The emo lifer’s seventh album tries to balance intimacy and accessibility, but he only ends up with the latter.

Crooked Shadows

Chris Carrabba’s lyrics loom over today’s pop like a baffling relic of teendom. Taylor Swift, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, and Kacey Musgraves can sing some of these pained words by heart, but so can scrappy emo revivalists and maudlin rap-rockers. If you’ve been a teenager at any point in the 21st century, then perhaps you can too.
The release of the first Dashboard Confessional album in more than eight years is an opportunity to revisit the reasons why so many young music lovers learned his piercing, sentimental lines in the first place. Carrabba’s debut, 2000’s The Swiss Army Romance stands as an incredible pop document, like emo lightning in a singer-songwriter bottle. The impression I had back then, in my own late teens, was of a tender-hearted misfit, shouting out his innermost feelings over not much more than acoustic guitar. It was released in a small run on a South Florida label near where Carrabba grew up, just as the internet was reshaping how music could spread. He wasn’t the first bandleader to unplug, but he made an artistic identity out of it.
Young audiences recognized themselves in these diaristic songs of naïve longing. Carrabba knew how to wring maximum stomach butterflies out of small but commonplace details, and he left enough space for us to find our own voices in those strums and yelps. But Crooked Shadows, Dashboard’s seventh album, is also a chance to acknowledge the reasons it sometimes seems better to let those lyrics lie dormant in the cultural subconscious. There was a tension between Dashboard’s austere origins and the full-band gloss needed for a stretch of three gold albums released between 2001 and 2006. It’s also harder to take Dashboard’s post-adolescent pining with a straight face once you reach the age—from mid-20s to early-30s—that Carrabba actually was during that charmed run. Worse was the male-centric solipsism, brimming with angst toward a largely undifferentiated female “you,” that rightly led to feminist reevaluations of how emo could often be sexist.
Dashboard’s recordings since those early years have oscillated between mega-produced albums for a mass audience and stripped-down sets for fans. He’d retreat into the studio with big-name producers like Daniel Lanois or Tony Visconti, and then turn around and sell a tour-only album of acoustic covers. With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place. It’s possible to balance intimacy and accessibility, but it’s not easy, and too often here we end up with only the latter. The most egregious example is road-trip anthem “Belong,” a corporate-synergy collaboration with DJ group Cash Cash that brings to mind the Chainsmokers producing Owl City. “We got the radio pumping jams,” Carrabba sings in a rasp, like he’s lifting something heavy.
Reassurance is a theme of the album and the opener “We Fight,” about defending a fiercely inclusive local music scene, is a highlight. There’s real urgency in Carrabba’s delivery, as the arrangement swells from Death Cab for Cutie-ish introspection to full-throated righteousness. Ironic detachment won’t help the kid “who’s tired of bleeding, and battered, and being torn up,” Carrabba demonstrates, but hollering along with kindred spirits just might.
But the thing that really connects these nine songs on this disparate, scattershot album together is that every song is generally disappointing. “Catch You” is synth-streaked new-wave pop a la the Cars, with Carrabba oddly asserting that he’s “no angel” but, given that “it’s a long way up to fall all the way down,” he’ll still swoop to your rescue. “About Us” is by-the-numbers keyboard pomp, with shades of fun., the Killers, or any other fine purveyor of “wanna hold you a little bit tighter/burn like a lighter” power ballads. Crooked Shadows’ finale “Just What to Say,” with stately guest vocals by Chrissy Costanza of labelmates Against the Current, describers all the symptoms of writer’s block, and the rest of the record certainly exhibits them.
Did you know that, several years ago, Carrabba formed a Mumford-style stomp-and-clap folk-pop band? He did. And that’s most evident on the stark strummer “Heart Beat Here,” which resembles early Dashboard on bluegrass. He’s still melodramatic, letting us picture a married couple connecting despite time they’re forced to spend apart, but he has only clumsy things to sing about feeling a pulse. “Be Alright” is built more on smoldering U2-style arena rock, but it too has one of those “oh-oh-oh” jamboree hooks. And if “we ain’t the kind to play it safe,” as he claims on the song, why is this reassurance so stultifyingly bland?
Dashboard being Dashboard, Carrabba offers romantic comfort, too. On “Open My Eyes,” with melodramatic violin from YouTube star Lindsey Stirling, Carrabba begs for an epiphany amid a relationship that’s grown “from dancing and turning/to pacing and worrying.” It’s relatable the way Dashboard once could be, but also a tad generic. The title track, with hints of the prickly guitars from Paramore’s 2017 alt-pop balm “Hard Times,” resolves the tense moments that happen between two otherwise-loving adults with a silhouetted image. The female partner in his songs still isn’t a three-dimensional character, but at least she more closely resembles one.
The other night, while getting ready for dinner, I inadvertently started singing the title track of Dashboard’s 2001 So Impossible EP. My wife, who knew the song from a mix I’d made for her back when it was fairly new, weighed in, sounding more exasperated than annoyed: “I thought we were done with this.” She wasn’t wrong. Like so much else in our past lives, the impact these words once had on me was gone, replaced with the bittersweet tang of nostalgia. I stopped singing immediately. Carrabba doesn’t have the same luxury.


The Detroit techno and house producer Jay Daniel expands outward, embracing his role as percussionist and folding vibrant live textures into his sound.

Broken Knowz

“The reality of dance music is that it encompasses more than just dance music,” the 25-year-old DJ and producer Jay Daniel recently told an interviewer asking about the Detroit music scene. He also seemed to be displaying his career ambitions in a single sentence. After several notable years as a prodigious house and techno talent, Daniel is cautiously expanding his purview. “I’m called a techno artist when really I’m a drummer,” he said. “I want to be referred to as a musician more so than a DJ.”
Since 2013 the Detroit artist has shared a handful of scatterbrained 12”-single and EP releases, improving in strides along the way. The progression has been leading up to an official debut called Broken Knowz, his first long player and also the first time he’s fully centering live percussion in his production, shifting purposefully from programming drums in favor of channelling his own considerable chops.
Daniel grew up in Detroit with his mother, the elusive soulful house singer Naomi Daniel, and then in Maryland with his father, where he picked up a pair of drumsticks and played throughout high-school. “I feel go-go had an effect on the way I see and hear music,” he once said of his time away from Detroit. “The cadence and syncopation is different from any other music. I could have played in a band, but it’s easier to make music by yourself.”
Accordingly, this debut feels like a solitary affair, full of the type of obsessive layering that can only be accomplished by a single pair of hands. The nine songs on Broken Knowz brim with meticulous, meditative production, and Daniel’s drumming is a revelation throughout. Instead of chopping up his drum sounds and triggering them individually, the artist uses multiple tracks to layer and loop percussion takes he recorded in his mother’s Detroit basement. As a result, the rhythms on Broken Knowz sound alive and slinky, and somehow despite all the singular attention nothing on it sounds fussy.
Daniel diverts sounds like a sleight-of-hand artist. A busily tapped hi-hat clouds the driving kick-drum of “1001 Nights” before a clipping sound builds into a galloping rhythmic element. Like any artist making dance music, Daniel revels in repetition, and he digs up little revelations inside his evolving loops. It’s an easy, popular trick to build a track up by its components, and while Daniel frequently relies on song-length crescendos of complexity, he arranges his layers with nuance and restraint, introducing certain sounds as flashy highlights and others as inconspicuous building blocks.
“Paradise Valley” is an obvious standout, and it’s also a bit of a red herring in its lush feel, a brilliant dose of shifty electronic funk that betrays some of the deeper and more austere grooves that follow. Unlike many of the songs on Broken Knowz, Daniel leads from the start with a shimmering synth that soars over a clanking percussive element. The producer taps a cowbell like a funky metronome in the right channel before a warbling synth lead rises and squirms above everything else. It’s busy and quirky, naturally just-so.
In interviews and as a DJ, Jay Daniel comes off studious and workmanlike, hyper and humbly self-aware of the Detroit music scene he inhabits. With Broken Knowz he’s fully built up his own identity. The live drum sounds are an obvious advancement in the producer’s craft and personality, but he’s also doubling down in his Detroit diligence, digging deeper into his already deep house and techno roots with sharpened tools. He’s finding old ways to do new things.


The experimental craftsman teams here with Elliott Sharp for an improvised concert based on an abstract score, one crafted by graffiti on blank music sheets.

Graffiti Composition

Christian Marclay is best known as an experimental turntabilist, and for collaborations with John Zorn, Lee Ranaldo, Okkyung Lee, and Elliott Sharp, among others. But he's more a conceptual artist, reaching beyond music into photography, video, collage, installation, and curation. Through these varied pursuits, he's built an impressive oeuvre, recently celebrated in wide-ranging three-month exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum. The downside is that, because his art is so idea-heavy, his records can be more interesting to think about than to listen to.
Take his most famous album, 1985's Record Without a Cover, fascinating mostly due to its lack of sleeve, which meant that accumulated scratches and debris would make it sound different every time it was played. To be fair, Marclay's discography isn't all abstract. His turntable and sample-based records can be entertaining-- 1989's More Encores features chopped-up collages of Johann Strauss, Louis Armstrong, and Jimi Hendrix, and 1997's hyper-cut Records has the cartoon-ish appeal of Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott. But his latest, Graffiti Composition, falls on the more overtly conceptual side, and as a musical experience it's uneven.
The concept behind it goes like this: In 1996, Marclay posted blank music sheets around the streets of Berlin, then returned to photograph them after they had been torn, smudged, and covered with graffiti. 150 of those photos were selected to form an open-ended graphical "score"-- the kind without any traditional notes or time signatures. In 2006, that score was given to Elliott Sharp to arrange and conduct for a single performance. The resulting recording is as much a Sharp album as it is a Marclay one, since Marclay doesn't actually play on it himself.
Which is not to say that the unevenness of Graffiti Composition is Sharp's fault. He assembled a strong lineup of guitarists for the event-- including Ranaldo, Living Colour's Vernon Reid, and Mary Halvorson-- and directed them into a busy mélange of sounds. Drop your digital needle anywhere among the six tracks, and you'll find something interesting-- a tearing note cluster, a thick swath of distortion, a beatific chord. But over 40 minutes, the tonal range of this ensemble turns out to be narrow, and their sounds blur together. Even abrupt shifts in volume feel smooth and unsurprising.
More importantly, Graffiti Composition rarely coheres into something larger than a collection of sonic events. Of course, you can't expect a one-time improvised concert based on an abstract score to produce some kind of linear narrative. But even the most abstract record should possess a memorable cohesion if it's to reward repeated listens. Here, the sounds are often so unconnected, they could be rearranged at random and it would be hard to tell the difference. Perhaps Graffiti Composition would've been best left as a had-to-be-there event*,* memories of which wouldn't be dulled by the harsh light of repetition. As an album to be enjoyed over and over rather than admired once, its impact is fleeting.


