The Brooklyn-based singer adds new wrinkles to a sound based on looped and layered voices, and the result is flat-out gorgeous.

The Magic Place

The interface between the voice and technology is central to Juliana Barwick's art. A Louisiana-born, Brooklyn-based singer who previously released the album Sanguine and the EP Florine, Barwick makes music whose raw material is almost exclusively her voice. But it's hard to know what she might sound like alone in a room. When she records, Barwick layers and processes and twists her utterances into figures that can alternately be described as familiar, soothing, alien, and tense. She might bring to mind the bright harmonies of Panda Bear or the mystical invocations of Elizabeth Fraser, but her approach is her own.
That's partly because her music feels homemade. We know that she spent a lot of time in church as a kid, so it's tempting to think of her work as a digital update on sacred hymns. The heavy reverb and layering brings to mind cathedrals, light refracted through stained glass, some kind of surrender to or celebration of the eternal. But while Barwick can seem to be reaching for these grand themes and overwhelming statements, there's something in her music that brings it back down to earth. It feels human, imperfect, and intimate, and the line of communication is one-to-one. Despite her music's often epic sweep, it can feel like she is whispering in our ears. So the sense of the sublime, which permeates every note of her material, ultimately works on a humble scale.
We've grown used to following along with artists from their first demo to their first self-released EP to their debut album and then their breakthrough moment courtesy of a company that specializes in caffeinated sugar water. But Barwick works slowly and carefully. She had a little bump with the issue of her debut in 2007, returned with a small-scale EP two years later that received a handful of positive reviews, and has presumably been spending the interim figuring out how to make something even better. The Magic Place, her first album for Asthmatic Kitty, stands above her earlier work in virtually every way. She sings better, the structures are more patient and enveloping, the layering is more precise, and she makes much more effective use of instrumentation. It has the feel of a modest classic of post-millennial ambient music, the kind of record that sounds gorgeous and immersive on first listen and never loses its sparkle, whether playing in the background or filling a room with its swells.
One of the secrets to The Magic Place's enduring appeal, the way it holds up to repeated listens, has to do with that aforementioned imperfection. Though Barwick's essential tool is the loop, she has a way of structuring them so they never seem too locked into the grid. They tumble and unspool and break into the silence like waves, but they are not easily reduced to units of sound dragged from a window onto a timeline. The imperfection gives a feeling of instability to these tracks. So "Keep Up the Good Work" mixes piercing high-pitched voices that a friend compared to the malevolent siren calling distant ships into the rocks and then folds in indecipherable low-pitched murmurs, hints of bass, and a piano line that sounds like a bag of pebbles falling onto the keys. It rolls forward but with an unstable gait, so the shimmering prettiness of the layers never feels too ordered and predictable.
She takes a similar approach on "Cloak", but the effect is less creepy and leans more in the direction of awe, a mini celebration of the idea of ethereality. "Prizewinning" combines her high/low voices in loops that spread like fractals with a marching guitar/drum figure that bores through the center of the track and makes it feel a little like two complementary songs playing at once. It's in these moments, where loops dangle and collide but don't quite line up, that Barwick seems most indebted to the process music of Eno. The way the units of sound in Thursday Afternoon and the reconstituted Pachelbel of Discreet Music develop bears a marked similarity to the easy unpredictability these tracks present.
Is something beautiful and ethereal that feels timeless and transcendent enough? What keeps Barwick from being the "indie rock Enya," which is the phrase that popped into my head when I first heard her music in 2007? It's not an easy question to answer. I want to say that the encroaching creepiness and human blemishes elevate Barwick's music above the soothing Calgon bath of new age, but I'm not quite convinced that's true. I'm also not sure that it matters. Part of it has to do with where we are living now, and how music functions in our lives. Complaints about the one-dimensionality of new age feel less relevant when we have so much music easily at our disposal. The Magic Place is music for a specific constellation of feelings. They are real, many people share them, and this album owns them completely. So while there are few identifiable words here and the titles don't really register, there's a hell of a lot being expressed. We may not need Barwick to go deep into darkness or to write words that mean something, because she has tapped a vein of expression that is rich and powerful and affecting and even useful. And for the time being, the vein seems to be hers alone, though we can visit any time we like.


With its pithy, searing songs about sex, groupies, and ennui, the self-titled 1995 debut from Elastica captured the whirlwind of the early-’90s Britpop explosion.

Elastica

Elastica hid from the media over a year before the release of their self-titled debut album. In early 1994, after putting out just two singles, they took six months off from performing and giving interviews. When the sabbatical ended, the band’s frontwoman and primary songwriter, Justine Frischmann, explained to Melody Maker’s Everett True “it’s imperative that you should be written about for your music, which is why we decided, after January, we needed to go away and prove ourselves. I’d seen the pressures close at hand before Elastica started—‘Oh my God, are we going to be A-listed? Are we going to get that cover?’ It seemed to be missing the point.”
Critics had adored Elastica’s lacerating, punkish singles, “Stutter” and “Line Up,” but the gossipy British music press had devoted far more attention to Frischmann’s personal life. A founding member of Suede, she’d also dated the band’s androgynous heartthrob singer, Brett Anderson. An item with the unfortunate title “Pulling Power” in the August 1993 issue of Britpop bible Select posed the question, “Elastica are the hottest property in town, but does this have anything to do with a (sssshh!) Suede link?” By then, Frischmann had moved on to Damon Albarn. They’d go on to earn the dubious honor of being nicknamed the “First Couple of Britpop.”
But Elastica’s music didn’t resemble anything their peers had recorded. Britpop was a movement, not a sound, and the bands constantly trashed each other in the press, annoyed at being mentioned in the same breath as acts with whom they had little in common. “It was irritating to be lumped in with Oasis,” Frischmann recalled in a typically blunt 2015 interview. “None of us liked their music. I remember being confused when I first heard them—it sounded like classic-rock power ballads.” By contrast, Elastica’s first album packed 15 loud and fast tracks into 40 minutes. They had no interest in mimicking Blur’s droll eclecticism or Suede’s orchestral glam, either.
The pithy songs on Elastica, with their searing lyrics about sex, groupies, and ennui, capture the whirlwind of the early-’90s Britpop explosion. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, the Kinks, and Bowie, Elastica blended the jagged guitars of Wire, Buzzcocks, and other English punks with the pop hooks of American new wave acts like Blondie and Talking Heads. The band didn’t have a full-time keyboard player until Dave Bush joined the lineup in 1996, but Albarn (credited as Dan Abnormal) punched up some of the melodies on their debut with scratchy synth lines.
That simultaneously edgy and catchy sound helped them break through to a U.S. alt-rock audience raised on poppy punk bands like Nirvana and Green Day. After Geffen won a bidding war over the right to distribute Elastica outside of the UK, their stateside fame quickly eclipsed that of Suede and a pre-“Song 2” Blur. A Rolling Stone critics’ poll named them them the best new band of 1995 and music writers who didn’t care about Albarn or Anderson focused on the songs. “American journalists seem a lot more interested in the music,” Frischmann, who would later settle down in California, has observed. “Britain is so up its ass in terms of journalism; people have been unable to remove themselves or separate the baggage from the music and the gossip.”
Elastica’s influences may have secured them a wider audience, but they also got the band into a lot of well-publicized trouble. Wire sued them, charging that “Line Up” too closely resembled one of their best-known songs, “I Am the Fly,” while Elastica’s biggest hit, “Connection,” stole a riff from Wire’s “Three Girl Rhumba.” The Stranglers’ publishing company filed suit, too, alleging that there were unmistakable similarities between another single, “Waking Up,” and their client’s “No More Heroes.” Both plaintiffs had a point, and both cases settled out of court.
In the instance of “Connection,” at least, it’s the song’s ferocious physicality that makes it a classic, not one particular chord progression. Its meaning is a bit murky. Vague lyrics like “I don’t understand how a heart is a spade/But somehow the vital connection is made” suggest luck and precarity, but could refer to love, success in the fickle music industry, or both. The confusion is intentional. “In the same way I think a partly clothed body is sexier than a naked one, it’s more interesting to do a partially cloaked lyric than a blatant one,” Frischmann told Rolling Stone in 1995. But the nonverbal sounds on “Connection” create an unambiguously steamy atmosphere. The “Three Girl Rhumba” riff kicks off a long slide into the first verse, punctuated by thrusting down strums and suggestive, guttural grunting. After two more minutes of taunting couplets and sweaty instrumental breaks, it cuts off early enough to make you desperate for more.
“I have a low boredom threshold,” Frischmann once explained. “I want the best bits—verse-chorus, verse-chorus, that’s it.” This hit-it-and-quit-it approach to songwriting suited her lyrical preoccupations: fast cars, unromantic fucks, getting wasted on wine and jittery with caffeine and cigarettes. While some songs on Elastica are as opaque as “Connection,” others couldn’t be more explicit. The band’s debut single, “Stutter,” condenses their aesthetic into 142 seconds of Matthews’ power-drill guitars, Annie Holland’s slithery bass lines and drummer Justin Welch’s frantic bursts of percussion, with Frischmann’s vocals matching their hectic pace as she delivers a diatribe on the subject of erectile dysfunction. “Vaseline,” a goofy, noisy sketch of a song, advertises the titular lubricant as a remedy for “when you’re stuck like glue.”
Frischmann’s self-assured, aggressive yet not explicitly feminist persona was something new, even in an early-’90s rock landscape where powerful women were everywhere. She had no patience for the riot grrrl movement. Like its male critics, she took issue with many of the associated bands’ rudimentary musicianship. “It seems stupid to me to be in a band if you’ve no actual talent or gift for it,” she told Select. But Frischmann’s objection to the movement was more personal: “A lot of the riot grrrl bands I’ve seen have made me feel ashamed to be a girl.” The women agitating for revolution grrrl-style now may well have been equally put off by “Line Up,” a single that would undoubtedly have been called misogynistic if a male singer had recorded it. A scathing portrait of a groupie referred to only as “drivel head,” who follows bands around and “loves to suck their shining guitars,” its placement as the opening track of Elastica’s first album seems like a way of immediately drawing a line in the sand between women who are rock stars and women who merely sleep with them.
Female identity, in general, held little appeal for Frischmann. Unlike her contemporaries Liz Phair, Courtney Love, Tori Amos, Polly Jean Harvey, and Salt-N-Pepa—all of whom brought rare, explicitly female perspectives to their male-dominated genres and scenes—she had little interest in enumerating the highs and lows of womanhood. “We’re not writing songs for women or things women might feel,” she explained to Manning. “We try not to marginalize ourselves.”
There has always been a sharp philosophical divide between women artists whose work is explicitly feminist, or at least openly concerned with representing the female experience, and women artists who would prefer to be thought of simply as artists. “As far as I’m concerned, being any gender is a drag,” Patti Smith, one of the latter camp’s most notable members, once famously opined. The riot grrrls’ approach to female agency has won out in 21st-century pop culture. That may well be for the best, but it’s still worth stepping outside that relatively new progressive orthodoxy for long enough to remember that refusing to be defined by your gender can also be a revolutionary act. “I’m 68 years old now and I still don’t bend to anybody’s concept of gender,” Smith explained in 2015. “All I’ve ever wanted to do was create freedom.” Elastica did exactly that on their debut album.
Surely that approach played a part in their success within a Britpop scene ruled by men. But instead of styling herself as one of the boys as Janis Joplin did, Frischmann cultivated a bold and unique brand of androgyny with her band—one that rejected gender essentialism while embracing heterosexual eroticism. On the cover of Elastica, all four members stand against a brick wall in black tops and pants. No one’s hair falls past their shoulders. The women don’t look butch, like Annie Lennox or k.d. lang. Welch isn’t even close to being in drag. They seem to belong to a reality where the categories of male and female are simply irrelevant.
The band’s look echoes Frischmann’s songs, which swagger, sneer, and claim romantic agency without calling attention to the subversiveness of a woman flaunting her dominance. On “Stutter,” she accepts zero blame for her lover’s impotence. The chorus takes the form of an interrogation: “Is it something you lack/When I’m flat on my back?/...Is it just that I’m much too much for you?” she demands of her intoxicated partner. Frischmann doesn’t even sound vulnerable when she’s admitting that she has a soft spot for someone. “I might just understand if you obey me,” she sings on the midtempo crush anthem “Hold Me Now,” in a bored drawl that suggests she wishes the object of her affection would be a bit quicker on the uptake.
This irresistible combination of casual androgyny and performative arrogance, along with the healthy sense of humor that brought “Vaseline” into being, allows Frischmann to let her dirty mind run wild without objectifying herself. “All-Nighter” packs a whole sleepless night’s worth of sexual frustration into a minute and a half of hyperactive drumming, as Frischmann propositions her date with such eloquent negs as, “You’re a cloud short of heaven/But I’d love to see you strut your stuff.” She’s the one sweet-talking a conquest into a roadside hookup on “Car Song”—a track that somehow manages to make the Ford Fiesta sound alluring—over synths that beep like horns and “oohs” that approximate the whoosh of hair blowing in the wind. When she confesses, “Every shining bonnet/Makes me think of my back on it,” it’s Frischmann who’s getting off on that image of herself, not some dude.
Whether it came naturally or was carefully constructed, her novel persona is what elevates the album above catchy post-punk revivalism. It also casts those notorious lawsuits in a different light. Now that sampling has spread from hip-hop and dance to just about every genre of popular music, and we acknowledge that entire albums constructed out of other people’s recordings can be masterpieces, Elastica’s obvious appropriation of two male bands’ riffs looks like citation more than theft. In borrowing from “Three Girl Rhumba,” “I Am the Fly,” and “No More Heroes,” they align themselves with Wire and the Stranglers—not riot grrrl, and not the music of Frischmann’s boyfriends. Painted by the press as a hanger-on and a beneficiary of nepotism, she used the album to reintroduce herself as a discrete artist, with influences, a personality, and a sex drive all her own.
Not that Elastica is all public sex and odes to lube. It has a few great solitary moments, too. “Waking Up,” a rare track that leaves room for sprawling instrumental passages evocative of early-morning disorientation, may be the best song ever written about the horrors of dragging yourself out of bed so you can accomplish something in this life. Frischmann lets the tough-girl mask slip on “Never Here,” which chronicles the final days of an isolating, codependent relationship with a self-absorbed musician and is rumored to recount her breakup with Anderson. (Its minute-long intro may well be a rejoinder to his sprawling compositions.) “I thought of our lives left on the shelf,” she recalls in the album’s most poignant verse. “Too much TV and curry/Too much time spent on ourselves.”
These songs might have been a preview of the more mature Elastica that would develop as Frischmann, who was 25 when their self-titled album came out, and her bandmates grew older. Unfortunately, fame didn’t agree with them. “I just wasn’t ready for that kind of headfuck,” Frischmann told SPIN in 2010. “I found the whole process of seeing my own image in front of me very difficult to deal with.” Most of the band developed drug problems. New members entered and exited. Matthews and Holland quit, although Holland returned a few years later. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the studio, endlessly tinkering with new songs. Eventually, everyone got clean. Matthews found God.
When their second and final album, the underrated but overworked The Menace, finally came out in 2000, Elastica had become a different, less cohesive band. They seemed to want to move past the sublime minimalism of their early hits, but couldn’t settle on a new sound. A year later, they would break up—and, unlike almost every other Britpop band, they’ve resisted the temptation to reunite. Frischmann contributed one last classic to the pop canon, co-writing M.I.A.’s breakout single “Galang,” then moved to America and became a visual artist.
Looking back on her time in Elastica in 2013, Frischmann mused that the band should have been a “one-album project.” While it’s good to have The Menace, she’s probably right. The persona she assumes on Elastica is as confining for a mature artist as it is thrilling for a young upstart. The album is a product of libido, bravado, and enthusiasm for the music of Gen Xers’ childhoods—all things that start to fade with age. That exhilaration can’t be recaptured, but it can be preserved for future generations of kids wired on sex, cheap wine, and punk rock.


