For Horse Feathers' latest album, Justin Ringle brought in scores of Portland musicians to add flourishes of piano, reeds, banjo, and horns. He's expanding his band's palette, not necessarily its sound.

Cynic's New Year

Musically and geographically, Justin Ringle is far removed from the Appalachian region that birthed so many of his folk forebears. Born in Idaho, he moved even further west to Portland, Oregon, where he formed Horse Feathers in 2004. Embracing a somber sound that proved an ideal setting for his slightly androgynous vocals, he managed to conceive his own personal idea of string-band folk, one that disregarded the technical prowess and lively performance style of East Coast strains. Instead, he emphasized mood and texture over rhythm and melody, as though drawing primarily from the incidental music of soundtracks. His first albums under the Horse Feathers moniker sounded fresh and distinctive, and yet, as the project has aged, its limitations have grown clearer. The band has one mood: minor-key solemnity.
Cynic's New Year, the title of Horse Feathers' latest album, implies a new beginning, albeit one for the pessimist in Ringle. His lyrics have always documented the friction between hope and despair, entertaining a tentative optimism and a shrugging fatalism that both sound much bleaker for the band's downcast folk arrangements. For this album, he brought in scores of Portland musicians to add flourishes of piano, reeds, banjo, and horns-- all of which are gracefully absorbed into the band's signature sound. Staccato plucks and percussive strums paint "Better Company" as a kind of backwoods noir full of quiet foreboding, and on "Where I'll Be", the strings mimic a pedal steel, allowing the band to translate country music to the Pacific Northwest. But Ringle is expanding Horse Feathers' palette, not necessarily its sound. Even with a larger backing band, he's still retracing his own steps, careful to walk in his own footsteps.
In some part, the band's limitations spring from Ringle's voice, a distinctive instrument that's not particularly agile. He gives the impression of chilly distance, of someone singing to himself rather than an audience. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, especially considering Horse Feathers' chamber-folk aesthetic, and he shines on "Better Company" and "Pacific Bray". But that voice holds each song to the same funereal pace, rendering Cynic's New Year a trudging listen. Similarly, his songwriting is idiosyncratic yet strangely constrained. Ringle writes evocative lyrics that carry a great deal of ominous weight ("something wicked this way is bound to come," he warns on "Nearly Old Friends"), and his best songs are typically the most concrete. "Every night we all go to a house we'll never own," he sings on "Fit Against the Country". "Every night we are tired, we've been worked to the bone." Ringle doesn't work to connect the song to current economic woes; the narrator could be one of Steinbeck's itinerant workers or one of Kathryn Stockett's oppressed maids. Instead, he simply lets the implications speak for themselves, rendering the song both timely and timeless.
On the other hand, he tends to treat verses and choruses as unnatural and suspect, like strip malls that have displaced woodlands. His melodies can be so understated that they sound almost amelodic-- just another element contributing to the album's ambience. Ultimately, there's something passive and decorous about Cynic's New Year: Horse Feathers are quick to set a mood and diligent in sustaining it, but it's pretty much the same mood they've struck on all their albums. Would it be so cynical to expect them to work harder for our attention?


While revisiting a treasured childhood TV show, the amber-voiced songwriter reaches back for the psychedelic majesty of his work with the late Richard Swift.