Sounding effortlessly in command of her money and her sexuality, the Griselda rapper’s new album oozes seductive pleasure.

The Liz 2

The rap collective Griselda takes its name from Griselda Blanco, the so-called “cocaine godmother.” Escaping an abusive childhood for life outside the law, Blanco became one of the most infamous operators in an underworld more often dominated by male kingpins and drug lords. The story of a woman who survived by any means necessary must resonate with Buffalo native Armani Caesar, the so-called “first lady” of the overwhelmingly male Griselda label roster. But Caesar’s own chosen icons aren’t all notorious crime bosses, or even corporate girlbosses—her work honors a pantheon of misunderstood women, recognized for their glamor but not always their hustle. The Liz 2 is her second project to be named for Elizabeth Taylor, whose face peers out from the cover, third eye open. No matter the era, Caesar loves a diva with big hair, and her new album abounds with references to everyone from Diana Ross to Paula Deen.
Caesar has been in the game for over a decade, and her work has matured with experience and the aesthetic guidance of the Griselda braintrust. Though she doesn’t share the family connection of cousins Westside, Conway, and Benny, she aligns perfectly with the creative mission of Griselda, a hub for hardworking rap veterans who never quite got their breakout moment. On early mixtapes like 2009’s Bath & Body Work and 2011’s Hand Bag Addict, Caesar worked in a more uptempo pop register, spitting over Dr. Dre and Jazze Pha beats. As her sound has slowed and deepened, she’s taken on an aura that’s arguably closer to the legends she idolizes. Her patient delivery and effortless gravitas command attention rather than giving it.
Draped in fur stoles and costume jewels like a Hollywood star of a bygone era, Caesar holds herself at a distance—not necessarily cold, but poised and self-assured. The new album’s production is a lush velvet of funk samples and soulful strings, the air thick with hairspray and blunt smoke. There’s a disco flair to the Nile Rodgers-like bassline on “Meth & Mary,” and the video for “Diana” imagines something like a remake of Mahogany co-starring Kodak Black. Trippy Moog tones float in the clouds on “Queen City,” and a brooding synthesizer rolls in and out like the tide on “Hunnit Dolla Hiccup.”
When Caesar sings, on tracks like “First Wives Club” and “Snowfall,” her voice is softer and brighter. It’s a sharp turn from her exacting rap flow, but her guard never drops. Words leave her mouth with emphatic precision, and while the pace is thoughtful, certain consonants hit like jabs to the chin. There’s menace to her delivery, and an unsettling tactility to the production—the classic breakbeat and thick bassline of “Survival of the Littest” are married to an incessant background tone that whines like a tea kettle. She’s in her hardcore New York bag on “Mel Gibson,” built from a wonky, scattered piano sample that would sound at home on an Armand Hammer joint.
Caesar’s Griselda period is a redefinition rather than a total reinvention; her core voice remains consistent, but she’s confident enough now to think about the total package. On “Survival of the Littest,” an origin story in the “C.R.E.A.M.” tradition, she breaks down how she hustled her way out of precarity, first as a stripper and then as a rapper. Like her labelmates, she proudly owns what she’s done to survive; there’s an obvious line between the sexual confidence and business acumen of her lyrics and her past work in another genre of performance. Fittingly, The Liz 2 closes with an outright banger that feels destined for placement on the P-Valley soundtrack: the 808-heavy “Sike,” featuring Queendom Come and legendary Texan strip club maestro BeatKing. But The Liz 2 is more than music for the club itself; Armani Caesar is speaking to the girls in the dressing room, reminding them that feeling yourself is the first step to making it on your own.


Hip-hop, one of America's last bastions of regionalism, is threatening to exalt itself out of its local roots. Authenticity ...

Boy in Da Corner

Hip-hop, one of America's last bastions of regionalism, is threatening to exalt itself out of its local roots. Authenticity issues still insist the genre is tied to the street, but where a hip-hop province used to be as compressed as the South Bronx, it's now as sprawling as the Dirty South. Even during the dichotomy of the pre-Chronic days, when East almost never met West, entire coasts counted as local wards. Ten years later, hip-hop is pop music in America, and its global reach is arguably greater than rock's has ever been. From Missy and Timbaland's tabla to Jay-Z's bhangra beats, The Neptunes' Eastern flavor to dj/Rupture's ragga/Nubian/chart-hop mashups and the Diwali-led rise of Jamaican dancehall, U.S. hip-hop is finally engaged in a two-way dialogue with the rest of the world.
On his debut album, Boy in Da Corner, 18 year-old Dizzee Rascal instantly stakes a claim that East London is hip-hop's next great international outpost. East London: Rascal's world is precisely that small, and it returns a sense of rueful perspective to hip-hop lost among the soundtrack tie-ins, Godzilla-aping Bone Crusher videos, and 50 Cent-style mixtape mythmaking. In basic ways, Rascal echoes the wish fulfillment of much of American hip-hop, but he's hardly mimicking their act. Rascal is at ground level, eyes trained on his immediate surroundings. His rhymes, and especially his beats, reflect his area's desperate social, economic and political landscape. Often, this desolation hardens an emcee's psyche (Styles gets high every day to combat his mental strain) or delivery: This summer's post-ecstasy swing toward punishing sounds and pugnacious looks threatens to bleed the personality, humor, and adventure out of hip-hop. But to wunderkind Rascal, the accelerated disintegration of his immediate world pains him-- absolutely wounds him-- and it's the Tupac-esque mix of brio and vulnerability, along with his dexterous cadence and gutter beats, that separates his rhymes from the typical money/cash/hoes triptych.
On the opening track, "Sittin' Here", Rascal concludes, "I think I'm getting weak 'cause my thoughts are too strong." Over ambient sounds of sirens and guns, he laments, "It was only yesterday/ Life was a touch more sweet." Most people Rascal's age crave arrested development, but Dizzee already longs for the innocence of childhood. And yet, the boy in da corner's emergence from adolescence isn't the start of a self-imposed purgatory-- life on the dole, or at university-- it's spent cowering, crouching and ready to pounce, and most of all, watching. Little of what he sees is pleasant: a cycle of teenage pregnancy, police brutality, and friends lost to the lure of crime and cash (if they're still alive at all). What's perhaps worse: For all of his concern and meditation, Dizzee himself offers few suggestions and little hope. He can dish bravado with the best emcees, but despite the eloquent boasts, he remains fragile, apprehensive, and consumed by the possibility of failure. "I'll probably be doing this, probably forever" is as convincing a career boast as Dizzee can make.
The hesitation and anxiety in that claim could also double as a question: whether Rascal will dabble in hostility forever. On "Brand New Day", he touchingly wonders if estate violence is youthful folly that he and his mates will outgrow. Over a bittersweet melody that sounds like a blend of an Asian music box and a Lali Puna lullaby, Dizzee asks, "When we ain't kids no more/ Will it still be about what it is right now?" For someone with enough of a big-picture grasp to announce that he's "a problem for Antony Blair," there's something tragic and poignant about Rascal wondering aloud if settling scores with organized violence is a mere child's game.
Rascal's curiosity about adulthood and responsibility doesn't, however, extend to fatherhood. Although he has girls on his mind, they're approached with suspicion. "Love talks to everyone/ Money talks more," a female emcee insists on "Wot U On"; "Jezebel" laments the cycle of teen pregnancy, blaming a promiscuous girl for bringing other future Jezebels into the estate. And on "Round We Go", a ringing "hey" (borrowed, Just Blaze-style, from The More Fire Crew) echoes the repetition and similitude of a series of loveless romantic entanglements sexlessly listed by Dizzee. Most strikingly, his debut single "I Luv U"-- recorded at the age of 16-- is a he-said/she-said snipe between an unmoved could-be father and a friend of the girl that could be "juiced up." It's a harsh amalgam of atonal bleeps and blips, washes of gabba sound, and low, harsh bass, fitting for the track's ultimately selfish approach to the impending consequences ("Pregnant/ Whatya talkin' about?/ 15?/ She's underage/ That's raw/ And against the law/ Five years or more"). It's among the record's most captivating, visceral moments.
It's on "I Luv U" that Rascal's sound most nods to the hollow shell of UK garage's end days, just before the champagne went dry and the world economy's bubble burst. UKG's move from feminized, R&B; club music to breakbeats and emcee bravado created a thrilling light/dark duality into which So Solid Crew stepped, and it seemed as if they'd be the ones to put South London on the international hip-hop map. When the press and record buyers began to ignore UKG in droves in 2001, SSC's strength in numbers (their crew has upwards of 20 members) seemed like an urgent plea for attention. They got it: "21 Seconds" shot to #1 on the UK charts, which secured for the collective a memorable Top of the Pops appearance, during which almost all of their members were crammed onto the BBC studio's bulging stage. Of course, they were aware that the sheer size of their group had benefits as well as limitations: The title "21 Seconds" referred to the maximum amount of time any one member could spend at the mic on any given track. This faceless, monolithic look and sound provided their music with a rare and unique power, but was eventually their undoing as well.
With UKG seemingly left in tatters, Rascal and pirate radio cohorts crawled into the wreckage, reconstructing its grimiest bits and blending them with RZA's paranoid minor chords, some off-kilter electro-glitch, the low-rent nihilism of Cash Money and No Limit, and the ghosts of ragga-jungle. Sparse and ugly, Rascal's record is an icy orchestra of scavenger sounds, owing as much to video games and ringtones as it does to anything more overtly musical. The despairing beats make the lyrical push and pull that much more severe: When Dizzee is venomous, they sharpen his bite; when he gamely searches for the light at the end of the tunnel, admits his failures, laments his unraveling psyche, and battles with depression, they seem like obstacles.
Despite Boy in Da Corner's garage roots, it couldn't rightly be called "dance music." There are still traces of those long-gone days when hyping the crowd or extolling the virtues of the drugs or the music were about all a British emcee would provide, but they're nods at best. On "2 Far", a helium-voiced claim ("I'm the fitness instructor") tips its hat to a rave emcee leading a crowd through its all-night workout, but now such calls are relegated to the periphery. Instead, the language-- which had often remained subservient to the beat in the UK's previous attempts to grapple with hip-hop (trip-hop, jungle, garage-rap circa 2000)-- is the focus. The point isn't to disconnect from the body, but to train the mind to match the speed of thought with the deceptively high BPMs.
After a cycle of cynicism, dark humor and despair, Rascal closes the album with "Do It", Boy in Da Corner's answer to The Streets' album-closer "Stay Positive". Simultaneously, it's an apology for his antisocial behavior, a rallying cry, a confession, and a lucid realization that, despite his age, he's already reached the crossroads. His resistance worn, he admits that he wishes he could sleep forever: for days, for years, then "for good," confessing that "if I had the guts to end it all, I would." Like he often does throughout the record, Dizzee sounds as if the only thing nearly as bad as dying is having been born.
Dizzee's despairing wail, focused anger, and cutting sonics place him on the front lines in the battle against a stultifying Britain, just as Johnny Rotten, Pete Townshend, and Morrissey have been in the past. The difference between the four (and their claims that "There's no future," "I hope I die before I get old," "I don't want to wake up on my own anymore," and "I wish I could sleep forever") isn't as different as it might appear on the surface: If Rascal grows at a similar rate, it's not out of the question that he could leave a comparable legacy.