The popular rapped musical Hamilton tells the story of the United States founding father Alexander Hamilton. Executive produced by the Roots' Black Thought and ?uestlove, the 46 songs, here split across two discs, show an impressive command of both showtunes and golden-era hip-hop.

Various Artists: Hamilton: Original Broadway Cast Recording

Hip hop is nothing if not rich in drama. Beyond even the competitive feuding, the best rap music chronicles its makers' highs and lows, detailing the gnarly realities of difficult lives lived triumphantly. Hip hop and theater, with their shared fondness for linear narrative, should make for more frequent bedfellows, but it took until this year for the two genres to combine to properly resounding effect. Debuting at the Public Theater to raves earlier this year and accumulating hype ever since, the rapped musical Hamilton tells the story of the United States founding father born and orphaned in the Caribbean, who used a prodigious writing talent to catapult himself off the island of St. Croix and leave as deep a thumbprint in United States history as has been made.
Hamilton could not have been an easy show to write, even for a theater savant like Lin-Manuel Miranda, the 35 year-old Grammy-winning author of In The Heights and recent MacAuthur "Genius Grant" recipient. The play is composed of 46 individual songs, here split between two discs (Acts I and II) that make up the album. Adopted by Miranda from Ron Chernow’s biography, Alexander Hamilton*,* the songs are vehicles for Hamilton’s life experiences, and great pains have been taken to maintain the accuracy of an already-fascinating story amidst the likewise-necessary shimmer of theatrical performance. Pairing early US history with one of the country’s youngest musical art forms, one born of the underprivileged especially, could have been as painful as listening to one of your history teachers "bust a rhyme," but Miranda’s command of both golden era hip hop and showtunes allows him to turn the pomp and circumstance of even congressional proceedings on its head.
Though ostensibly a rap record, from the show opener, "Alexander Hamilton", it’s immediately apparent that we are still essentially in musical-theater territory. Theatrical dialogue must be clear and audible to reach its audience—even when presented in song—which denies the cast the freedom to indulge in grand tonal flourishes or vocal tics. Miranda and his cast’s delivery is steadfast and well-enunciated, the flows delivered with a watchmaker’s precision. It helps that the song itself is a bracingly economical synopsis of Hamilton’s early years: The treacherous hurricane that destroyed St. Croix, the letter he wrote  to his absentee father that published by a local paper and caused such a fervor on the island that a group of businessmen took up a collection to send the then 17 year-old Hamilton to New York for college.
Disc one is the more jovial of the pair, chronicling Hamilton’s rise to prominence, and flexing a number of smile-inducing touchtones. Over beatboxing and a drum breakdown replicating hands banging on a lunch table, we get introduced to eventual Hamilton murderer, Aaron Burr. "My Shot" is Miranda spouting couplets in a manner a little too close to slam poetry for anyone’s good, but a number introducing "The Schuyler Sisters", (one of whom Hamilton would marry and another of whom he’d keep a suspiciously affectionate pen pal correspondence with) sounds like it could have been a last-second album exclusion for one hit wonder and infamous Wyclef protégés, City High. "Wait For It" moves with a dancehall lilt and "The Ten Duel Commandments" pays homage to the Notorious B.I.G.’s "10 Crack Commandments".
Disc two is Hamilton’s unraveling, covering, among other things, his affair with one Maria Reynolds and the very public fallout that followed and the death of his 19-year old son in a duel defending his father’s honor. Musically, there are direct allusions to LL Cool J and Mobb Deep ("I’m only 19 but my mind is older," Phillip Hamilton spouts on "Blow Us All Away", a near-quote of "Shook Ones Pt. II") and an a capella verse from Miranda on the second-to-last track "The World Was Wide Enough" is thoroughly reminiscent of the prayers that used to close out DMX albums.
The Hamilton cast recording was executive produced by Black Thought and ?uestlove of the Roots, who know maybe better than anyone the intricacies of presenting hip hop over live instrumentation successfully. These are, however, still very much showtunes. An audience for musical theater comes to hear a story first and foremost (they bury the backing musicians in a pit, for goodness sakes) and the songs of Hamilton work to that end with every bar, even when seamlessly formatted for storyline, as in the case of the show’s freestyle battles by way of cabinet debates.
As an educational tool, Hamilton is a new standard, a piece that will very likely do more to cement Hamilton’s legacy into the consciousness of the general public than any history class ever could. Kaplan would be wise to commission volumes of these kinds of hip hop-driven biographies from Miranda and force him into some kind of lifetime contract. As an album, however, the audio removed from visual context, it’s a lot to digest. It’s 46 songs of verbose, intricately delivered raps, spun from a story with enough character to have already made it a New York Times best-seller. There’s a lot of ground to cover regardless of medium.
The closest thing to it in popular rap in recent memory would be Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. Just like Hamilton, GKMC is an album that requires time and attention, and rewards that investment handsomely. Hamilton, though, is an album for a very specific audience. It’s for theater lovers, sure, but more generally for people who probably wish they were watching a production of Hamilton. There’s an argument to be made that GKMC’s songs, too, work best within the context of the entire album, as a holistic production to be devoured whole hog. But many of those songs are able to live on their own as great radio singles in a way Miranda’s songs never could. For Hamilton there is no such debate. You need the whole of it, from curtain rise to call.