Reggae Film Star

Damien Jurado had been making records with assorted musicians for a dozen years before he made his first one with the producer Richard Swift, in 2010. They became instant creative foils and deep companions, cutting cover collections and bonding like brothers. Two essential things happened to Jurado’s music, too: First, Jurado—whose fragile tales of peripatetic loners and soft-spoken losers were sometimes decorated only by his murmured falsetto—began enjoying the process. “I just love being in the studio,” he said after finishing their fourth LP together. “Before I met Richard … I hated it.” That discovery, in turn, sparked one of the most staggering streaks of any American singer-songwriter during the previous decade. From 2010’s expansive but cozy Saint Bartlett to 2016’s dioramic Visions of Us on the Land, Jurado’s four collaborations with Swift framed the high stakes of his characters’ low situations with perfect psychedelic drapery. If Jurado’s earlier works felt like scenes from a curious movie written but not yet made, these records were the whole picture show, tenderly conceptualized and vividly rendered.
But in their final conversation before Swift died in July 2018, he cut Jurado loose, telling the songwriter he was now ready to helm his own records. That cut cord was a gift: Jurado’s self-produced The Horizon Just Laughed may well be a career acme, the joy he found alongside Swift now applied by a songwriter able to match music to his images. Jurado has since been recording at a feverish pace, releasing a new album each of the last five years, with seven more reportedly in the queue as of June 2021. The new Reggae Film Star, however, suggests an awkward oxbow in Jurado’s catalog, as though he’s uncertain about how to proceed with self-production. After a series of largely spare and ultimately resilient records following Swift’s death, he seems to be reaching back for the magic he found with his old friend Swift—and, kind of tragically, rarely connecting.
The writing, at least, is often remarkable. Jurado’s songs have often presented elliptical portraits of people trying to overcome dire circumstances—a lovelorn ode to a kidnapped kid trying to make it home to her mother in “Ohio,” an aging artist interrogating his life choices through “Fool Maria.” Likewise, Reggae Film Star threads together the unobserved indignities that often accompany a creative pursuit. Jurado has long talked about his enduring love of the B movies and daytime television of his childhood. “That was my mainline to whatever America is,” he has said, noting they were a constant companion while his family pinballed around the United States. These dozen vignettes stitch together bits of the lives that such characters lead offscreen: the mental toil of an actor doing endless takes of their own death, the tedious repetition of life on set, the creative partners trying to let one another go.
Jurado plucks liberally from the universe of the late-’70s sitcom Alice for these songs. The show—about a widow, Alice, who moves to Phoenix with her son, Tommy—must have resonated with the preteen on the move. The writers, characters, and circumstances have cameos, but you don’t need to know ’70s CBS programming to see pieces of your own puzzle here. Maybe you’ve been sad and shopping for groceries when a song plays overhead, suddenly crystallizing your whole emotional saga, as happens in opener “Roger.” Or maybe you’ve had to work some mindless job just to try and find time and money to pursue the creative passion that actually fulfills you, as with the actor doing commercials to earn a living during the heartrending “Whatever Happened to the Class of ’65.” Jurado is a master of opening a window on once-hidden difficulties, his ambered voice inviting you in to understand; the world he exposes during Reggae Film Star is strange and compelling, like a reality TV show filmed behind the scenes of a sitcom.
The accompaniment for these curious lyrical snapshots, though, never rises to meet their idiosyncrasy—it is often bland enough to distract from them. The piano runs throughout “Roger’s Audition” feel like mere plug-ins, never supporting the story of a man at the brink of madness. The faintly motorik rhythm section and chromatic keyboards of “Taped in Front of a Live Studio Audience” disrupt the mystery and danger in the exchange between former lovers. The severe self-doubt that pools inside of finale “Gork Meets the Desert Monster” is met by straightforward strings and predictable vocal effects; it’s almost impossible not to imagine the fun Swift would have had with this sad character study, animating these neuroses in broken pastel washes. Jurado and longtime multi-instrumental collaborator Josh Gordon can suggest that majesty, but never muster it.
It is callous, maybe even mean, to wonder how these songs would sound with Swift, to imagine him once again turning Jurado’s sketches into vivid dramas. You can hear his faded traces in the prismatic harmonies and piano flourishes; Swift’s musical ghost slinks through Reggae Film Star, here in spirit but unable to wield the controls. That’s OK: Despite his prolific pace, Jurado’s career has been a series of slow arcs. It is promising that he’s trying to reach for such arrangements again at all; he may eventually get there. That very scenario—the artistic survivor reaching across the void toward a trusted late collaborator—even seems like a scene from Reggae Film Star, a tender look into the lives of those who help give our own lives meaning.


On her first full-length, the singer-songwriter navigates the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, poetic writing and a sardonically sunny indie-rock sound.