Teaming with producer John Carroll Kirby, the R&B singer sets an idyllic, spiritual mood while contemplating the weight of the world.

Sundown

Ibiza may be best known for nightlife, but away from the endless raves and debaucherous parties, the island’s natural beauty can be something to get lost in. In October 2021, Los Angeles musicians Eddie Chacon and John Carroll Kirby escaped to the Mediterranean oasis and found themselves doing exactly that—soaking up the ample sun and lush greenery while recording Sundown, a collection of laid-back grooves and sultry meditations on love, loss, and the human experience.
Chacon has had decades of practice settling into this rarified zone. After an adolescent stint in a mid-’70s garage band with Faith No More founder Mike Bordin and future Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, he made a name for himself singing breezy, radio-friendly music as one half of soul-pop duo Charles & Eddie in the early ’90s. At their peak, they found global chart success with the irresistible “Would I Lie To You?,” from their 1992 debut, Duophonic. But 1995’s follow-up Chocolate Milk flopped and the two called it quits. In 2001, not long after they’d begun entertaining the idea of making music together again, Charles Pettigrew passed away. Chacon changed career paths, becoming a creative director and fashion photographer.
Fast forward to the late 2010s, when a mutual friend introduced Chacon to John Carroll Kirby, a seasoned producer and pianist who’s worked with Solange, Frank Ocean, Steve Lacy, and Harry Styles. Together, they collaborated on Chacon’s 2020 solo comeback, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness, a series of foggy, low-key reflections that Chacon cut through in his barely-there falsetto. His newest album, Sundown, serves as an extension of those meditations on romantic woes and regrets as Chacon and Kirby’s camaraderie matures into an effortless partnership.
A throughline of Chacon’s solo music, built on the foundation of soul legends like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield, has been his minimal lyrics. For the most part, he’ll stick to one or two core refrains, repeating them until they slowly take the shape of mantras. From accepting the fleeting nature of life on the bouncing synth-funk cut “Comes and Goes” to subtly grappling with his mental state on the shimmering “Same Old Song,” he renders the lessons he’s learned throughout his 59 years short and sweet. The repetition of lyrics on “Far Away” (“What went wrong?”) and “Step by Step” (“Listen to your heart and know/Every day a stepping stone”) exemplifies his less-is-more approach, an ethos of simplicity that shows the influence of spiritual greats like Pharoah Sanders and Laraaji.
The labyrinthine music often fills the gaps between words. Spearheaded by Kirby’s sleek production and woozy fingerwork on the Fender Rhodes, the smooth, soulful instrumentation comes to life with bird-like flutes, samba-infused bongo rhythms, and communal handclaps. The music video for the title track gives a behind-the-scenes look at the utopian recording process at Los Angeles’ 64 Sound Studios, with Chacon, Kirby, and a slew of players, eyes closed, bobbing their heads in unison.
In the impressionistic outlier “Haunted Memories,” Chacon confronts the nature of his difficult mind as his slightly off-key vocals and Kirby’s oscillating keys add a sense of unease. Sequenced back-to-back with “Same Old Song,” this darker stretch mirrors the uncharacteristic anguish he detailed on 2020’s “My Mind Is Out of Its Mind.” With a forlorn but sensual feel, his troubles were easier to digest back then; here, his introspection seems unresolved in a way that’s more visceral. As “Haunted Memories” progresses, his voice trails off like he’s losing himself deeper in thought, while the ticking drumbeat and shaky, fluttering flute seem to engage in a conversation of their own.
It’s not all heavy, though. In the funky “Holy Hell,” Chacon considers whether the glass is half-empty or half-full: “We can keep on shining,” he sings in a confident rasp, “But we can’t stop the hands of time.” Album closer “The Morning Sun” sends things off in high spirits: Blissful saxophones and synth bass emit an air that’s joyous and carefree alongside Chacon’s shaky vibrato, describing summer breezes and gentle rain. Moments like these encapsulate the spontaneous, paradisiacal feel of the album’s early days in Ibiza: a place where Chacon could reflect on love, loss, and the weight of the world without ever losing his groove.


With their self-titled debut, Weval have made the rare electronic record that is so strong and obviously appealing that it can't help but end up in the hands of casual listeners.

Weval

Every once in awhile an electronic record comes along that is both so strong and so obviously appealing that it can’t help but end up in the hands of people who otherwise own no records from labels like Kompakt, Hyperdub or !K7. Think of The Knife’s Silent Shout in 2006, or Burial’s Untrue and Justice’s † in 2007. Beyond luck and timing, these kinds of releases are successful because they are not only masters of their genre and bring its best attributes to light, but also because they manage to be a lot of different things to different people. It’s uncommon for all of those factors to come into play at once, but with the new self-titled debut album by Weval, it’s easy to imagine how German techno mainstay Kompakt could have the next great crossover artist on their hands.
Weval is the work of Dutch friends Harm Coolen and Merijn Scholte Albers, who have been tinkering together in the studio since first meeting in 2010, Albers coming from a self-described background in trip-hop, and Coolen in house. They describe their creations as being part of no particular subgenre of electronic music but instead a “cumulation of music that inspires” them. These points alone probably explain a lot about why Weval’s music could appeal to audiences of many stripes.
From a very first listen to Weval, it becomes immediately easy to envision the record simultaneously functioning as a summer soundtrack to beach nights at Ibiza, windows-down empty road car drives, backyard BBQs, background ambiance at expensive NYC hotel rooftop bars or headphone music for late-night dog walks. It’s hard to single out highlights on an album whose excellence is partially connected to the phenomenal consistency of mood and feeling it provides, but even so, there are many noteworthy tracks on Weval. “The Battle” begins with a slow, propulsive beat that sounds either like live drums or a well-recorded imitation and a filtered synth refrain. Its  assured confidence and its sampled vocal shine with a swagger that sets both the temperament and tone for the rest of the album.
The dryly recorded syncopated pitter-patter drumming underneath “I Don’t Need It” immediately recalls “Bloom” from Radiohead’s *The King Of Limbs. *Other influences on the record stand through more deferentially. Beginning with a Knight Rider bass, “Square People” is almost like a dark, vocal-less homage to Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” with a circulating return chord that gives the song a feeling like it could go on forever. And on the elegiac two-part suite “You Made It,” the warbling senescence of the intro and cooing background vocals recall Boards of Canada and Ulrich Schnauss.
For a record that maintains a constant sonic template, Weval’s peppering of vocals throughout are crucial to providing gentle tone tweaks that keep it interesting. While many tracks are driven by vocal samples by KW Toering, two of them feature actual singing throughout, “Ways to Go” and “Days.” Perhaps due to the Lana Del Rey ringer My Larsdotter on “Days,” it feels like the track most likely to work as a “crossover hit,” or at least the one most likely to inspire an actual “featuring Lana del Rey” collaboration in the near future.
Perhaps best of all are “You’re Mine” and “Just In Case.” The former builds an incredible skittering beat for a minute and a half over a wall of decayed synths that sound like the chirping bugs before finally giving way to the organ hook that carries the song. Coolen and Albers’s sense of pacing is impeccable, seemingly knowing exactly how long to tease each part for maximum effect before moving on to the next. It is perfectly sequenced, mysterious and moody. For a debut album, the fully-formed nature of their songwriting, sublime pacing and monolithically tasteful atmosphere is remarkable.


Method Man's first solo album since 2006 is a throwback to Wu-Tang’s mid-2000s wilderness period where the leading figures tried to establish independent fiefdoms outside of RZA’s view.  Raekwon and Inspectah Deck guest.