With an eclectic mosaic of sounds across 1980s and ’90s freestyle, Miami bass, house, and old-school reggaeton, the Puerto Rican star’s new album delivers floor-fillers that actually try something different.

SATURNO

Do celebrities dream of BeReal? On “Dime Quién????,” a would-be standard heartbreak track, Rauw Alejandro gets uncomfortably real as he recalls the terror of seeing an ex with someone else on the supposedly low-pressure social app for candid photos. In the song’s video, he skulks around New York like he’s caught in The Matrix. He’s broached these topics in his music before, but this time, Alejandro’s confessional is a synth-powered reggaeton spaceship. And while the science-fiction concept of his new album SATURNO doesn’t ever fully solidify, it doesn’t need to. Combined with Alejandro’s charisma, the record’s eclectic mosaic of throwback sounds across 1980s and ’90s freestyle, Miami bass, house, and old-school reggaeton proves there’s room to innovate in pop reggaeton yet.
Latin pop has ventured into space recently. On 2018’s “Yo Le Llego,” from his collab album with J Balvin, Bad Bunny introduced himself as “Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, directamente del espacio” (“direct from space”). Ozuna’s Nibiru (2019), titled after a fictional planet, didn’t quite reach the heights promised by the extra-galactic premise. In each case, these Goliaths sought to prove their singular merit against the most popular backbeat in the world. While neoperreo artists have long embraced the digital sounds of the other in service of a liberatory cyberpunk vision, it’s rare to see pop reggaeton enter similar territory.
In a mainstream Latin music industry that favors a proven formula, popetón doesn’t often pair a big, extraterrestrial concept with an experimental sound to match, even if the concept doesn’t aspire to much beyond another “we’re in space now” aesthetic. With his 2021 single “Todo de Ti,” Alejandro led the Latin pop push into disco retrofuturism; the subsequent Vice Versa proved his dexterity in crafting an album, rather than a collection of songs. Fans of Spanish-language pop, often condescended to by the industry, crave experimentation. “¿Cuándo Fue?,” Vice Versa’s foray into drum’n’bass, signaled that Alejandro was prepared to use a new toolbox not only to surprise, but to underline the emotional potency of his lyrics.
With a trusty production crew (including Alejandro’s own producer alias, El Zorro), SATURNO’s landscape of synths, snares, and samples is airtight—ripe for scene-setting and narrative, if that were the artist’s intention. Instead Alejandro succeeds on vibe alone, delivering floor-fillers that actually try something different, from chiptune loops to hyperpop inflections, and calling on references and collaborators who represent authorities in their genres. “Punto 40” feels lab-created, TikTok trend and all, by expert Latin pop scientists, teaming Alejandro with veteran Baby Rasta for a digitized iteration of Baby Rasta & Gringo’s 1998 track “Tengo Una Punto 40.” “Más De Una Vez” infuses a dreamy sample of Spanish singer Susana Estrada’s 1981 pop track “Gózame Ya.” On “Cazadores,” his collaboration with reggaeton and Latin trap titan Arcángel, a darkwave outro scores Alejandro’s claim to multi-genre fluency: “Listen to me/Nosotros fronteamos en cualquier ritmo” (“We front in whatever rhythm”). “Corazón Despeinado” combines a singsong chorus, a bridge born for rock en español, and a dance-punk beat, all illustrating the same romantic desperation: “Puedo hacer mainstream o alternativo/Pero nunca la pego contigo” (“I can do mainstream or alternative/But I’ll never be a hit with you”).
For all its ambition, SATURNO isn’t consistently adventurous: A few tracks that could easily have been B-sides abandon the already loose concept in favor of straightforward pop reggaeton, and the earlier single “Lokera,” though exciting, feels tacked-on. While Alejandro is certainly capable of a more substantive concept, it’s the specificity of his experiments that make the best tracks work. “De Carolina,” dedicated to his hometown where reggaeton flourished in the ’90s, enlists legendary mixtape architect DJ Playero (who co-produced a few tracks across the album). Layering a nostalgic Playero 38 sample against sharp beat switches and the organic energy of crowd recordings, the track enacts a dynamic flow between new and old that keeps community at its center—the signifier of authentic reggaeton. Since its inception, the genre has been variably derided, criminalized, and defanged; it is rendered utterly toothless when played safe. If pop reggaeton has largely lost its sense of a good time, then Alejandro is kicking a soccer ball in space among the aliens. As true reggaeton duro becomes scarcer in supply, SATURNO charts a course to its pop future.


Max Clarke balances vintage recording methods with expressive songwriting on the ’60s-style pop ballads that fill his debut album as Cut Worms.

Hollow Ground

Max Clarke is one of those musicians who worship relics of bygone eras. His eagerness to revisit the art of periods he was born too late to experience permeates the 8-track recordings he makes as Cut Worms, an alias lifted from William Blake’s 18th-century poem “Proverbs of Hell.” But he’s more than just a throwback. His debut album, Hollow Ground, is a collection of ’60s-style pop ballads that balance vintage aesthetics with expressive songwriting.
In his other life, as an illustrator, Clarke relies on old-fashioned drawing skills. (He also designed Hollow Ground’s cover art.) The combination of ingenuity and patience that this work requires is also reflected in Cut Worms’ music. Clarke rotates between electric, acoustic, and lap steel guitars, as well as bass and keyboards, stacking instruments to create the illusion of simple songwriting. “Till Tomorrow Goes Away” sets a foggy mood, then lets a trickling guitar melody clear it away. “Like Going Down Sideways” sounds slow and rough, like a demo recorded outdoors, with Clarke’s voice cracking as he confesses the pain of an old love. He serenades listeners with jaunty acoustic guitar and a sweet croon on “Don’t Want to Say Good-bye.” But, as he switches up instruments throughout the album, Clarke maintains a warmth akin to the honeyed tones of the Everly Brothers and the Kinks.
Clarke doesn’t give his words the same attention as the music, though, too often recycling generic phrases. On “Mad About You,” he stumbles from cliché to irksome cliché: “But wouldn’t it be nice to see you/Somewhere else beside my dreams/I’m mad about you.” But he does, at least, breathe life into those lyrics with a voice like a more melodic Bob Dylan, his unexpectedly pleasant nasal coarseness apparently emanating from some remote inner idyll. He effectively masks his weakness by elongating the notes he sings or, in “Coward’s Confidence,” letting baritone sax and doo-wop backing vocals steal the spotlight.
It’s the way Clarke uses the grainy texture of 8-track tape that gives the album its amber glow. Recorded at the Los Angeles home studio of Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado and at New York’s versatile Gary’s Electric with producer Jason Finkel, Hollow Ground filters cozy bedroom-pop sketches through studio boards, drawing out the details in Clarke’s songwriting without stripping the songs of their dusty appeal. The relatively clean production on “Cash for Gold” complements the energy of Clarke’s full-lunged hollers and enthusiastic harmonica solo, instead of coming off as a meaningless ploy to make the track stand out.
What’s most impressive about Hollow Ground is the way Clarke prevents even its most unassuming songs from fading into the background. While a mellow number like “How It Can Be” isn’t groundbreaking in its approach to soft rock, Clarke brings its otherwise hazy evocation of the ’60s into focus by harmonizing with himself in the simplified style of early Beatles material, all endearing croons and power-pop charm. There are elegant touches like this on each of Hollow Ground’s 10 songs, resulting in an album whose familiar melodies don’t demand your full attention but earn it anyway.


The reborn art-music crusader reprises himself as a curious classical composer and a singer whose vocal presence proves monumental in surprising ways.

Scott Walker: And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball?

Industrial hums are not inherently dramatic or musical. There are numerous ways engender a sense of drama, most of them suggestive of intent or austere to the point of making the presence of "art" unmistakable. Musicians can lean on what's signified in their names (Labradford, Iannis Xenakis) or the imagery on their album covers (graphs, power lines, nothing), or they can set industrial hums within surroundings that amplify their abstract nature (atmospheres, beats, more industrial hums).
Another way to engender drama is to simply be Scott Walker. Since reestablishing himself with his 1995 comeback album Tilt, Walker has maintained a formidable presence in art-music circles. If singing about Ingmar Bergman in the 1960s wasn't enough, everything Walker has done in his fertile later years has skewed as work that aspires to the heights of High Modernism. He's assayed atonal sounds. He's bedded down with formalism. He's invested his process with gestures, such as making a rhythm track for last year's The Drift by punching a big slab of meat found hung on a hook in a butcher shop.
Walker has banked lots of reasons to be taken seriously no matter the context, and that figures highly into hearing And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball?, a score written to accompany a dance piece in England. It all starts with an industrial hum: an ominous, throbbing pulse that pushes the air out of a room when played loud. The fact that it was recorded by Walker ups the sense of foreboding already there, but the drama ticks up with sparse flickers of static and then a mad clash of what sounds like demonic klezmer-- a rush of reeds and expressive strings that fall apart as soon as they've struck a melody.
The score develops from there in a fashion similar to The Drift, with a focus on classical music delivered and denuded in an avant-garde vein. Intricate strings drive the action throughout the course of four movements, but sections give way to the dramatic rumble of drums (the kind played with mallets by guys in tuxedoes) and surprising bursts of brightness in which Walker sounds attuned to old Alfred Hitchcock scores composed by Bernard Herrmann.
The most dramatic aspect of the piece, however, involves reconciling the fact that Walker doesn't sing a single note from start to finish. If the absence of a voice when you're expecting it can play games with the mind, then the absence of Scott Walker's-- a tremendous, trembling voice that sounds deep, eerie, gorgeous, and terrifying all at once-- arouses a special kind of dramatic tension. For its voicelessness alone (as well as its short 25-minute running time), And Who Shall… can't be classed as a Walker album proper. But it goes a long way toward revealing the strengths of an artist who has established himself as a serious composer as well as a monumental presence-- even when he's not there to be heard.


The Bronx rapper’s second album in two months has the intimacy of voicemails to a close friend and the warmth of Lil B in his most generous BasedGod form.