The Meth Lab

If you've been keeping up with Method Man over the past decade or so, the question isn’t whether he will make embarrassing "Breaking Bad" references on an album called The Meth Lab, it’s how many times will he make a reference, the likely range being "too many" to "far too many." This is how Johnny Blaze does nowadays—after kicking off 8 Diagrams with a promise to "bring the sexy back like Timbaland and Timberlake," he’s followed with countless other, similarly demoralizing punchlines that are at least a year past their spoilage date. Method Man has always been expected to be Wu-Tang Clan's mainstream emissary, and his lyrics mirror their currently tangential relationship with relevancy.
If that doesn’t kill your vibe, look at the tracklisting of The Meth Lab: of the 19 tracks, only three are credited solely to Method Man. One is the intro, another is the outro, and the other is fittingly called "2 Minutes of Your Time". This actually works out quite well for the Method Man brand—if hip-hop has completely passed him by, Method Man can always surround himself with rappers more out of step than himself.
Though it doesn’t advertise as such, The Meth Lab is a throwback to Wu-Tang’s mid-2000s wilderness period where the leading figures tried to establish independent fiefdoms outside of RZA’s view—even if Hanz On, Eazy Get Rite, Mack Wilds, Chedda Bang, Dro Pesci, Kash Verazzano, and Hue Huf aren’t given the dignity of a crew name, The Meth Lab is a posse record in practice, very much in the lineage of Theodore Unit's 718, Polluted Water, or the ultimate in Wu-Tang marginalia, Ugodz-illa Presents the Hillside Scramblers. Pity these dudes if you want—Method Man is still a household name.
Based on their handles alone, you can’t possibly imagine the aforementioned involved with pertinent rap music in 2015. Not that they want to anyway—beyond the likely deathless #hashtag and "no [RAPPER OF INTEREST]" kickers, Meth Lab's foot soldiers have a stylistic cut-off point around the most recent Method Man album, and that came out in 2006. They favor broadly-drawn street journalism and humorless punchlines, less derived from Method Man than the still-down-for-whatever Streetlife, who appears on over 1/3rd of The Meth Lab. The production complements the rapping—you likewise get Wu-Tang’s second tier (4th Disciple, Mathematics behind the boards, Killa Sin and Carlton Fisk on the mic), and the occasional "oh that guy!" from any number of "bring New York back!" waves. The biggest outside appearances come from Corey Gunz and Uncle Murda—both are technically major-label rappers, though it feels like a matter of time before Epic or one of the four imprints currently sharing Gunz fixes the glitch. Likewise, you get a beat from Ron Browz, who no longer refers to himself as Etherboy. Seven tracks are helmed by Pascal Zumaque—the first thing that pops up in a Google search of his name is his LinkedIn page.
Otherwise, you know Meth’s steez—Wu-Tang’s for the children, other rappers need to pull their pants up, hip-hop peaked when you could still hear Method Man songs on the radio. He’s basically turned into Redman now—except when Redman stays making O.J. references in 2015, he’s at least staying in character as hip-hop’s favorite knucklehead uncle. Method Man just sounds like a guy who got set up with a Twitter account and has no initiative to use it, making jokes to himself while watching TV. Sift through the verses for proper names and the likes of Michael Vick, Fat Joe, Lil Mama, and Rappin’ 4-Tay emerge. Yet, here’s the one that I find most fascinating—"I’m here to analyze your shooter like I’m Kenny Smith." Just think about that one for a second—what exactly is Method Man trying to express here? I know what he means, but it also makes no goddamn sense. This is undeniably the result of Method Man’s mind drifting while watching "Inside the NBA" and as far as rapper/actors clowning on the Jet, he now ranks below Shaquille O’Neal.
To Meth’s credit, he hasn’t fallen the fuck off as hard as Inspectah Deck, who shows up on "The Purple Tape", a highlight by default because it also features Raekwon—the one guy left in Wu-Tang Clan who really hasn't fallen off at all. His F.I.L.A. record from earlier this year didn’t leave much of a mark either, but the appearances of Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, and French Montana didn't feel like desperate grasps at Hot 97 airplay; those guys likely showed up on their own volition, an acknowledgement that Rae’s style has aged well because rapping in code about selling drugs and fly gear has never gone out of style in hip-hop and never will. All you can really do with The Meth Lab is contemplate its reason for existence— if anything, the fact that it's being released on Tommy Boy might get a chuckle out of GZA... provided you can get a chuckle out of GZA. But if you make it to the end, you find out that this is actually a prelude to Method Man’s real solo album. Which will be called Crystal Meth. So really, we’re right back where we started.


A new compilation explores the early days of Elliott Smith's alt-rock band, whose tight songcraft and introspective lyrics set the stage for his solo work to come.

The Music of Heatmiser

When Elliott Smith and his college buddy Neil Gust formed Heatmiser in Portland in the early ’90s, all the pieces started falling into place. They had two supremely talented songwriters, a thrashing yet tuneful alt-rock sound, and a local following from their sold-out performances at the local club La Luna. Onstage, they were “just a phenomenal, rip-your-head-off-and-shove-it-up-your-ass rock band,” the group’s manager, JJ Gonson, later recalled.
So, what happened? Elliott Smith happened. Relations within Heatmiser deteriorated during the recording of their third album, 1996’s Mic City Sons, and the band broke up just as Smith’s solo career was taking off. Within two years, he was performing at the Oscars while his old band was relegated to coulda-been status. Now, 30 years after Heatmiser’s debut, 1993’s Dead Air, a sprawling, 29-track compilation takes stock of their fiery early recordings and fills in some blanks, making a persuasive case for their undersung greatness.
Heatmiser—rounded out by bassist Brandt Peterson and drummer/engineer Tony Lash—were exhilarating from their first 1992 demo, which comprises the first six tracks here, four of which appeared in slightly more polished form on Dead Air. Each song got in and out in about two minutes and would’ve fit on any college radio playlist in the country. “Lowlife” is a pounding statement of intent, led by Smith’s youthful torment (“I’ve got a plague/Plague in my head”), while “Buick” showcases Gust’s twangier delivery and more narrative-driven songwriting. On “Dirt,” the two singers trade lines and egg each other on, sounding remarkably like Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi. Similarly, the previously unheard “Just a Little Prick,” with its hulking bass groove, could pass for a Repeater outtake.
Both Smith and Gust sound consumed with angst and self-loathing. Gust grappled with his alienation as a gay man, a subject he addresses obliquely on “Candyland” and “Can’t Be Touched” (“They’re all so straight they’d swear the earth was flat/And that the bend is in my head,” he sings on the latter). Smith, who removed feminine pronouns from some of his love songs in solidarity with his friend, confronts his own disillusionment with masculinity on “Man Camp,” a darkly funny skewering of the mythopoetic men’s movement.
Despite its definitive title, The Music of Heatmiser is not a career-spanning set. The focus is on Heatmiser’s early recordings, demos, and live cuts from 1992 and 1993, when they played an intense, somewhat derivative brand of post-hardcore, borrowing from trailblazers like Hüsker Dü, Nation of Ulysses, and of course Fugazi. Smith’s vocal style back then—gruff, loud, deep—will come as a shock to anyone only familiar with his solo records. His contributions to Heatmiser’s later albums, particularly Mic City Sons, offer hints of his folk-pop melodicism, but you won’t find any of them here. Instead, we get a charming cover of the Beatles’ “Revolution” and a live recording of the band’s 1993 set on KBOO—a compelling document of their live prowess that’s also a bit repetitive, since most of the tracks also appear on the compilation in demo form.
In retrospect, Smith’s rise as a solo artist seems so preordained that it’s easy to forget how unfashionable his hushed, acoustic style seemed in the mid-’90s. As Smith once reflected, “I thought my head would be chopped off immediately when [Roman Candle] came out because it was so opposite to the grunge thing that was popular.” If it was Smith’s willingness to buck trends that made his records stand out, then Heatmiser had the opposite problem. They were great, but they sounded like a lot of other fashionable bands, too, struggling to fully break out from the pack. The Music of Heatmiser conveys what was so compelling about the band in its nascent period and what was soon to come from Smith: They had caterwauling energy and angst to spare, yes, but they also had the songs.


Gore is easily Deftones’ most engaging record since White Pony, filled with carefully crafted hooks disguised as bridges and transition. As with all of their best music, it sounds like the brutal, beautiful result of the band being passionate enough to rip each other’s heads off.

Gore

Deftones were going through a particularly rough patch and Chino Moreno just had to vent: “I hate all my friends, they lack taste sometimes.” This wasn’t from an interview: it’s a lyric from “Hole in the Earth”, the lead single from their self-described artistic nadir, one where Dan the Automator, Kanye-skeptic Bob Ezrin, Ric Ocasek, and label-appointed song doctors were of no avail for a band that was alternately exhausted and apathetic. Meanwhile, their 2000 masterwork White Pony was plagued with so much in-fighting that Moreno admits, “it almost killed us.” This is worth remembering a decade later in light of how the leadup to Gore has mostly honed in on out-of-context quotes about how they hate each other’s taste sometimes. As with all of their best music, Gore is the brutal, beautiful result of Deftones being passionate enough to rip each other’s heads off.
More justifiable causes for concern were Moreno’s claims that Deftones were making studio-intensive “heady, outside the box” music, worrisome terms that could describe the various, underwhelming material he released with Palms, ††† and Team Sleep since 2012's Koi No Yokan. It’s somewhat surprising that Deftones would want to dig their heels in after being in a groove: Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan are strong records, but a lot of the praise felt fueled by relief. The band had proved capable of functioning after a devastating accident left founding bassist Chi Cheng in a coma until his death in 2013, reemerging from their post-White Pony wilderness period with the ability to write hooks again, and their longevity had vindicated their relative critical acclaim and commercial failures compared to the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit. But their “return to form” felt a bit too literal, and for all of their attempts to distance themselves from nu-metal’s He-Mook posturing, Koi No Yokan’s “Tempest” still did a very convincing job of soundtracking an auto-erotic Vin Diesel montage in Furious 7.
Moreno perhaps sensed they’d exhausted their decades-tested “five guys in a room” format and Deftones entered the studio with no written material and no real timetable. Rather than sapping them of their immediacy or energy, the protracted, Pro Tools-y composition of Gore ensured they didn't have to rely on old patterns or just finish the damn record already. Sound manipulator Frank Delgado reasserts himself on the most texturally luscious Deftones record yet, layering shakers, backmasking effects and dessicated vocal filters onto the shapeshifting bad trip “Acid Hologram”; while Jerry Cantrell dishes Dirt on the bluesy first half of “Phantom Bride”, Delgado pulls the coda down a black hole of grinding ambience. And while the maddening, math-rock rhythms of “Geometric Headdress” and “(L)MIRL” will push drummer Abe Cunningham to his physical limits in a live setting, the arrangements themselves clearly feel like the result of man-machine interplay.
There’s still plenty of the palpable tension between Moreno and Carpenter that drives Deftones records and sometimes derails them. But where previous records tended to isolate their conflicting desires into separate songs or allot them to standard verse/chorus dynamics, both Moreno and Carpenter achieve a compelling standoff throughout Gore. “Hearts/Wires” was the song that prompted Carpenter’s red-flag-raising remarks, and it does recall a more shapely take on Moreno’s Isis-featuring Palms project. Carpenter takes out his frustration on the rest of Gore, as the riffs on “Doomed User” and the title track hit with astonishing, almost atonal brute force. His work on Gore is equally reverent of Meshuggah and the ’80s iterations of Maiden and Metallica, a layering of black-, leather- and denim-metal similar to Deafheaven's New Bermuda. It's a flattering comparison that still manages to demonstrate Deftones' unique presence: they do this in the context of songs that could conceivably be played on rock radio.
Emphasis on conceivably, though—Gore lacks a crossover shot as transcendent as “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)", "Change (In the House of Flies)", "Minerva" or “Digital Bath", but there’s a satsifying, nasty, seething edge to “Prayers/Triangles” and “Doomed User” that their post-Chi singles lacked. Still, Gore is easily Deftones’ most engaging record since White Pony, filled with carefully crafted hooks disguised as bridges and transitions; even the requisite, rangier late-album cuts aren’t subject to the drifting coo that Moreno relied on to fill out verses before the inevitable piledriving chorus.
If Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan were a vindication of Deftones’ formula, Gore captures the inimitable essence of the band: the thing that makes people reference them when discussing Deafheaven, Sigur Ros’ Kveikur or basically any heavy rock album that strives to be prettier than its peers or vice versa, a truly new metal that’s sensual without resorting to shoegaze tropes, aggressive and unconventionally freaky in a way that never suggests predation or regressive machismo. Synaesthetically speaking, it’s a smear of pink, purple and black, a kiss that bites down on your lip to draw blood. By no means did Deftones invent the idea of combining brutality and beauty in metal, although they were definitely at least a decade ahead of the curve on covering Sade. Nothing short of a name change will likely convince skeptics at this point, but Gore proves that Deftones can remain vital as they are relevant, if they don’t kill each other first.