Renaissance Man

Music argues for itself as it plays: This is how you should listen to me. You can tell from how it’s mixed and presented in your speakers how it hopes to be experienced, and MIKE’s Renaissance Man does not want you to play it loud. Splitting production duties with Daryl Johnson, the Bronx rapper muddies the textures of his songs so that the drums feel like drawn breath and small sighs resound like snare claps. MIKE’s own voice is often hard to pick out among the sampled, pitched-down voices moaning in the background. These are deliberate choices, and they lead you to clap your headphones tighter and concentrate. This is music of secrets, internal monologues, intensely specific revelations.
The album follows 2017’s May God Bless Your Hustle and last month’s Black Soap, fleshing out a body of work that presents itself humbly on the outside but swells with fierce pride and self-love within. The video for Renaissance Man single “Time Will Tell” says it all: MIKE peers at you from beneath his bedsheets, a self-made fort that you’re invited to enter if you accept him. Under here, you’ll find a teeming kingdom, a world of sighs, small cries, and under-the-breath mantras, where small gestures can turn superheroic.
MIKE’s flow remains a thing of wonder, for those who stop to notice it. His rhyme schemes map back onto themselves in a gratifying way reminiscent of Earl Sweatshirt, or MF DOOM, or Reddit threads of things fitting perfectly into other things. One small stretch, for illustration: “My feet on the ground but my head over heels/The beast on the prowl for his bread and his will/No lease on my doubt, I’m expecting a thrill.” But he buries these verses inside the music, seemingly unconcerned about whether we notice their intricacy. What he wants us to feel is the size of his heart, and the pain and empathy filling it. He is the spiritual heir of Lil B, in his most generous BasedGod form, the truth-speaker radiating magnanimity from his pores.
For all the twisting-vine paths his verses can take, the album opens with his friend Joygill Moriah just talking, on “Negro World (Intro),” while the track warps and curls around him like a burning Polaroid: “It’s the mental game that matters the most. Knowing where your seeds is planted. Where you keep the water at.” He adds, “For what it’s worth—thanks. Thanks for not giving up. Thanks for not holding back.” It’s not clear who he’s talking to, but he makes us feel how much it matters.
The album feels like a series of voicemails to close friends—in fact, “Goliath” concludes with one such actual voicemail. “On the streets is the worst way to hear about you/And that’s only cuz a nigga really care about you, dude,” he mutters on “Sidewalk Soldier.” There are glints of confidence and bluster—“I made it this far from ducking all your feedback/You ain’t done enough to see that”—but the dominant gesture here is the outstretched palm, the overwhelming message: “Come and spread your arms if you really need a hug.”
The production glimmers in place. You can stare into these tracks and feel your eyes dilate: The synths on “Decision Tower” mimic the gentle ripple of a pool filter. Nothing here insists, nothing shouts, nothing demands. You can often lose track of yourself listening to the album, in the best possible way. MIKE sums up this effect nicely on “Time Will Tell”: “Don’t really like attention, but I bring it around."
Even live, MIKE insists on this disarming intimacy. I saw him on a bewildering bill where he opened for the indie rock outfit Amen Dunes; it was just him and two others onstage. He encouraged the audience to dance, launched into a song, but stopped a few seconds in to observe, “But y’all ain’t dancing, though.” Then he shrugged and plowed forward, giving the moment all he had.


Ed Sheeran sells trite innocence by the pound. He uses bland wisdom and unimaginative music to ponder the basic good and bad in people around him, without once looking inward.

÷ (Divide)

Ed Sheeran needs you to know that he did not go to university. Instead, he spent his teens slogging around the UK pub circuit, and by the age of 20, he was on his way to becoming Britain’s biggest male pop star. Still, he likes to come back to the uni thing. He sings about not having a degree twice on his new album, ÷, after at least three earlier instances in his catalog. He’s fashioned this weighty chip on his shoulder into an arrow in his quiver, using it to shore up his everyman image and personable nature, while distinguishing himself as a bit of a cheeky system-shunning maverick who’s made it this far on chops alone. His shtick is aspirational: All you need is free will, a little song in your heart, and perhaps you too could one day be playing for 270,000 people across three nights at Wembley Stadium.
Innocence is key to the Ed Sheeran brand. His self-proclaimed uncoolness is what makes him both cool and impervious to bad-tempered criticism. He regularly describes his true love as an angel, refers to his father—a perpetually lingering prophet—as “daddy,” and sings tenderly about his grandparents. On ÷’s release day, he sold copies of his record in an HMV superstore, and looked indistinguishable from the full-time staff. There’s no doubt that Sheeran is calculating, but then he told you as much in his album titles (÷, 2014’s x, and 2011’s +). Like Sia, the Chainsmokers, and Charli XCX, he marvels at his ability to turn out generic hooks like nobody’s business—so many, he doesn’t even remember writing them when they hit No. 1 in 17 countries.
This is the genial, antiseptic frame through which we’re to view Ed Sheeran. But considering he is among the most successful songwriters in the world, a lot of his lyrics do not even scan. “I’m just a boy with a one-man show, no un-er-ver-si-tee..., just a song I wrote,” he sings in “What Do I Know?” like a teenage boy trying to knot a cherry stem with his tongue. When he raps, as he does on “Eraser,” his words fit together with the elegance of Stickle Bricks. Good taste is of no concern: He lets John Mayer sleaze all over the tender ode to his girlfriend “How Would You Feel? (Paean)” with his guitar. Although you can practically hear Rihanna’s laugh after being offered the tropical house concession “Shape of You,” the song generally fares fine until Sheeran, the seventh richest British musician under the age of 30, admits to his dating style: “You and me are thrifty so go all you can eat/Fill up your bag and I fill up a plate/We talk for hours and hours about the sweet and the sour.”
There is no greater evidence of Sheeran’s commercial power than his label acquiescing to keep Corrs tribute “Galway Girl” on this album. Set to bodhrán and uileann pipes, it’s the latest of many Sheeran barnstormers about meeting a great gal (who is definitely real) on a boozy night out. A check from the Irish tourist board for him name-dropping Guinness, Jameson, John Powers, and Van Morrison may be forthcoming, which would certainly cover any forthcoming lawsuit from B*Witched for infringing on their 1998 hit “C’est La Vie.” Sheeran traveled the world for a year before making this record, and considering his cultural takeaway from County Galway, we should be thankful his travels didn’t also inspire him to write a song about lassoing une mademoiselle with a string of onions beneath the Eiffel Tower, or how love sprang eternal with a girl in a dirndl in Austria.
On his past records, Sheeran often painted himself as a drunken mess, at the mercy of bad girls and dark situations. Whatever you made of them, they felt, to use a dirty word, honest. Here, “Eraser” feels like the only true reflection of his psyche, where he acknowledges his unrelatable predicament (“Ain’t nobody wanna see you down in the dumps/Because you’re living your dream, man/This shit should be fun”). For the rest of the record, he switches to a mode of bland wisdom that allows him to ponder the good and bad in people around him rather than look inwards. The lack of honesty doesn’t really matter—nobody’s going to Sheeran for gritty soul-searching. But the lack of imagination does. As with Adele, who was also told by Rick Rubin to go back to the drawing board, you suspect that more interesting songs may have been left off the record for commercial reasons.
If there’s a personal touch to Sheeran’s generic sentiments, it’s his unwavering belief in love. He’s often burned for it, he’s desperate for kids, he sees the future in his girlfriend’s eyes. Over the simpering groove of “What Do I Know?” he talks about how his “daddy” told him, “Son, don’t you get involved in politics, religion or other people’s quarrel.” Instead, like a Disney woodland creature, he just wants to pass on “the things my family’s given to me: just love and understanding, positivity.” His feeble message falls apart when the self-confessed careerist sighs at someone surely in his same tax bracket for talking “‘bout exponential growth, and the stock market crashing and their portfolios/While I’ll be sitting here with a song that I wrote.” Sheeran’s conditional optimism flashes back into view, and shows his judgmental ass: “I’m all for people following their dreams/Just remember life is more than fit-tin’ in your jeans,” he sings, in a chummy, winking dig at the basic, vapid women who do not share his own basic, vapid worldview.
It’s one of several striking lyrics about appearances on ÷, which is where the Nice Guy façade comes undone. Sheeran has always loved to neg and to position himself as an innocent victim. If you thought he’d got all that out of his system when he co-wrote Bieber’s risible “Love Yourself,” you were wrong. “Perfect” is “Unchained Melody” by way of Westlife, and a tender assurance to his beloved that she’s not a mess, but a beauty. The barely suppressed creepiness of “Happier” is his attempt at post-breakup maturity, but it doesn’t even last into the next track, “New Man,” a wounded sketch of his ex’s new boyfriend who has “his eyebrows plucked and his arsehole bleached,” and “wears a man bag on his shoulder but I call it a purse.” One nil, Sheeran. He turns his attentions to his ex. What happened to that sweet, sylvan girl who used to read and eat crisps by the river? “Now she’s eatin’ kale/Hittin’ the gym/Keepin’ up with Kylie and Kim.” You mean, when she could be listening to Sheeran rap about his daddy?
This is not to say that anyone should expect Sheeran—who is popular at weddings and funerals for a reason—to present a nuanced interpretation of gender politics within his songs (though his fans deserve more than depictions of women as angels or traitors). But more than his weak balladry, it's this disingenuous side that rankles. In the nostalgic vein of Lukas Graham’s “7 Years” and Drake’s “Weston Road Flows,” Sheeran’s “Castle on the Hill” yearns for a childhood idyll. It’s pure sentimentality, another key to how he uses humblebraggadocio and innocence to shore up his moral high ground over shallow girls and unfair beauty standards. On “Eraser,” Sheeran sings, “I’m well aware of certain things that will befall a man like me.” He means booze and drugs, but it’s his inability to reconcile his early underdog status with his titanic popularity that’ll ensnare him. Sheeran wants it both ways: artist and celebrity, nice guy who doesn’t want to alienate his fans with political convictions, anti-consumerist while gagging to dominate pop’s arms race. He’s the guy she told you not to worry about, and he’s wearing your clothes.


On his first album as Huerco S. in six years, the Kansas musician trades his customary ambient textures for an hour’s worth of intricate, off-center head trips.

Plonk

Brian Leeds has been wrestling with electronic music’s utilitarian aspects since he was barely out of his teens. He started his career as Huerco S. in 2011 with a series of 12"s that subverted house music’s rhapsodic abandon, buffing its surface until the dancefloor seemed to lie behind a pane of frosted glass. As he became recognized in dance music circles as an innovator of what was inelegantly called “outsider” house, he dipped in and out of club-centric styles until he abandoned them altogether on 2016’s For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have). Despite its stature as one of the defining ambient albums of the past decade, many tracks on For Those of You cut to stark, disorienting silence mid-phrase, insistently reminding the listener that any blissful state is by nature temporary. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone using the album in their next savasana.
Still, Leeds seems to conflate the album’s success with the slow spread of more docile strains of ambient music. “[Ambient] is like productivity music, capitalist music,” he told Bandcamp last year. “It doesn’t get in your way, like you can still work your job. It kinda makes me cringe a bit. And maybe I feel responsible for that.” In the past five years, under the name Pendant, he’s released just two albums of abstract, billowing sound that few would call easy listening. Whenever consensus builds around whatever he’s doing, Leeds, seemingly feeling his back against the wall creatively, sheds his skin and walks away—not just from a sound or style, but from how listeners engage with his music as a part of their daily life.
Plonk is Leeds’ first album as Huerco S. in six years, and once again the album’s brilliance comes from the way it subverts its utilitarian framing. The titular sound that acts as the music’s aesthetic anchor is inspired by the mechanics of an automobile, metal against metal working in concert to produce forward motion. Car culture and electronic music share intersecting histories that bridge the gap between Germany and Detroit, but there is no motorik pulse signifying the steady passing of highway lines here. It’s hard to say that its ideal setting is a long drive, as Leeds has tentatively suggested, either; the depth of the album’s production is lost beneath the hum of the motor and the rush of the road. Plonk is much more inventive, much more varied and surprising, than the framework suggests.
One Plonk’s most striking aspects is Leeds’ Escher-esque approach to rhythm and song structure, with repetitive loops often taking a backseat to translucent drift and illusory syncopation. The first two tracks are percussive without relying on a pulse; in fact, they forgo almost any hint of a steady tempo. “Plonk I” opens with flickering beads of sound tapping at the ears like droplets hitting a windowpane, and they become more insistent, but never more coherent, as the first track develops. Tessellating pulses of synthesizer detonate at irregular intervals before evaporating into hiss and bassy rumble on “Plonk II,” punctuated by expectant periods of dead silence. Only as “Plonk III” ramps up is there any semblance of rhythmic continuity, and with a rush of drum machine the music becomes a multi-dimensional current of interlocking grooves.
Plonk follows a parabolic arc, with the highest energy tracks all clustered near the center of the album. The meatiest, most propulsive zone, primarily concentrated in “Plonk III” and “Plonk IV,” consists of dazzling rhythmic workouts that draw on Leeds’ experience as a peak-time DJ but maintain the unwavering asymmetry of the album’s expository tracks. Textural layers whirl and collide in tandem with melodic synth lines and seemingly autonomous drum patterns that reconfigure themselves every few bars. These tracks reference various corners of the zeitgeist—traces of melodic IDM, atmospheric glitch, dread-laden trap, and the psychedelic bounce of trance are all present—but ultimately they are subservient to the grand, vividly rendered swirl.
Even the steady unraveling that occurs during the album’s second half is full of surprises and sharp left turns. After a couple digressions into low-lit, downtempo loops (some of the most uncomplicated, undemanding productions on the album), Leeds brings in rapper Sir E.U, a linchpin of Washington, DC’s experimental hip-hop scene, for “Plonk IX.” E.U is a perfect foil for Leeds; both make music that is playful, skewed, and profound, but where Leeds’ productions feel meticulous, E.U follows every lyrical tangent as they occur to him. A kick drum fires sporadically, accenting E.U’s whimsical flow, while garbled synths cluster around his voice like bees on honeycomb. Ending the album with the silky ambient flutter of “Plonk X” feels almost as provocative. After 50 minutes of intricate and off-kilter head trips, its gentleness, recalling some of the most blissful moments of For Those of You, is disarming.
Plonk shows Leeds evolving in real time as he throws an abundant number of very sticky ideas at the wall. Its most cohesive element is the onomatopoeia that gives the album its name, which appears in various forms: Sometimes it’s a literal clank of metal, other times a synthetic scrap of errant sound that whizzes by. But the record’s multiplicity results in a strange kind of approachability, with each errant turn inviting us to hear what those obscure corners of the music have to say. To give in slightly and breathe some life back into Leeds’ car metaphor, perhaps this music provides a safe, impeccably designed environment in which to traverse those unknown spaces; at its heart, this is music about and for the daily explorations that offer new perspectives on the world. In that sense, Plonk is nothing if not transportive.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the debut album by the Go-Go’s, a ’70s punk band that beat the odds to become ’80s pop superstars.

Beauty and the Beat

In 1982, the debut album from the Go-Go’s, Beauty and the Beat, went to No. 1, making the California band the first all-woman group to top the charts with songs they’d written and performed themselves. It was such a big hit that the Go-Go’s were constantly misnomered as the first successful female band, ever. While this conveniently ignored the achievements of their pioneering predecessors and contemporaries, there was some truth to the idea. Unlike the girl groups of the ’60s, the Go-Go’s operated without any men pulling the strings, without a Svengali figure as their shepherd. Their singles “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed” were international successes, and the band’s faces were all over MTV and on the covers of People and Rolling Stone. It was a long way from where they’d started.
As the Los Angeles punk scene emerged in the late 1970s, it was inclusive, diverse, and pioneered by marginalized voices. Bands like the Zeros and the Bags spearheaded a community that encouraged the freedom of self-expression and self-celebration. The scene centered largely around The Canterbury, a derelict, roach-infested apartment building where members of the future Go-Go’s lived. As one version of the story goes, outside a house party in Venice, bassist Margot Olavarria invited two girls to join a band she was starting with drummer Elisa Bello: guitarist Jane Wiedlin, a helium-voiced former glitter rocker known as Jane Drano who was studying fashion design, and vocalist Belinda Carlisle, a former high school cheerleader and Monkees fan-club member who was supposed to play drums in the Germs under the name Dottie Danger until she was sidelined by mono. (Subsequent tellings of the band’s mythology often ignore Olavarria’s contributions, but as Carlisle wrote in her memoir, “she lit the match that started the fire.”) The four novice musicians dubbed themselves the Misfits; they quickly renamed themselves the Go-Go’s.
“Everyone we hung out with were all in a band and they weren’t any good,” Wiedlin later told Sounds. “So we figured if they could do it, why couldn’t we?” Inspired by the Buzzcocks’ pop-punk, they wore dresses made of garbage bags and wrote noisy, shambolic songs that celebrated BDSM, taunted music critics, satirized pretentious poseurs, and extolled the grimy hedonism of their digs. “I wanted to throw up on stage, rip my clothes off, and dye my hair,” Wiedlin told Flipside in 1979. Olavarria just wanted to “spit at Valley girls.”
Down the street from The Canterbury was The Masque, a ramshackle, heavily graffitied DIY venue in the basement of a porn theater on Hollywood Boulevard where, in May 1978, the Go-Go’s played their first show. Missing at that debut gig was Charlotte Caffey, who they had invited to join as lead guitarist. Caffey, who had previously played bass in the L.A. punk group the Eyes, had never played lead before. Yet her presence in the band was transformative, and not just because, as the band often joked, she was the only one who knew how to plug a guitar into an amplifier. Caffey brought in a pop sensibility, and she and Wiedlin quickly became a writing team; as the Go-Go’s became more technically proficient, their music evolved from punk to pop. “One must admit that the wildly amateurish musical approach of their early days has been replaced by a very competent barrage of near melodic tunes and singing,” one Slash magazine critic noted in May 1979.
In the summer of 1979, Bello was replaced by Gina Schock, a recent transplant from Baltimore. Of the five, Schock had the most experience on her instrument and, sensing the band’s potential, she imposed a tighter rehearsal schedule and work ethic. And so the Go-Go’s began their slow transition away from “a serious joke” to simply serious.
In 1980, while overseas on tour, the band released a demo for the UK punk label Stiff, led by a rough and tumble version of “We Got the Beat.” Composed quickly by Caffey on New Year’s Day 1980 while “listening to Motown songs, watching a Twilight Zone marathon, and getting high on a cocktail of stuff,” the band’s first hit is a two-minute ode to lighthearted bliss driven by a supercharged, Duracell Bunny rhythm section. Though the song failed to take off in Britain, it was big enough back home in California that their audience began to expand beyond the L.A. punk crowd. In December, facing a competing vision for the band and a nasty case of Hepatitis A, founding bassist Olavarria was replaced by Kathy Valentine, who had been playing guitar professionally since she was a teenager in Texas. With a series of sold-out shows at famed Sunset Strip rock club the Whiskey a Go Go looming, Valentine buckled down and learned the bass in four days. As the L.A. punk scene gravitated toward the hardcore sounds of Black Flag, the Go-Go’s were moving in the opposite direction.
Still, the group struggled to find a label. “The one thing I was greeted with without exception from every [record] company was ‘Oh, it’s an all-girl band,’” the band’s manager Ginger Canzoneri later explained. “‘Fanny didn’t make it, the Runaways didn’t make it, therefore girl bands don’t make it.’” Neither of these bands were failures by any definition: Fanny wrote their own songs and were the first all-female band to release a rock album on a major label; teenage rockers the Runaways also wrote and performed their own songs while challenging the confines of girl-group sexuality. Though both bands carved out space for the Go-Go’s to thrive, their successes were defined by a system outside of their creation, a system never intended to empower them.
On April 1, 1981, after countless rejections, the Go-Go’s finally signed with I.R.S., a small label that was home to the Cramps and the Buzzcocks. I.R.S. wasn’t their top choice, but its willingness to take a risk on the band was meaningful in the face of pervasive sexist prejudice they’d faced elsewhere. “The other record companies could only see that we were girls; they could never get past that point,” explained Wiedlin in a 1981 issue of Trouser Press. “It was either that we were girls so they didn’t want to take a chance, or we were girls and they wanted to capitalize on that.”
Soon after, the Go-Go’s headed to New York City to record their debut, Beauty and the Beat, with producer Richard Gottehrer, a former Brill Building songwriter who co-wrote and produced the Angels’ hit “My Boyfriend’s Back” and later produced Blondie’s 1976 self-titled debut and Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ Blank Generation. The record’s two singles, a polished version of “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed,” fit neatly into Gottehrer’s résumé of pop perfection. The latter, based on a love letter Wiedlin received from the Specials’ Terry Hall, with whom she was having an affair, encourages optimism amid rumblings of hurtful rumors. “Can you hear them/They talk about us/Telling lies/Well, that’s no surprise,” Carlisle sings, brushing off gossip with the relentless pep of a trained cheerleader.
The easygoing pleasure of these two singles is embodied in Beauty and the Beat’s cover. With a washed-out Jacuzzi color palette, it shows the five bandmates posed in towels, terrycloth turbans, and face masks, while on the back cover, individual members lounged in a bathtub pouring champagne, eating chocolates, and reading pulp novels. It was a far cry from the band’s grimy roots; many critics interpreted the girly photos as proof that the Go-Go’s had lost all punk credibility. (In reality, the shoot wasn’t so posh: The group had to return the towels to Macy’s in order to afford food and the Mr. Bubble gave them infections.)
Though it was a far cry from The Canterbury, Beauty and the Beat is about what’s underneath the surface of pop music. Rather than relishing the California sunshine, the Go-Go’s evoke their Los Angeles, a glittery, gritty place where punks rule the streets after dark. “Tonite” captures the exhilaration of cruising down Hollywood Boulevard, where the band “get dressed up/And messed up/Blow our cares away.” “This Town” digs deeper into the city’s scuzzy glamour. “We’re all dreamers, we’re all whores/Discarded stars, like worn-out cars,” Carlisle snarls before Valentine rips a gigantic guitar solo. “Bet you’d live here if you could/And be one of us,” she taunts, offering a thrilling taste of their freedom.
While their attitude might be cooler-than-thou, the Go-Go’s offer an unabashedly sincere window into their hearts. On “Lust to Love,” Carlisle plunges into her vulnerabilities to chronicle the transformation from casual flirt to lovesick prisoner. Later, on “Fading Fast,” love’s spell breaks after one too many lies. As her bandmates cushion her devastation with mournful harmonies, Carlisle holds the pieces of her heart in her hands and looks forward with herculean resolve. Beauty and the Beat concludes with a chipper mantra: “Can’t stop the world/Don’t let it stop you.” Originally written by Valentine for her band the Textones, the song is not so much about blithe optimism as it is understanding your own potential, a reminder of the determination that fueled the band’s creation.
The Go-Go’s later claimed that the first time they heard Beauty and the Beat, huddled together in a car, they wept. “In the studio, we had thought we were making a great punk album,” wrote Carlisle in her memoir. “On hearing the final version, it sounded more pop than we had anticipated.” Here, they worried, was the final proof the Go-Go’s had entirely traded their punk roots for mainstream popularity. But once Beauty and the Beat was released in July 1981, many critics felt differently, calling it a record that “those of you who were embarrassed by pop music can use to say that pop’s okay.” The band quickly changed their tune.
One month after Beauty and the Beat was released, MTV began broadcasting. The new channel helped catapult the Go-Go’s toward superstardom. In the video for “Our Lips Are Sealed,” the band drives through Beverly Hills in a convertible, their trademark garbage bags replaced by colorful summer dresses. Dubbed “America’s Sweethearts,” the Go-Go’s were considered “safe, wholesome, and proudly commercial.” Beauty and the Beat hit No. 1, they were nominated for a Grammy, and they opened for the Police on a massive stadium tour.
But the trappings of mainstream success did not shield the Go-Go’s from the sexism of the male-centric music industry. “It sounds like a joyous, bubbling celebration by five cute girls, with no thought inside their darling little heads save for tonight’s beach party,” griped NME’s review of Beauty and the Beat. “If this was an album by five guys from the USA it’d be hacked to bits by the critics,” said Sounds. Interviews and reviews focused on the band’s love lives, outfits, and novelty; when Annie Liebowitz photographed them in their underwear for their first Rolling Stone cover, the photo ran beneath the headline “Go-Go’s Put Out.”
The band was well aware of their sugar-coated image (Wieldlin once compared the band to Twinkies) but privately rebelled against it. They partied relentlessly, while Carlisle and Caffey struggled with cocaine and heroin addictions, respectively; rumors spread of pranks that involved harassing their tour manager with explicit Polaroids and an alleged sex tape. This dark underbelly of an outwardly bubbly band feels indicative of the contradictions that lurked around the band.
While the Go-Go’s achieved unprecedented chart success, there was a cost to this insurrection, one that brings up complicated issues of identity, integrity, and the blurring of genre lines—topics still fully relevant today. Would the Go-Go’s have become so popular if they retained the punk spirit of their early days? Probably not. But was there a way for them to retain this essence and still be successful? Yes, and to an extent, they did. The Go-Go’s wrote and performed their own songs, songs about independence and desire and control. They shifted a paradigm and inspired a new generation of women—from the Bangles to Hole to Bikini Kill to Sleater-Kinney—to make noise on their own terms. The Go-Go’s never hid from where they came from, and they never apologized for where it took them.