Newly unearthed audio of the Stooges’ infamous final original lineup performance highlights their masterful album Fun House and sheds light on their raw, druggy, unhinged stage show.

The Stooges: Live at Goose Lake: August 8th, 1970

Live at Goose Lake: August 8th, 1970

The promoter behind the 1970 Goose Lake International Music Festival near Jackson, Michigan promised a good time. His newspaper ad announcing the three-day event wished “peace” to all the “brothers and sisters” who wanted to see Jethro Tull, Chicago, Faces, Bob Seger, the MC5, and a dozen other bands for $15. It wasn’t quite the nightmare that Altamont had been the previous year, but government officials in Michigan decried it as, essentially, a shitshow. The 200,000 in attendance more than tripled the expected capacity, and they were all prohibited from leaving the grounds’ barbed-wire fence enclosure. Sketchy drugs were everywhere, which caused over 500 people to be treated for bad trips on the first day alone; multiple reports emerged of people ingesting “cocaine” or “PCP” that turned out to be horse tranquilizer. The governor later made a public speech decrying the “deplorable” Goose Lake problem and the promoter was indicted for promoting the sale of narcotics.
This was the fittingly chaotic scene of what turned out to be the Stooges’ final show with their original lineup. The band’s Goose Lake set took place one month after the release of Fun House, and that entire summer, they performed their brand new masterpiece in its entirety while Iggy Pop built his legend as an unhinged performer in front of bigger and bigger crowds. In Cincinnati earlier that summer, he was filmed in his dog collar and long silver gloves smearing peanut butter on his chest, mid-crowd-surf. Consider what it must have felt like to see the Stooges perform “1970” in 1970 at a sweaty outdoor music festival—heaving forward with the current of the crowd when Iggy thrashes into the front rows, hearing him repeatedly scream “I feel alright” while Ron Asheton rips through one of his best hooks. Then, with the adrenaline sky high, you can feel the kick of Scott Asheton’s bass drum in your chest as Steve Mackay’s freeform sax solo folds chaos and frenzy into the band’s hypnotic “Fun House” groove. It’s psychedelic music with wild menace, and it’s all anchored by the lithe little Michigan goblin flailing unpredictably somewhere near the front of the stage.
It absolutely rules that Third Man is putting out a live Stooges album from this period, and at the same time, it makes perfect sense why Iggy voiced hesitation about officially sanctioning the newly unearthed Goose Lake audio. It’s an infamous night in Stooges lore. The Jim Jarmusch documentary Gimme Danger, for example, mostly distills this event into two distinct story beats: the bad drugs that Iggy took right before the set and the firing of bassist Dave Alexander right after the set. The legend goes that Iggy went into a tent “with some wild people,” took what he thought was cocaine, and suffered temporary amnesia just moments before he went onstage. He pulled it together, but looked over at Alexander, who was apparently too fucked up to play anything. Iggy said Alexander froze and didn’t play a note; Scott said someone unplugged Alexander’s amp. Either way, Iggy fired the bassist immediately after the show, closing the book on the lineup that made The Stooges and Fun House.
So the biggest surprise about Live at Goose Lake is that the Stooges’ performance transcended the long-held narrative that this wasn’t a great show for them. If you’ve ever loved a Ron Asheton guitar solo or hook, know that this album’s brimming with those. If your love of Fun House is defined partially by Mackay’s sax performance, absolutely buy this record and listen to his work on the B-side first. Iggy, meanwhile, delivers all the nuances required of performing the music from Fun House. He sings gently, he shouts with authority, and—why not—he even incites a minor riot. Iggy briefly flouts “TV Eye”’s actual lyrics, and in apparent frustration about festival security not allowing him to stage dive, he starts singing about the “big ol’ wall” and screaming “RAM IT.” A security guard, interviewed by Creem’s Jaan Uhelszki for the Goose Lake liner notes, confirmed that this was the moment people in the massive crowd started to rip planks off the front of the stage.
As for Alexander, his presence on the album is a major selling point of Third Man’s Live at Goose Lake LP. The late bassist’s supposed non-performance has been the gospel of biographies, documentaries, and Iggy interviews for years, but you can hear Alexander’s bass all through this newly released audio. So yes, he was playing and he was plugged in, but no, he did not play a perfect set. There are stretches of “Loose” with palpable gaps where there should clearly be bass, and there are other sections where Alexander is either behind the beat or playing the wrong notes entirely. And to his credit, he often shows up when it counts most. “Dirt” hinges entirely on Alexander’s trudging, climbing bassline, and he’s absolutely there, doing the work of establishing the song’s foundation. But then he’s spotty for significant chunks of two crucial numbers: “1970” and “TV Eye.”
That void is disorienting and distracting—especially when you stack these performances next to his work on Fun House. Goose Lake is not the careful work of the Stooges in Elektra’s L.A. studio, and it doesn’t have the luxury of the standard crisp production quality of most ’70s live albums (like Bob Seger’s Live Bullet and Neil Young’s Live Rust). The Goose Lake tapes were found recently in a festival sound engineer’s basement, and frankly, they sound like some old tapes you’d find in a Michigan basement after five decades. While the audio is in largely good shape, the vocals wipe out every other instrument as soon as Iggy screams (which happens pretty often here), and there are a couple brief moments during the closing “Fun House” and “L.A. Blues” freakout where the audio drops out completely.
The impressionistic and imperfect sound quality of Goose Lake ultimately feels fitting for a record that captures some of the band’s less performative and more human moments. The flubs, stage banter, audience chatter, and interstitial tuning all make it feel like a breathing historical document in a way that even the Stooges’ studio albums can’t capture. Turn up the volume for everything that happens between the fuzz and the screaming—the moments when everybody on stage is catching their breath—and you can imagine what it was like to watch this unbelievable band on a Michigan summer night somewhere in the sea of bodies and drugs.

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At this point, Clark has been translating his wracked emotions via machines—samplers, software, synths—for about half his life. Clark finds the Warp artist merging techno, electro, noise, classical, ambient, and post-rock with the skill of a virtuoso.

Clark

The world is ending, and Chris Clark is writing its soundtrack. In the 35-year-old electronic producer’s latest dystopian vision, the Earth’s layers peel back with painstaking certainty while everything else bursts and pops in unrest. Temperatures flash between frostbite and flame. There are moments of unsettling calm, only to be ruptured by bruised sky, acid rain, famine, disease. Unknown beings attack, armed with tones set to bewilder. Somewhere, the sound of a muffled Billie Holiday acetate being mauled by a pack of lions echoes through the murk. There is last-chance dancing—or are those people just running away?
As far as end-times scenarios go, the one Clark sets forth on his eponymous seventh album is vivid. And while there’s plenty of terror to be found here, Clark resonates because it pinpoints both the humanity and the nothingness that come along with complete dread; he knows that in order for annihilation to mean anything, you have to care about what’s being annihilated. Because for every laser-burned bass kick and alien-probe synth, forces of good cautiously look out from the rubble in the form of twinkling lullabies and melancholic piano loops. In cinematic sci-fi terms—and it’s hard not to think of this record as a kind of headphone IMAX experience—Clark is more akin to Alfonso Cuarón’s devastating infertility parable Children of Men than, say, Independence Day: ominous because its pulse feels all too real.
At this point, Clark has been translating his wracked emotions via machines—samplers, software, synths—for about half his life, and Clark has him merging techno, electro, noise, classical, ambient, and post-rock with the skill of a virtuoso. Growing up just outside of London, he indulged in nascent omnivorous Internet-era listening habits, giving time to indie rap, Pavement, and Squarepusher as a teen before Warp deemed him next-in-line to their mindful electronic throne at the start of this century. Though it was probably unfair to expect Clark to live up to the legacies of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, it was also inevitable. But with his third album, 2006’s Body Riddle, he quietly did just that, turning in an opus that moved the sounds of Warp’s classic 1990s roster forward, mixing sensuousness and mechanics to create a 21st century cyborg touchstone.
Owing to the mercurial nature of his tracks, which often morph unexpectedly many times across just a few minutes, follow-up Turning Dragon was nearly as excellent but utterly different, trading in spectral atmosphere and hip-hop rhythms for a more full-on techno thrust. And after five years of frustratingly diffuse material that had the producer grasping at new styles and textures with mixed success, Clark is a much-welcomed return that locates the midpoint between Body Riddle’s tangibility and Turning Dragon’s bulletproof sheen. The album adds a fresh layer of grandiosity that hints at festival-sized dance music or even Trent Reznor’s churning soundtrack work while never bowing down to any type of current trend. Clark is like Aphex’s comeback Syro in that it showcases a veteran artist living and breathing within a sonic space of his own creation—and the fact that no one would confuse the two records is a testament to Clark’s hard-won individuality.
What’s always set Clark apart is his eclecticism, dynamism, and flair for the dramatic, all of which is on fine display here. His tracks don’t drop as much as they slip or swerve, forever off-balance. He’ll end a techno album with eight minutes of beatless, sky-cracking ecstasy you’d expect to find on a Sigur Rós LP, and it will make sense. He’s allergic to the idea of standard sounds and presets, which is partly why we’re still talking about him 13 years after his debut. And unlike many of his more insular peers, Clark can be open to sentimentality—not schmaltz as much as a belief in humanness and all its inexact wonder. In electronic music’s never-ending battle between man and machine, he’s seeking a third way. “It's just far too easy these days,” he said in an interview earlier this year, talking about the copy-and-paste replicability of so much modern composition. “I'm often inspired by the path of most resistance. Looking for those tiny snippets of error—machines being pushed into areas of behavior that seem wrong and unusable. There is real fruit there.”
Rather than fighting the SoundCloud hivemind with real people playing real instruments, à la Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, he composed Clark largely on a computer by himself in a barn in the middle of the English countryside, cracking codes and inflicting glitches. As computerized watches and glasses inch toward ubiquity, this idea of subverting machines to make them more human seems like a particularly worthy preservation strategy—and nobody does that quite like Clark. Yes, he makes music that sounds like the end of the world. But he also makes you want to live long enough to see what that will look like.


Weaving in and out of concrete, direct, indie-rock songwriting and meditative, impressionistic dream pop, Girlpool’s third album features their most expansive and surreal songs to date.