Röyksopp's third album finds them synthesizing the highs and lows from their previous records to strike a knowing middle ground. Robyn and Lykke Li guest.

Junior

Listen to it now and you might beg to differ, but history's current take on The Understanding (Röyksopp's 2005 answer to their relentlessly smiley faced debut) seems to be that it was a misstep. Despite a lead single ("Only This Moment") that foresaw trance's miniature mainstream resurgence and memorable contributions from Karin Driejer (whose "What Else Is There" ranks among Röyksopp's finest songs) and Chelonis R. Jones (whose syncopated "49 Percent" helped eke the Norwegian duo into more credible techno territory), this darker, more textured follow-up stalled at the gate. In retrospect, it was probably done under by both expectation and competition: Not only did The Understanding fail to deliver anything as relentlessly chirpy as early single "Eple" or as friendly and as instantaneous as the Geico Caveman-endorsed "Remind Me", but it was also up against increasingly significant competition from the emergent Scandinavian electro-pop scene.
Junior is Röyksopp's third album in eight years and finds them synthesizing the highs and lows from their previous records to strike a knowing middle ground. While it might be oversimplifying matters to suggest that it splits the difference between the cute, poppy Röyksopp and the darker, techno-friendly Röyksopp, the most satisfying thing about Junior is how convincingly they've bridged that divide. In doing so, they've managed to solve the niggling problems inherent to Melody A.M. and The Understanding-- neither sickly sweet or unsuitably gloomy, Junior is arguably the pair's strongest album.
If you're a production duo like Röyksopp, a lot of your success is dependent upon the singers you surround yourself with, and they've chosen wisely here: In addition to a pair of encore performances from Dreijer, Junior also includes turns from Robyn, Lykke Li, and frequent contributor Anneli Drecker. The high points are pretty much as you'd expect; Driejer does double duty, lending an uncharacteristically creamy falsetto to the disco-inflected workout "This Must Be It" as well as a typically nervy vocal to the double-timed horrorshow piece "Tricky Tricky". Elsewhere, Robyn overdelivers, accounting not only for the best track on the album, but possibly of the year: Influenced in equal parts by Italo disco and "Blue Monday", "The Girl and the Robot" is a frigid, winding bit of electro that combines a powerhouse vocal with some slippery chord changes and one of the biggest choruses of 2009 so far.
Meanwhile, fans of Röyksopp's pop confectionaries needn't look farther than lead single "Happy Up Here", whose dumb, gloopy loop is so infectious that it manages to coast along without the aid of (or need for) any supporting song structure. The pair also hit with "Röyksopp Forever", a starry, string-aided instrumental that starts out sounding like a proggier, second-rate Air before saving itself with a legitimately momentous key change. Some of the other album cuts flirt with downtempo conventions to less flattering outcomes; in fact, if there are any criticisms to be made here, they probably have to do with Röyksopp's tendency to veer into over-produced tastefulness. The worst offender is probably "Silver Cruiser", which exposes the pair's overly finessed production skills and temporarily veers the record into Zero 7/Lemon Jelly/Groove Armada territory. Mostly, though, it's a divide they manage to stay on the right side of; if rumors are true and Junior is in the fact the companion to a slower, more ambient album called Senior due for release later this year, it'll be interesting to see just how long they can keep that up.


On his new EP, the 21-year-old Queens singer presents a series of heart-rending song sketches inspired by loss.

we think we alone EP

Deem Spencer sings through a fog of grief on we think we alone, a hazy EP inspired by the death of his grandfather last winter. “There was this super heavy feeling that I’d never felt before...[that] brought me home and showed me what’s really important,” the 21-year old Queens artist recently told The Fader. Spencer—ostensibly a rapper but really a restrained, pattering singer on most of his songs—sounds perpetually subdued as a result, grasping at a sense of purpose and stumbling through romance. Last year, Spencer began slowly trickling out precocious tracks that cast him as a heady, free association lyricist. But his recent heartache has catalyzed some lonely revelations that carry more weight, even if he has a pesky way of obscuring them in his brooding.
Spencer writes with the worldliness of someone who has learned sorrow too early, and transforms the banal into tragedy with a wistful turn of phrase. “Our loved one left last Friday but he still get mail to the crib,” he sings numbly on “Moonflower.” Though it’s severe, Spencer’s desolation is tranquil and measured. “Everybody knew, I’m sad to say came too late/I just threw out the reverend,” he mumbles, sick of glad-handing well-wishers. At times like these, Spencer illuminates clumsy details with a matter-of-fact poeticism.
Elsewhere, his lyricism slips by in the daze of his delivery. “I was never lonely when I walked alone/I prefer the fall of my own bones,” he sings distantly on “Dirt,” content to let a good line glimmer without over-coddling. “Eve’s Titties” is we think we alone’s buzzy lead single, and it’s representative of his knotty, stream-of-conscious verses. Opening track “There Was Plenty Time Before Us” utilizes the same abbreviated but philosophical phrases, this time over quivering strings. “Soul Atlantis/Dolo antics/YOLO and it’s/So low-handed/Goal abandoned,” Spencer raps, letting his loneliness tumble into disappointment.
Throughout we think we alone, Spencer sings affectively, but his voice sometimes fails to do the lyrics justice. Most of the vocal performances feature Spencer drifting away from or mumbling into the mic, and he often sounds hushed to the point of rendering himself camouflaged in a beat. Singing in a thin and barely moving mid-range exacerbates the effect since many of the songs on the EP plod in a similar atmospheric hue. But when Spencer lets his voice ring clear, it sounds much better and lends his lyrics a deserving spotlight.
It’s what makes “Sex Makes Babies” the most vulnerable vocal track of the bunch, with Spencer crooning in a strained but bold style over an electric piano and softly brushed drums for a sort of jazz lullaby. Like a handful of the songs on we think we alone, it ends abruptly with a zap, shortcutting the problem of writing out a resolution and framing tracks as sketches. To Spencer’s credit, they’re the type worth poring over, wishing there was more.


The debut EP from the UK metalcore revivalists is a triumph of concision. Whatever you like about the genre, you can find it here.

Profound Morality

Metalcore is experiencing a surprising, unprecedented era of critical cachet, all without ceding an inch toward “good taste.” Whether it’s splatterhouse gore, WWE entrance music, MySpace emo, great southern trendkills, or “Bring Me to Life” revival, this 21st-century subculture has already proven to be fertile roots music. Amid this wave of extremists and specialists, Heriot make for a curious Next Big Thing. The Midlands quartet hadn’t developed much of a reputation prior to the pandemic; a string of early releases was followed by a four-year hiatus and the addition of guitarist/vocalist Deb Gough in 2020. Gough’s presence infused Heriot with greater instrumental flexibility and, more importantly, charisma: From their reboot single “Cleansed Existence,” it was clear that Heriot had it, even if that quality couldn’t be reduced to sonic signifiers. With Profound Morality, it’s easier to define—whatever it is you find intriguing about metalcore, you’ll find it here.
More than their peers, Heriot maintain a healthy degree of respect toward the genre’s formative figures. The cover’s font and blurred, igneous imagery hearkens back to Roadrunner’s 1990s commercial peak, and in late 2021, Heriot made good on the title of “Ten Ton Hammer,” a cover of the 1997 hit from Machine Head—a key liaison between groove- and nu-metal, and also subject of some of the era’s most withering reviews in Heriot’s native UK. Gough has the chops of a Guitar World guest columnist but can also be found jamming along with Turnstile on her Twitter account. Numerous writeups of Heriot’s guitar tones have assumed the reader is familiar with Boss’ HM-2 pedal, in the same way hip-hop critics will namedrop the 808 drum machine—the sound of a formative piece of “golden age” equipment whose sonic character remains timeless.
And so it’s fitting that instrumental opener “Abaddon” evokes one of the most memorable instances of early ’90s futurism, the final scene of Terminator 2 where Arnold Schwarzenegger gets lowered into a vat of smoldering steel, obscured by chains—the sound is metal, some of it cybernetic, some of it forged from steel, all of it merging towards a molten end. And immediately afterwards, “Coalescence” imagines the T800 reemerging as an amoral killing machine, the track itself a self-contained syllabus of everything Heriot has done and will do through Profound Morality: bionic percussion, blast beats, vocals that span blackened, death and goth metal, tempos alternating between sludge and speed.
With eight tracks in about 20 minutes and judicious use of silence, Profound Morality is a triumph of concision, Heriot concentrating the overwhelming effect of past masters who were far more reliant on sprawl and space. “Abaddon” and the title track miniaturize Godflesh’s colossal, cautionary tales of machine turning against man. Rather than compartmentalizing metalgaze, the flagrant thrash of “Enter the Flesh” is covered with a layer of gauze equally steel and wool. Gough’s vocals occasionally edge towards the haunted forests of doom-folk and Deftones’ drug dens and quickly find their way out. At any given moment, Profound Morality presents as maximalism, but taken as a whole it’s a work of restraint and craft—a band whose shapeshifting happens organically rather than as a series of jarring growth spurts.
At times the band betrays its interest in influences outside of metalcore, as the erratic pulses and ambient synth washes of “Mutagen” and “Abattoir” could’ve been smuggled onto the more confrontational and abstract stretches of Arca’s KICK series. The band’s voice is also in a state of development: The lyrics themselves are mostly vivid, tactile ways of making explicit what the music itself implies (“blood soaked brick, meaningless living,” “scorned by the blaze of death,” “Feel the wrath of mass terror”). While a weighty statement on its own, Profound Morality arrives as only a teaser of their boundless potential—the past, present, and possible future of metalcore.


Luke Temple hires a band and, led by the outstanding "Collector" single, expands upon the promise of his debut as Here We Go Magic.

Pigeons

Listeners crave tidy narratives. Thus, when "Collector", the second track from Here We Go Magic's second LP and first as a full band, Pigeons, began to make the blog rounds, there was quite a bit of chatter about the album possibly being the band's-- and its bandleader, Luke Temple's-- breakout moment. Makes sense: It's hard to listen to "Collector"-- one of the finest pieces of post-Sufjan Stevens chamber pop-- and not get excited about something. Can anyone be blamed for hoping that the rest of the record would endlessly vibe on that theme?
Whatever the case, Pigeons is not the sparkling, fully realized breakout effort many of us hoped from this band. Nothing is as precisely organized and self-contained as "Collector", as the album's other similarly rhythmic, pulsing moments arise more from Here We Go Magic's reliance on looped melodic fragments than any discernible krautrock influence. As such, Pigeons feels less divorced from the bedroom freak-folk of the project's self-titled debut (recorded by Temple all by his lonesome, with the assistance of a looping pedal or two) than it seems the logical extension of that aesthetic.
Somewhat surprisingly, especially given the debut's minor faults, the woodshedded feel of Pigeons is a good look for the band. Here We Go Magic are doing something more interesting-- something weirder; they're trying out takes on jittery new wave, tone-smeared dream-pop, and high-pitched Kiwi pop with success. The normally frustrating aspect of transitional albums is that bands that make them tend to get lost in their own experimentation; instead, Here We Go Magic attack their shape-shifting sounds with enthusiasm and purpose, applying details like the honking keyboard line in "Old World United" and "Hibernation"'s bouncy bass to flesh out songs rather than as affectations.
As such, Pigeons' most straightforward and formal moment, the shuffling ballad "Bottom Feeder", is the big brick here, mostly because of how comparatively uncomplicated it is. Sure, Temple's voice can be most affecting when accompanying an unadorned, superficially pretty melody but sandwiched between the spiky psych-rock of "Surprise" and the (literally) astral throb of "Moon", the song is a momentum killer. Temple saves his biggest curveballs for the end-- the abstract 1-2 punch of "Vegetable or Native" and "Herbie I Love You, Now I Know"-- but they don't feel tossed-off or willfully obscured. Like the bulk of Pigeons, they represent a good band still finding its way to becoming a great one. Whether they'll reach the end of that path is another debate, but for now, listening to this group of folks mess around is still a treat.


With richly textured psychedelic folk music, the Los Angeles artist draws complex emotions out of simple love songs.

Stars

Ryan Pollie makes guitar-centric dream pop that recalls the staples of classic rock radio while sticking to his DIY roots. Since debuting under the pseudonym Los Angeles Police Department in 2014, the Philadelphia-born, L.A.-based songwriter has sharpened his California bedroom pop with a breezy country twang, reaching an emotional peak on 2019’s self-titled album under his birth name, which he completed while undergoing chemotherapy. On Stars, his fourth studio album, Pollie expands his musical palette and wades into richly textured psychedelic folk.
Produced entirely by Pollie himself, the sound of Stars is clean and loose. Some songs are grounded by crisp snare hits and bright piano, while others embody the kaleidoscopic haze of late-‘60s Beach Boys records. “The Shore House” borrows the charming whimsy of Magical Mystery Tour, while “On the Nose” is reminiscent of summer nights with the Grateful Dead—so much so that guitarist Rob Dobson’s spot-on Jerry impression could have prompted the song’s title. Inspiration verges on imitation, but Pollie’s interplay between string instruments and brass and woodwind keep things fresh for the duration of the record.
What distinguishes Stars from Pollie’s back catalog is its flirtation with psychedelia. Take, for example, “Steal Away,” a hearty piano jaunt laced with wailing pedal steel notes that spiral under a moody cloud of saxophone and distorted guitar. All of a sudden, a ticking hi-hat breaches a sonic dam, and cascades of jazz horns, folk accents, and prog guitar gush into one another: It is the most astonishing moment on the album. “The Thing,” meanwhile, nosedives into a synth and sax-laden daze that sounds somewhere between Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” and “Any Colour You Like,” while “Out of It” embraces the shape-shifting surrealism of Syd Barrett’s solo material.
While his experimentation often proves successful, Pollie’s playfulness turns hokey on “Harriton House,” a twee parade of piano, banjo, and a trumpet solo filtered to sound like a kazoo. At best, it’s a charming, off-kilter folk tune. At worst: a ragtime number at a Disneyland restaurant. For the most part, the album makes good use of eccentric instrumentation, although Pollie sounds just as strong without all the bells and whistles. In “Don’t Lie,” the most affecting song here, dreamy vocal harmonies and melancholy acoustic guitar bring out the sadness in his lyrics. “I want you to like me/Reminds me of grade school,” he sings. Pollie’s voice is delicate and wispy, sparking a feeling of wonder that runs through the entire album. Take the talk-sung hooks about marriage in “Best Love I Ever Had” (“I picked out a ring/It’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen”) that brim with childlike excitement. Through plunky piano and waves of slide guitar, he squeezes rich emotion out of an otherwise simple song.
Forming a subtle narrative about love and heartbreak, Pollie’s lyrics document the excitement of a blossoming relationship before peeling back his insecurities and expressing sugary devotion. Near the end of the album, he laments a fizzling flame, recounting details like walking the dog on summer days. On the closing track “Market,” he faces the rubble of his romance: “She’d never marry me.” As the story unfolds, Pollie draws a map of pivotal locations, guiding us through the beach where he wants to raise his kids; the third floor of a bar where he used to smoke. But Pollie’s heartfelt conviction suggests that the most meaningful part of the ride is the gentle moments of joy and disappointment scattered along the way.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1981 debut from the mysterious Los Angeles post-punk band, who developed a cult following and vanished just as quickly.