What Chaos is Imaginary

A few songs into Girlpool’s 2017 album Powerplant, all the rules the band had set for themselves seemed to fly out the window. The break comes during “Corner Store,” a 90-second jaunt built on twangy guitar chords and the close-knit harmonies of the group’s two singers, Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad. Shortly into the track, the guitars erupt into a squall of feedback and distortion; it’s as if we’ve been lifted from the world of Girlpool and plopped down right in the middle of a Sonic Youth jam. After a few measures, the hard-rock spell ends, and the song continues on like it never happened. No other songs on the album call back to that brief interruption. Girlpool, known for rendering the world through a quasi-surrealist but ultimately soft lens, let loose a little chaos.
The boldness contained in that spontaneous bout of noise spills over into the duo’s third LP, What Chaos Is Imaginary. Weaving in and out of concrete, direct, indie-rock songwriting and meditative, impressionistic dream pop, the record takes up more space than any of Girlpool’s previous music. Guitar chords tend to land with a hefty crunch, bleeding distortion across the field of sound rather than keeping clean and tightly wound. A few songs skirt Girlpool’s usual rock instrumentation in favor of drum machines and synth organs. The record crests and falls, agitated on one track, melancholic and serene on the next.
What Chaos is Imaginary is the first album Girlpool has released since Tucker came out as trans and began taking testosterone that lowered his voice to a tenor range. Where on previous albums the band’s two singers trailed each other, singing nested melodies, their voices are now clearly differentiated. When they harmonize, a bright friction between their ranges adds a new dimensionality to the music.
Suddenly, there are Tividad songs and there are Tucker songs, two discrete threads that wind together into a Girlpool album. They pass the baton on lead vocals, playing off of each other as much as they play with each other. Certain songs on the record began as solo recordings; “Lucy’s,” the punchy fuzz-rock number that opens the album, is a Tucker song, while “Where You Sink” and “Joseph’s Dad” both appear in embryonic form on Tividad’s acoustic 2018 solo release, Oove Is Rare.
A few idiosyncratic lyrical gestures (puzzle pieces, glue) recur here from Powerplant, which can make songs like “Stale Device,” with its tried-and-true rock grounding, sound like outgrowths of the band’s last album. Girlpool’s lyrics are so striking that any repetition tends to call attention to itself, especially when it’s employed toward an image as compelling as the one Tividad uses in “Pretty”: “There was a person I once knew/He built a molehill out of glue/He claimed I was too close to stick/But somehow I’m still stuck in it.” A molehill becomes a sticky mountain trapping the song’s speaker in the past. The dense psychological weight of loss and memory bores through lines written as simply and memorably as schoolyard chants.
Many songs on What Chaos is Imaginary wrangle the messy process of constantly becoming a new person while saddled down with the memory of who you used to be. “Will I make the matinée with my newest life/And be that bright time?” Tucker asks at the start of “Hire.” On the album’s beautifully delicate title track, Tividad snakes her way out of a world bounded by a painful past. “I loved him and his violence for the pretty view/Rehearsed a strange reality, what chaos is imaginary,” she sings, pronouncing her words carefully over a steady drum machine beat, a swell of synthesizers, and intermittent strings. Girlpool have often sung about leaving one world behind for another—exiting childhood and entering adulthood, shedding the self-destructive reflexes of past selves—but they’ve never so poignantly attended to the pain of such a shift. It hurts to forsake a toxic reality and build a bigger, healthier one. But it has to happen.
A certain vertigo occurs when the present self faces the past. The older you get, the more there is to look back on, and the distance from here to there can be overwhelming. Girlpool excel at squaring history and immediacy with lyrics that float freely—not quite stories and not quite streams of consciousness, but words that hang somewhere in the middle. “Create the vague you need,” sings Tucker on “Roses,” as if laying bare the duo’s lyrical ethos. “It’s a tug-o-war/With his dreaming and the floor.” A slow guitar bristles beneath his voice, and Tividad courses in gently behind him. It sounds like he’s not quite done; the melody lilts unresolved. But the guitars eventually fade out, and Tucker doesn’t come back. He leaves you there, half dreaming, half bolted to the floorboards, in the limbo that divides the imaginary from whatever you take to be real.


Angel Deradoorian’s second LP is darker, less polished, and openly meditative. Even in its most psychedelic moments, the fuzzy aesthetic gives her music an earthy, grounded feel.

Find the Sun

Finding oneself is never easy, but Angel Deradoorian seems determined to try. In recent years, the nomadic singer-songwriter cultivated self-awareness while actively embracing solitude, decamping to the woods of upstate New York for long stretches. In 2019, however, she found herself craving communion (and the company of other musicians), and brought that feeling into the studio. Find the Sun, her second full-length, is the unexpected result. Boomy and soaked in reverb, the record occasionally sounds like someone set up a single mic in the corner and left the room. It’s darker, less polished, and more openly meditative than anything she’s done before, miles away from the psychedelic sheen of her debut, 2015’s Expanding Flower Planet, and its more subdued follow-up, 2017 mini-album Eternal Recurrence. But the new LP’s fuzzy, almost lo-fi aesthetic gives her music an earthier, more grounded feel, even in its most psychedelic moments.
Find the Sun was recorded at the Panoramic House, a scenic analog studio in Marin County, California. On previous releases, Deradoorian largely worked alone, only involving others when she needed an instrument that she couldn’t play herself. This time, she recruited percussionist Samer Ghadry and guitarist Dave Harrington (of Darkside), granting them license to not just play along, but to improvise and help flesh out the sketches she’d already written. Setting up shop in Panoramic House’s spacious live room, they refused to overwork the material, running through each song only a few times before selecting the best take and moving on to the next one. Their breezy approach shines on “Corsican Shores,” a peppy tune that sits somewhere between ’60s garage rock, fuzzy Phil Spector-produced pop, and the jangly groups that populated the K Records roster during the ’90s.
The LP’s guitar-centric approach is a bit of a surprise, but Deradoorian isn’t a stranger to big riffs. She’s done stints in bands like Dirty Projectors and Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks; more recently, she’s been ripping it up as the vocalist of BSCBR (aka Black Sabbath Cover Band Rehearsals), filling Ozzy Osborne’s shoes alongside artists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner and drumming virtuoso Greg Fox. Find the Sun never reaches Paranoid levels of bombast, but it’s easily her brawniest solo record to date. Songs like “Saturnine Night” and closer “Sun” channel the psychedelic swagger of ’70s giants like the Doors and Led Zeppelin, while the rubbery bassline and surging guitar chords of album highlight “It Was Me” bring to mind the likes of Nirvana and Hole—or at least the times when those bands emulated indie pop groups like the Vaselines and Young Marble Giants.
But Find the Sun shouldn’t be mistaken for an exercise in rock worship. The influence of Can looms large, and Deradoorian’s music is still psychedelic, weird, and seemingly primed for a hallucinogenic trip to the outer recesses of the human psyche. With its motorik groove and dramatic talk-singing, “The Illuminator” sounds like a freaky, nine-minute-long outtake from Andy Warhol’s Factory, while the slinky “Devil’s Market” recalls the space-age lounge music once championed by bands like Stereolab. “Saturnine Night” does feature growling guitars, but they’re paired with an unkempt Krautrock rhythm that could have been pulled from Neu! 2, along with a dramatic, PJ Harvey-esque vocal turn from Deradoorian, who belts out brooding lines like “Innocence/In my death” and, simply, “I die.”
Thematically, Find the Sun is rooted in the idea of self-exploration. Deradoorian has a fervent passion for psychology, neuroscience, and astrology, and in the months before she hit the studio, she attended an intense, 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in rural Massachusetts that further shaped the album’s introspective tilt. While there, she meditated 10 hours a day and could not touch or even acknowledge fellow practitioners, but Deradoorian—who describes the retreat as life-changing—seems to have come out of the experience with a deeper understanding of herself, her body, her fears and anxieties, and her capabilities. Find the Sun can’t necessarily be described as a confident album, but its creator’s willingness to document her spiritual growth and present herself as vulnerable feels uniquely brave and honest.
The gentle “Waterlily” and the somber “Mask of Yesterday” offer some of the album’s quietest, most emotionally naked moments, but Find the Sun reaches a whimsical zenith on “Monk’s Robes,” a folksy, largely acoustic number whose twirling melodies wouldn’t be out of place at the local Renaissance Faire. It sounds escapist, but according to Deradoorian, “it’s a song about accepting the futility of attempting to escape your reality, finding peace in acceptance and working with what you have to make something beautiful.” It’s an approach she’s applied to all of Find the Sun, which feels like a snapshot of a single moment along a much longer path. Like most of us, Deradoorian doesn’t know where she’ll ultimately end up—but she’s embraced that uncertainty. Even with its dense clouds of reverb, Find the Sun might be the album that provides the clearest window into who she is.

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The second album from one of Atlanta’s most promising rappers recasts him as a star in waiting. He writes with grisly clarity and humor, and his songs here are sturdy, inventive, and sticky.

I Am > I Was

The jarringly sober track “a lot,” which opens 21 Savage’s poised and superbly focused i am > i was, is contemplative without being dramatic, mournful but not morose. At one point, the 26-year-old recounts his little brother’s murder and how it warped his psychology, but he does so in a perfunctory way, like talking to a therapist who’s already familiar with the smaller details. It’s a great tone to strike first: moody at a bit of a remove.
Early in his career, the Atlanta rapper appeared almost exclusively as a mood—his voice was the ideally dry vehicle for 2016’s Savage Mode, Metro Boomin’s experiment in tempo and ambient sound. At times, 21’s appeal was explained away as a sort of authenticity fetishism, as if the raw carnage in the music was the main selling point. In truth, he’s spent the last few years building a persona that’s tormented by trauma and violence but unworried about projecting just how tough or wise or beloved or feared it’s made him. His raps are self-assured. The songs about the strip club—like the Three 6-sampling, Yung Miami-featuring “a&t”—are good because they’re good strip club songs not because they’re couched in self-awareness or PTSD.
21 is an effective writer because he’s not hung up on what everything means—he’s much more interested in how things actually are, how they feel: the pit in his stomach when he thinks about jail, the weight of his jewelry in his hand. He’s tormented but also wants to go to the club, loves his mom but also his bodyguards, and is willing to explore those halves of himself without using “whoa, there are two halves of me” as a narrative crutch. So the statement in the title—I am greater than I was—is a little misleading. This is not a record about self-improvement as a 12-step course with dramatic results. When it’s about anything, it’s about self-improvement as a small, constant struggle where you contradict yourself and eat your own tail.
The way 21 describes the grisliest details of his past can be unnerving when he filters it through an unexpected tone. He’ll rap about gruesome memories that are shocking in their neutrality: “Back in the day I used to rob with no mask on/Shit on my wrist? I woulda killed the whole house for.” 21 has burrowed so deep into his trauma-wracked brain (see “Close My Eyes” or “Numb” from 2017’s Issa Album) that the subtlest modulations on how he speaks about his demons can have a profound effect. On “asmr,” he raps, “All these dead bodies got me seein’ strange things” with a bounce in his voice that makes it seem like he’s about to introduce a new dance, and maybe he is.
Those small tweaks are smart, but they have nothing on the spontaneous adjustments to his voice. Before Savage Mode, 21 had never been locked to such a deep register and quite so laconic a flow. Since he’s been famous, he’s perfected a half-dozen variations on his whispered style, finding a whole dynamic range where a lesser vocalist would come off as painfully one-note. (Think of 21 as Meek Mill’s equal opposite: The number of textures and variations Meek brings to his full-throttle bars are the same ones 21 brings to his sotto voce raps.) 21’s found a way to emote without breaking character, to grin at the camera without letting his voice crack and sound sarcastic. This helps him sell the sly jokes he peppers throughout: On “can’t leave without it” alone, he says he keeps a stick “like a hobo” and brags about his gun being autographed by Osama Bin Laden.
There are points where i am > i was nearly becomes rote; “break da law,” the Offset duet “1.5,” and parts of other songs will sink into production formats that are so well-worn they’ve become ruts; a song like “gun smoke” is little more than 21 on autopilot. Those blips are fine considering that most of the record is musically exciting. The groove on “letter 2 my momma” is irresistible, and “good day”—which samples Lord Infamous’ “Damn I’m Crazed,” a song 21 could have written in another life—makes superb use of both Project Pat and Schoolboy Q’s voice. There’s also “all my friends,” which is really a showcase for Post Malone, as if it could follow “rockstar” straight to the top of the charts.
i am > i was shatters the notion of 21 Savage as a specialist with a narrow purview and audience, and recasts him as a star in waiting, all without forcing him into unflattering contortions. It also cements him as a far more original stylist than other hopefuls from Atlanta, like Lil Baby and Gunna, who appear here together and sound simply like Young Thug disciples. At its best, the album is still weird, like when 21 raps earnestly over Santana, or when he ends with a Young Nudy duet that sounds for all the world like the third act of a Morricone western. That’s the song where 21 sneers at rappers who “drop a mixtape, then they tattoo their face.” It gets at the core idea of his work: You can’t fool people into thinking you’re someone you’re not.


Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch’s third album sounds broken down by life and death alike, but it scrapes together something like hope.

Mirror Reaper

Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch’s first two albums engaged fearlessly with themes of death and transience. Their 2015 release Four Phantoms even got into the grisly details, envisioning ghosts dying for all eternity by each of the four elements: buried alive in earth, burnt at the stake, drowning in a river, and falling into winds so harsh they tear the skin off the dead. That album’s fantastical details and grandiose scope painted death as something inevitable, but easier to imagine as a fable than as reality. On their third album, Mirror Reaper, Bell Witch sound broken down by life and death alike. It’s their first album since the death of drummer and founding member Adrian Guerra, who passed away in 2016, and so their first album written in the blunt light of public grief. Having hit the bottom of their reserve, they spend the record scraping together something like hope.
Arranged as a single 83-minute track, Mirror Reaper steps back from the resplendent gestures that swept across Four Phantoms. Each beat of Jesse Shreibman’s drum kit, each throb of Dylan Desmond’s six-string bass sounds labored, as though they’ve had to drag the sounds out like lead hammers. Doom metal works with fewer notes at a time than thrash or death metal, so the key to its emotional power is to pour everything you’ve got into each one. Bell Witch do just that in Mirror Reaper’s quiet moments, which are more abundant than their previous albums, and also in its loud ones, where Shreibman lurches forward one kick of the bass drum at a time and Desmond carves mournful leads out of his extra wide fretboard.
Few bassists can make their instrument sing quite like Desmond. About 33 minutes into Mirror Reaper, he climbs a crescendo that, in its tone and its simplicity, sounds like a human voice singing a funeral hymn to itself. He exploits the upper range of his bass, digging out emotional extremes from the notes that could be mapped onto the low end of an electric guitar if they weren’t quite so rich with overtones. He’s newly joined by the sounds of Shreibman’s Hammond B3 organ, whose chords tangle with the distortion on the bass and the echo of the cymbals. Plenty of metal bands play impressively in step, but here, Desmond and Shreibman play as though they are clinging to each other.
Both members of the band sing, as did Desmond and Guerra, and their voices feel both distinct and entwined. Shreibman issues a low, diaphragm-racking growl; between the drummer’s parts, Desmond sings clean, his voice multi-tracked so as to emulate a Gregorian choir. He sounds like he’s standing far from the microphone, and the contrast between his stoic detachment and Shreibman’s visceral roar emphasizes the album’s lyrical themes of duality: between life and death, sorrow and relief, the body and its fleeing ghost.
Halfway through the album, Guerra’s voice appears, too, in a sequence the band has titled “The Words of the Dead.” These screams were recorded for, and cut from, Four Phantoms, and they form the living emotional core of Mirror Reaper. Here is where the tension of the album’s first side climaxes, where life and death seem to pierce each other. Guerra is dead, and he is singing with his former band; they are mourning him and they are with him at the same time. Then the cresting waves of sound fall away, and on Mirror Reaper’s second side, Shreibman and Desmond wade through acres of empty space. Their instruments echo into beats of silence. The loss of their friend bores holes in the music itself.
Mirror Reaper’s stark final act, which features lyrics sung by the band’s continuing collaborator Erik Moggridge, ranks among the loveliest and saddest moments the band has recorded. Moggridge’s voice lilts, gentle and devastating, as though he’s crying out for someone, anyone, to hear him, as though he’s not sure there’s another living soul on the scorched earth. When Desmond answers him and the drums clatter back in, the feeling only multiplies. It’s like the emptiness grows once there are more people to feel it.
Mourning overwhelms the mourner; it often feels as though it is the whole world. Mirror Reaper simulates that totality of grief, but it also transcends its own function as a eulogy. That hope that Bell Witch scrape together by the end? It’s the kind that emerges once everything in your periphery has been burnt to the ground and you, somehow, still exist. You exist, and you get up, and you walk in whatever direction you’re most likely to find light.


Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz’s rhythm-forward third album is a syncretic celebration of sounds and traditions that shimmers with color and joy.

Spell 31

Ancient Egyptians imagined death as a journey through a treacherous underworld of demon reptiles, onerous puzzles, and grueling trials. To help the dead navigate these obstacles and reach eternity, the Egyptians assembled The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, commonly known as The Book of the Dead. The tome offers spells, prayers, and adventure, a breadth that Ibeyi embraces on their third album, which takes its name from one of the book’s many entries. Since 2014’s Oya EP, named after the Yoruba deity of storms and death, the French-Cuban sister duo has bent heavy emotions and weighty subjects into lithe, elegant shapes, building shrines from personal and historical tragedies. On Spell 31, they rework their signature layered spirituals into fleet grooves that shimmer with color and joy yet still channel pain and loss.

Where Ash and Ibeyi were spectral and skeletal, evoking aching absences, the songs on Spell 31 are rhythmic and sinuous, engorged with blood and energy. The twins have credited the shift to a change in their writing process: Normally, Lisa-Kaindé would initiate songs on the piano and Naomi would mold the percussion around her sister’s melodies and lyrics. This time, the rhythms came first, Naomi and longtime collaborator Richard Russell making beats and Lisa-Kaindé writing to them. Her melodies “had to gain muscle…and be able to live up to the beat,” Lisa-Kaindé explained in an interview. The resulting album isn’t an outright jamboree, but the rhythm-forward approach begets bolder, more lively performances and arrangements.
“Made of Gold” pulses with textures and voices, Ibeyi and Pa Salieu declaring their resilience over a thicket of rumbling bass, shrill yelps, and rattly percussion. “My spell made of gold, gold, gold,” Lisa-Kaindé sings for the hook, a buoyant harmony backing her. The line works as both incantation and earworm, a one-two punch Ibeyi also land on “Lavender & Red Roses,” a collaboration with Jorja Smith that evokes the lush melodies of We Are KING. “Lavender and red roses,” the trio coos, their voices tender and warm as they dedicate the floral offering to a hopeless former lover. The song is the rare kiss-off that’s as sweet as a kiss.
Amid the revelry and uplift, Ibeyi still evoke the bone-deep grief and despondence that characterized their early work. “Creature (Perfect)” builds to an epiphany that sounds more paralyzing than freeing. “I don’t have to be perfect, don’t have to be perfect/I finally see, I’m just a creature,” Lisa-Kaindé wails, stretching the last word with downcast trills that recall Björk. “Tears Are Our Medicine” offers a similar mix of pain and triumph, the sisters dolefully reaching their upper registers over a spare bassline and a faint drone. “Look at my eyes and cry with me,” they softly request.
On “Los Muertos,” over solemn hums, dulled stomps, and the Santería chant of “ibaé,” which is used to honor deceased loved ones, they recite the names of lost relatives and friends. The song is celebratory despite its gravity, the “ibaé” sourced from a song by Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz’s late father, famed conguero Miguel “Angá” Díaz. Ibeyi also sample their father on “Rise Above,” a soulful but limp interpretation of Black Flag’s punk standard. Their version, which they reportedly recorded without hearing the original, includes a perfunctory reference to George Floyd’s murder, and is more respectable than galvanizing.
Luckily, “Rise Above” is the album’s sole misfire. Ibeyi continue to celebrate and probe diaspora, building bridges between the sounds and traditions of their transatlantic heritage. There’s a quiet audacity to their growing syncretism, which here casually yokes together Egyptian funerary lore, South African sangomas, Santería rituals, and British rap. The wacky sprawl feels in step with The Book of the Dead, which historically was a varying, unofficial collection of texts rather than a stable, canonical book. In Ibeyi’s deft hands, tradition, like death, is a gateway to strange wonders.


The experimental soul musician's adventurous debut album draws as much from free jazz and IDM as it does funk and R&B, from the Dirty Projectors as much as D'Angelo.

What Now?