Suburban Lawns

Before Su disappeared, she was an extraterrestrial in her city. This was Los Angeles in the ’80s: the cokey, sad, grayscale Los Angeles where what you did was go to porno theaters and go to gigs on the Strip to listen to hair metal. This was also the era of Los Angeles that Bret Easton Ellis wrote Less Than Zero, where the vibe was disaffected and rich kids took joy rides in their parents’ cars to pick up drugs. This era, the primordial ’80s in LA, was tinged with that flavor of pleasant numbness, of swerving under the influence, putting on Mötley Crüe and tuning out. But it was also an era of punk rock coming alive. It birthed Su Tissue and the Suburban Lawns. And in 1981, they released a self-titled LP that felt awake. Suburban Lawns presented an alternate reality where you join a cult and light cars on fire, where you dress up like a Manson girl and obliterate your brain on post-punk.
For a small, mighty, and disaffected sect, the Los Angeles of the early-’80s was all about rebelling against any notion that the city was a generic backdrop, a place to reinvent yourself into another pretty face. X, Circle Jerks, and Fear were writing nihilistic, disaffected punk rock. It was the era of Madame Wong’s, a Chinese restaurant that also featured performances from local punk bands and the short-lived Jett’s. Somewhere in between lay the Suburban Lawns: They weren’t really a punk band, nor were they really a new wave band. Most of their songs were a minute and a half long and not particularly compositionally complicated. And when it came to Los Angeles, they wrote about it from the margins, freeways, and from a deep anger towards the superficial quality of Hollywood. They wrote about West Coast disaffection not from the vantage point of punk rock but from something more feral and strange. They were post-punk Vivian Girls.
They weren’t so into revealing too much about their true identities. The cold hard facts are sparse. They were probably art school kids. They all had stage names: Frankie Ennui, Vex Billingsgate, Chuck Roast, John McBurney, Su Tissue. Su and Vex lived together in an old corner store in Long Beach where the band also practiced. At first, they released their own music and put on their own shows; this was 1979 or 1980 and people weren’t really doing that quite yet. The band self-released an EP called Gidget Goes to Hell in 1979, and a young, newly famous director named Jonathan Demme found out about it and made them a music video that involves a girl in a pink bikini trying to have some fun at the beach and ends up getting eaten by a shark. It ended up airing on Saturday Night Live, and the band went from being DIY freaks who booked their own shows to being beloved freaks who regularly drew crowds on the Los Angeles club circuit. They were no longer semi-anonymous Long Beach guerillas who trekked into Los Angeles for the occasional gig, they were a band on TV.
Around this time, they began working on their first and only record, which would eventually be released by IRS, the same label as the Go-Go’s and R.E.M. They recorded at Paramount Studios late at night, on the cheap, with producer EJ Emmons, whose goal was to faithfully translate the energy of Suburban Lawns as a live band on tape. The songs they recorded in those sessions became Suburban Lawns, a devious cocktail of surf rock, post-punk, and new wave. The best songs are the ones Su sings on, like “Gossip,” which glows green like vaseline glass as she sings and chants at the low end of her register, like a sleepwalker. “Lies/Paradox/A parade of rest,” she sings as a guitar cuts through the song like a rusty steak knife. Or “Flying Saucer Safari,” where the band sounds like they’re all wearing tinfoil hats and contacting each other purely via ESP.
And then there’s “Janitor,” the band’s closest thing to a pop song, their biggest hit. There’s a video of Su performing it, one of the very few videos of the band that exist on the web. In the grainy and distorted video, Su wears a baby yellow button-up and a high-waisted plaid skirt. She stands there, not dancing, not interacting with the band, not smiling. She looks bored. She looks like a Dickensian street urchin, or the Orphan from the movie Orphan. “All action is reaction/Expansion, contraction/Man the manipulator,” she sings, looking at the microphone. “Underwater/Does it matter/Antimatter/Nuclear reactor/Boom boom boom boom.” Her voice ricochets, gets louder, and inflates with imaginary helium.
The success of the video as a strange post-punk ur text is largely because of Su and the way she moved. In the video, she sings like she’s in a trance, her brows furrowed, pivoting her body slightly, but more or less staying in the exact place. In one moment, a guitar solo erupts and Su stares at her feet. Like she wants to be anywhere else in the world, like she’s deliberately trying to fuck with you. It’s almost disturbing, vaguely satanic, the stuff of cults.
Her instrument was the kind of voice that you might call “disturbing” or “jarring ” or “difficult.” She was hypnotic in the way that Nico was hypnotic, she had an icy gaze, she looked permanently plagued with ennui. She was Kim Gordon and Kate Bush, Joanna Newsom in a surf punk band, or Haley Fohr from Circuit des Yeux if she could jackhammer her way from her rich, warm alto to a terrifying devil shriek. That’s what Su’s voice did: bungee itself from the low and meaty to the high-pitched and deranged. That’s what made Suburban Lawns tick the Geiger counter of the punk and new wave scene of Los Angeles circa 1981: Su’s voice. Without it, they’d have sounded kind of like Devo.
After all, there isn’t much to a Suburban Lawns song. On a surface level, they wrote straightforward post-punk tracks. Take “Anything”: fast and loud, just under two minutes long, all choppy guitars that occasionally venture off into frenetic solos. What elevates the song is the humor of her paranoid delivery, and Su’s soprano yodel. “Don’t blame it on me!” she sings alongside her bandmates. “If you want it good, get it!” When Su sings, she sounds like her mind is racing, like she has a story to tell you in extreme detail.
As the band gained momentum, writers began to comment on Su, specifically her stage presence, in increasingly comical and confused ways. “While her voice goes to Mars, her lanky, childlike body is in its own private Idaho,” wrote one critic after seeing the band play at the Starwood punk club. “That strange unfashionably dressed girl sang like others slip into the first stage of an epileptic fit,” wrote another. “As hard as it may be to believe, I think she’s really ‘like that,’” opined a writer for the LA Weekly. “In other, less tolerant societies, she would be dismissed as a ‘wacko’ or burned at the stake as a witch.” Here was this woman dressed like Miss Trunchbull from the book Matilda who looked so bored and uncomfortable standing on stage with all of these boys that looked like they were having so much fun. What do you do with a woman who doesn’t meet your expectations? How do you enjoy music when you have a frontwoman who basically wants to be left alone to yodel and then get off stage?
Very few critics knew what to make of Su. Maybe she did communicate with her bandmates with ESP. Maybe “Flying Saucer Safari,” was autobiographical. Maybe Su was a chick from a Diane Arbus photo or a depraved villainess with a fucked up backstory from a David Lynch movie. In reality, Su was just Su.
In an interview she gave with the Los Angeles Times in 1981, she’s described as being quiet and withdrawn—like she doesn’t want to be there. Within the first few beats, she speaks about how when people singled her out for special attention they “don’t understand what this project is about.” And then quickly goes on to say that she thinks that interviews were “obsolete,” which can be interpreted as Su being punk (which she was) or Su being reluctant about being put on any form of a pedestal.
In reality, it was probably both, and as a result, she maintains an air of unknowable mystery. Later in the interview, when she’s asked to talk about her thoughts on songwriting, she’s even more cryptic. “I just like music. I didn’t even think of people singing words.” Su and the Suburban Lawns treated their music like an art project or an accident. Everything they did was part of a performance of being in a band and being public-facing. Maybe that’s why they burned out so fast. They couldn’t sustain that momentum, literally-go-fuck-yourself level of punk rock anonymity.
The band got bigger, enjoying the kind of cult rock band success that led the freaky miscreants to open for U2 and the Clash. And after the release of Suburban Lawns, they went on to release one more EP for IRS, Baby, where they ditched Emmons as a producer for Richard Mazda, who had produced the Fall and the Fleshtones. It wasn’t nearly as well-received, and the band split up shortly afterwards. Su went to Berklee and released an album of experimental solo piano music called Salon de Musique. She appeared in a bit part in Demme’s 1986 film Something Wild as a pregnant housewife who wears a tiny Uncle Sam hat. After that, like cult bedroom artist Connie Converse before her, she completely disappeared.
What happened to Su Tissue is a question that is difficult to answer. In a 2019 article for The Outline, Scott Beauchamp reported on rumors of her being a housewife, a lawyer, or a piano teacher. Spend any amount of time searching the internet for Su Tissue and you’ll find all sorts of bizarre, fetishistic tributes to her, like covers and albums and a super slowed-down video of “Janitor” that sounds like an airport terminal. There’s a whole universe of content about Su Tissue as muse, as an untouchable, unknowable cool girl. Suburban Lawns are a band whose mystery is intrinsic to their identity. So much is left unsaid, and in that empty space, the band lives on.

Buy: Rough Trade


On his third solo album, the former Foxygen player indulges his mischievous instincts while mourning dead friends.

Jonathan Rado: For Who the Bell Tolls For

For Who the Bell Tolls For

As one half of Foxygen, Jonathan Rado rode shotgun with one of the most notoriously volatile indie acts of the early 2010s. His duo with Sam France balanced classic-rock worship and home-recording hijinks with Behind the Music-worthy drama and onstage meltdowns, but out of that dysfunction came another, less sensationalistic narrative: the emergence of Rado as the go-to producer for fellow retro-minded mavericks like the Lemon Twigs and Father John Misty. With Foxygen inactive since 2019’s Seeing Other People, Rado has been free to adapt his old-school aesthetic to the modern pop marketplace, giving him a foothold in the liners of buzzworthy records by the likes of Weyes Blood and Crumb. And through his associations with Aussie eccentric Alex Cameron—aka Brandon Flowers’ bestie—he wound up co-producing and co-writing the most recent albums by the Killers, a gig that completed his transformation into something akin to a West Coast-reared Jack Antonoff.
But if his career trajectory suggests a desire to trade the hand-to-mouth drudgery of band life for a more stable seat behind the mixing desk, Rado isn’t farming out all of his good ideas to his high-profile clients. For Who the Bell Tolls For is technically Rado’s third solo release, following a pair of low-stakes records that reconfirmed what we already knew about him—he’s a fan of lo-fi lunacy (2013’s glorified demo collection Law and Order) and a student of classic-rock mythology (a faithful 2017 full-album cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run). But For Who the Bell Tolls For feels like a proper coming-out party for Rado the artist/auteur, an opportunity to flex his elevated production chops on a set of songs that embody his cavalier boho spirit while striking a more personal chord. For Who the Bell Tolls For was written in response to the deaths of two dear friends: musician/producer (and early Foxygen champion) Richard Swift and actor/visual artist Danny Lacy. But the album is less an act of mourning than a celebration of life, befitting its simultaneously serious and tongue-in-cheek title. For Who the Bell Tolls For is equally profound and playful, a work of art-pop grandeur that’s grounded by its self-effacing, homespun charm.
As a producer, Rado is quick to cite the influence of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies on his process, but as a songwriter he remains very much in thrall to a familiar Foxygen influence: Todd Rundgren. And so on the album’s momentous title track, he rolls the sumptuous songcraft of Something/Anything? into the theatrical irreverence of Here Comes the Warm Jets, creating a runaway snowball of a song that—thanks to guests like Brad Oberhofer and the Lemon Twigs’ D’Addario brothers—accumulates layers of brass, choral harmonies, and crashing percussion until it’s big enough to flatten cities. On top of serving as a business card for a producer who can nurture a simple repeated melody into a skyscraping epic, the song also establishes the album’s defiant, life-goes-on tenor, and its refusal to be overcome with grief.
But Rado need not always trigger an orchestral avalanche in order to get his feelings across. For Who the Bell Tolls For is anchored by more compact delights like “Easier,” where Rado speaks directly to Swift over a jaunty piano-pop arrangement that could’ve come out of his mentor’s playbook, while threading in symphonic textures that heighten the poignancy without getting schmaltzy. Likewise, “Blue Moon” invokes Lacy’s death by suicide—“I could see there was something wrong/Gone forever, took too long/Now you vanished behind the seas”—yet it’s an infectiously upbeat glam-soul romp thrown delightfully off balance by twinkling marimbas and mechanistic shocks of distortion.
For Who the Bell Tolls For is the musical equivalent of reacting to awful news with a nervous laugh—a perfectly irrational yet natural response to life-altering events that seem too inconceivable to fathom. True to that counterintuitive logic, the album’s purest expression of sorrow is the one song with no words in it. Though the title “Yer Funeral” references a Swiftian inside joke, this seven-minute hymnstrumental is like Rado’s very own “Here Come the Warm Jets”-style curtain closer, albeit one that avoids liftoff to marinate in its vibraphone-gilded, slide-guitar-stained melancholy. For its final minute, Rado lets the arrangement slowly corrode and decompose into the ether, until it sounds like some muffled transmission from the afterlife. It’s a sobering finale to an otherwise vivacious record, but a necessary one: Rado spends the bulk of For Who the Bell Tolls For putting on a brave face and powering his way through the pain, but he leaves us with a reminder that it’s healthy to cry once in a while.