What Now? opens with a nearly 10-minute-long track called “Guided Meditation.” The title here is quite literal: the track consists of a recording of a woman guiding the listener through a meditation exercise over layers of ringing drones. This is a bold move, to be sure, especially for a new and relatively unknown artist like Jon Bap—it’s as if he’s demanding our patience and open-mindedness as the cost of admission to his sonic world. Still, this kind of confrontation is fully in keeping with Bap’s uncompromising ethos. He is nothing if not a serial breaker of rules, his practice largely defined by a continual willingness to scribble outside of the lines.
While it’s difficult to find a box that he fits into neatly, Bap is perhaps best described as an experimental soul artist. His background is in many ways traditional: He was raised in a musical family, first found his voice in the church choir, and clearly draws a lot of inspiration from classic funk, soul and R&B. The forms that his songs take, however, push beyond the commonly understood bounds of those genres. His aesthetic as a recording artist is one of disorderly virtuosity, a composer who piles up home-recorded sounds in unexpected and sometimes stunning ways. In this regard he has more in common with, say, the Dirty Projectors than D’Angelo, though he’s clearly indebted to both.
Nowhere is Bap’s outsider stance more clear than in his approach to percussion. The drums on Jon Bap songs clash and clatter, fighting for control of the tempo and the listener’s ear. He allows beats to collide at odd angles, to play counter-rhythms, to create an air of barely-contained chaos. On What Now? Bap has taken this sensibility a step further by fully removing the drummer from the songwriting process. Nearly all of the drum tracks on What Now? were sampled from hours of jazz drummer Mike Mitchell’s improvisations, which Bap recorded in preparation for the album and then sequenced to create these tracks. On these songs, Mitchell’s playing evokes everything from Questlove’s off-kilter kit work on Voodoo to Zach Hill’s manic fills to the inhuman breakbeats of IDM artists like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin.
Despite the rhythmic discord, Bap’s best songs still manage to feel loose, warm and immediate. “Gotta Be Your Lover” sounds like the warped memory of a Prince song with a wind-up toy standing in for a drummer. “Don’t Run Into the Dark So Quick” is a devastating ballad, its wobbly, detuned guitar conjuring a dusty blues acetate, as Bap pleads with a wayward lover. And “Let It Happen,” the beautifully off-balance, Jeff Buckley-esque title track from Bap’s debut EP, gets a welcome reprise here, closing the album with one of Bap’s strongest vocal performances to date.
Jon Bap is a promising new voice, and the inventiveness and confidence he displays here is commendable, but he might benefit from an editor. What Now? has more than its fair share of interludes, field recordings and spoken-word bits, but its primary shortcoming is that there are simply not enough songs, especially by way of comparison to his more focused debut EP. Similarly, not every sonic experiment here clicks; songs like “Intuition” border on cacophonous in parts, when the songwriting begins to bow under the weight of too many tempos and layers. Still, it’s not difficult to see how this sort of willful messiness might support Bap’s overall aim, to surprise and unsettle the listener but also, to see that her patience is rewarded.


The Israeli-Dutch techno duo’s fifth album is an intriguing left turn, leading them far from the dancefloor and well into serene, spacey new age territory.

Sis-boom-bah!

It is entirely possible that Juju & Jordash’s Sis-boom-bah! is the only techno record you will hear this year that features wah-wah guitar. But then, the Israeli-Dutch duo is hardly your typical club-music proposition. Gal Aner and Jordan Czamanski, both jazz aficionados, approach their live gigs in the spirit of pure improvisation, heaping their gear table high with sundry machines, many of them years if not decades old, and jamming away. They start from scratch—no preset synth patches, no pre-programmed rhythms—and make it up as they go along, building woozy, wooly, and sometimes downright noodly grooves out of nothing but the circuitry they brought with them. They approach their records in much the same way. The only difference is that the recording studio offers many more possibilities for cutting away the excess and honing in on the meat of the idea, the sinew of the groove.
Sis-boom-bah! is their fifth and most streamlined record yet. Juju & Jordash typically oscillate between freeform abstraction and Detroit-inspired techno, but this is more like their take on new age. Where they were once happy to whack away on a fat 909 snare, here they’ve whittled all the drum sounds down until they’re little more than suggestions of percussive energy: neatly filed hi-hats, shadows of kick drums, snares that are all rattle and no smack. A few songs have no recognizable drums at all, and on several tracks, liquid tones drip like a serum squeezed from an eyedropper, reinforcing the sense that the two musicians have distilled their sound to its essence. Though it’s still recognizable as dance music, this is a vision of techno that has wandered far from the dancefloor and has no great interest in going back—a little like a raver who has wandered into the woods and is happy to remain there, communing with the trees, while pinging droplets and distant synth riffs filter through the foliage.
“Herkie” opens the album like a statement of intent: part electric Miles, part Motor City synths, it rolls elliptical rings of Rhodes keyboards, plucked guitar, and greasy bass tones around rattling, metallic percussion. The circular vamping serves as a kind of scene-setting, building energy without arriving at any particular destination; swelling synth pads and lilting tambourine amplify the sense of drift. “Rah-Rah” picks up the same palette and adds trickling liquids, Hammond flutter, and guttural chants, for a skipping house groove that only hits cruising altitude in its final minute.
With the third track, “Back Tuck Basket Toss,” Juju & Jordash ease into the syncopated chords of piano house (and, for fun, some gnarly digital slap bass). It’s the record’s clubbiest cut yet, even though it’s slower than the two that have preceded it. The album’s sequencing follows a curious organizing principle: Each successive track across the first half of the album is slower than the last. The effect is not so much to lessen the energy level as to darken the mood and deepen the intensity of every pulse, and with the following track, “Deadman,” things get truly entrancing. There’s a hint of a talking drum in the toms; a low wind blows through the track’s ample empty space. Knowing when not to play is one of the most important instincts an improviser can develop. Here, and across the album, they flex those chops brilliantly.
The tempos bottom out with “Paper Dolls” and “Hanging Pyramid,” a pair of tracks that hover around the 90-BPM mark, and which collectively comprise the record’s beating heart. “Paper Dolls” plays highlife-inspired guitar off delicately detuned synthesizer, and its triplet pulse lends to a dizzy sort of slow/fast quality, while “Hanging Pyramid,” the album’s most unassuming cut, applies double-time pulses to a barely-there array of marimba and handclaps, like a drum ‘n’ bass remix of Jon Hassell. Both are dazzlingly pointillistic. The remaining three tracks build up the energy once more, but it’s here at the album’s cavernous center that the duo's skills shine brightest, as they carefully (but never fussily) polish their sounds to a dull gleam, weaving everything into a loose lattice of pluck and ping. Keeping one finger on the pulse without ever submitting entirely to it, they highlight the tension between the rhythmic grid—rigid, unrelenting—and the slipperiness of the objects that pass through it. Sis-boom-bah! is a celebration of techno at its most elastic.


The Australian pop singer finds freedom in the EP format, breaking the family-friendly veneer of past releases and serving up his most idiosyncratic music yet.

In a Dream EP

Late last year, on the final night of his Bloom tour, Troye Sivan walked onstage suited à la David Byrne and left in the spandexed, eyepatched regalia of David Bowie. Sivan was at the tail end of an album cycle that had him performing alongside supernovas of pop music: strutting down a catwalk singing his hit “My My My!” with Taylor Swift, dancing on tables with Ariana Grande. This costuming was a potent symbol of ambition, and a cheeky nod to subversive, queer-ish forebears. Bloom, Sivan’s 2018 sophomore album, made him an avatar of a new generation of mainstream-friendly queer popstars. In the lights of a sold-out arena, he seemed poised to become the first of them to hit the big—really big—leagues.
In a Dream, the 25-year-old’s six-song sequel to Bloom, isn’t an ascension to blockbusting ubiquity, but something more interesting: a formally adventurous break-up record that explores the far corners of indie pop. Although enjoyable, Bloom and Sivan’s 2015 debut Blue Neighbourhood rarely broke through a certain veneer of cleanliness. When he emerged, there were far fewer young queer people in the mainstream; one could hardly blame him for appearing as a polite and broadly appealing spokesperson for an underrepresented community. At a time when mainstream pop is as calculated as it’s ever been—the product of a major label system obsessed with playlisting and “streamability”—he might have been rewarded for maintaining that family-friendly image. Instead, like the forebears Sivan emulated onstage last year, In a Dream chooses distinctiveness over approachability, offering a bricolage of warped indie rock, tech-house, and theatre-kid emotion.
Across In a Dream, Sivan eschews the black-and-white sadness of typical pop breakup albums in favor of the self-discovery that can happen in the wake of heartbreak. “Stud,” the record’s lascivious, sun-kissed centerpiece, dives into heart-racing casual sex, hinging on a classic trope of queer desire: Do I want to be him, or fuck him? (Call it the Call Me by Your Name conundrum.) “Hey stud! You can come and meet me out front, you got all the muscles and the features I want,” Sivan sings, his Auto-Tuned voice crinkling like tinfoil. He teases and taunts, flirtatious to the point of second-hand embarrassment, as the song switches gear into a raucous house beat. When he’s feeling more downcast on opener and first single “Take Yourself Home,” snatches of arena anthem fodder hang around him like peeling wallpaper. These touches seem to deliberately undermine their own triumphant feeling, serving as bitter reminders that even a great pop song can’t fix the worst feelings. In both cases, the tentative, fresh-faced star of Bloom —“Hold my hand if I get scared now”—is gone.
These songs are drawn from the moments when sadness turns to clarity and loneliness to self-possession, and the same confidence drives In a Dream’s more outré aesthetics. Between Charli XCX’s immersion in PC Music hyperpop and Taylor Swift’s collaborations with members of the National and Bon Iver, there’s nothing new about pop stars drawing from indie music. But In a Dream feels connected to a more peculiar segment of pop’s underground: I hear smacks of Negative Gemini’s dissociated club music and Vegyn’s formed formlessness in these songs, as well as the warmth of Rostam, indie-pop’s current king of the queer bildungsroman. The hazy, guitar-heavy interlude “could cry just thinkin about you” isn’t far from the jangle experiments of avant-garde hero Dean Blunt, who Sivan namechecked on Beats 1 earlier this month. The team that assisted Sivan on In a Dream is largely the same as on Bloom; Sivan seems to have simply grown into his own influences. The EP format—the preferred model for a new class of pop auteurs, from Mallrat to Yaeji—may afford him freedom to explore his own weirdness without the pressure of a major album cycle.
Even the EP’s most conventional song, the ’80s-inspired cheating apology “Easy,” surprises. Sivan sings through thick Auto-Tune, lamenting the dissolution of his relationship, but punctuating it with an uncanny exclamation—“This house is on fire, woo!”—that suggests there’s something sublime about the agony. Nothing about “Easy” should work, from the “woo!” to the Future-lite vocals to the City Pop synth solo. And yet it does. These idiosyncratic choices may sacrifice some of Sivan’s universal appeal, but it’s much more fun to watch him cutting his own path.

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