The Baby

Everyone and no one is “baby.” You call people “baby” when you love them, or when you’re infantilizing yourself via internet meme. For Gen Z, cutesy self-identification as “baby” softens a harsh reality of coming of age in a time where everything is too much or too little—too much pollution, too few jobs, too much debt. Twenty-three-year-old Samia Finnerty’s debut album The Baby deals with “too much” in elegant ways, navigating the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, reflective songwriting and poetic lyrical beauty.
The Baby is technically Samia’s first full-length project, but she’s been entrenched in the entertainment industry for a while. Her parents are the actors Kathy Najimy and Dan Finnerty, and Samia has been acting and pursuing music for most of her life. When she was 17 and living in New York, she made a fake manager’s email address to help her book shows. On the painful “Is There Something in the Movies?,” she observes the industry as if she’s somewhat removed from it, sing-shrieking “Everyone dies/But they shouldn’t die young/Anyway, you’re invited to set” over a plaintive acoustic guitar.
Like Grand Jury labelmates Hippo Campus and Twin Peaks, Samia favors a sardonically sunny indie rock sound, good for driving in circles around your old high school and thinking about how different you look now. But she sets herself apart with her voice, which is where the truly exciting things happen. It’s dark and smooth like a melted caramel, and she sets it at the forefront of her songs, which are sparse aside from a guitar, a drum set, and occasional airy synth or keyboard. The flexibility of her tone allows her to explore a wide range of feelings, from anger to sarcasm to wry optimism.
Her intimate lyrics often conjure bad feelings—betrayal, powerlessness, the gross human need to impress others. On the album’s first verse, Samia sings, “I said loving you is bigger than my head/And then you dove in/And then I said, ‘I’m afraid that I need men’/ You said, ‘Need me, then.’” It sounds overwhelming, giving yourself to someone like that, being taunted into it, and the conversational tone makes the verses feel both personal and perverse. She offers crystal clear images, like on “Does Not Heal,” where she recounts cutting her thigh after climbing a fence, remembering being “so scared I had tetanus/I checked on it every night/Purple and yellow/The pregnable skin was so coarse and tight.” The images she produces range from realistic to metaphysical, but they’re always evocative and sensory.
Samia often forgoes the practice of burying uncomfortable personal emotions with obscure lyrics, opting for diaristic clarity and precision. It’s unclear who the “baby” of her album title is, but still, the intimacy of the term speaks to the weird in-between space that Samia’s generation is occupying right now. As many people like to say of the Class of 2020, we were college freshmen when Trump was elected and graduated in a pandemic. With few job prospects and usually no health insurance, a lot of us have turned to living with our parents. It’s hard to become an adult at a time where everything is so dangerous, to stop seeing yourself as a baby when you’re still so vulnerable. But life still happens and it still hurts in all the typical ways—heartbreak, bad friends, confusion. Songwriters like Samia are still trying to make sense of it.

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As hip-hop’s elite ice him out, the Atlanta star tries to keep the good times rolling. These may sound like the catchy Gunna songs of the past, but they don’t feel like them.

One of Wun

Let’s be real: You knew what One of Wun sounded like before you pressed play. Gunna’s motor-mouthed tales of the high life here, his dreary piano ballads there. His last album a Gift & a Curse wasn’t a whole lot different; neither was the one before that. Glazed, melodic raps about clothes and girls and whatever jewelry he wore to the studio that day are Gunna’s bread and butter. That is the formula that has made him one of the biggest Atlanta rappers of the last decade. Though these days it feels like even Gunna is getting bored, spicing it up risks derailing the money train.
Despite his considerable success, in the last two years Gunna has been unofficially shunned from the inner circles of popular rap by hip-hop cornballs who have interpreted his plea deal in the YSL RICO case as “snitching.” (Kendrick recently made him the butt of the joke on his Drake diss “Euphoria” when he said, “I know some shit about niggas that make Gunna Wunna look like a saint.”) The situation hangs over One of Wun, clearly weighing on Gunna even as he tiptoes around those frustrations to keep the good vibes intact. He’s trying to have the best of both worlds: An ol’ fashioned light and fun Gunna flex-a-thon, sprinkled with a reflective bar or wistful tune every now and then. Tonally, it’s confusing. Nobody wants Gunna’s pain rap album or his Me Against the World, but I do want him to be real with us.
Back in the day, when Gunna sung about the way his “Fear of God pants match his Fear of God Vans” on Drip Season 3’s “Almighty,” or his “AP blacker than Akon” on WUNNA’s eponymous track, he sounded as if nothing else in the world mattered to him more. Now his boasts of having the sharpest outfit at the Met Gala (“One of Wun”) or a new Balenciaga crop top (“Prada Dem”) feel obligatory. I don’t doubt that he still gets fits off regularly, but we all know he has so much more at the top of his mind. It comes off as a deflection.
He’s making songs that sound like catchy Gunna songs of the past—he’s still able to float on these laid-back, skittering ATL trap variants while reading straight off his SSENSE receipt—but they don’t feel like them. He’s going through the motions. His rapidfire flow on “Hakuna Matata” is clean but the energy is flat (he should have saved it for the soundtrack of Barry Jenkins’ upcoming Mufasa movie). He’s made “On One Tonight,” with its humming beat and limp croons, a dozen times before. I do still get a kick out of his latest sexual escapades (at the gym, on a yacht, in an orgy) and luxury car purchases—the extremely chill “Back in the A” is a standout, especially when he says, “My car is a half million dollars/I came a long way from Impalas”—but he’s so checked out that a couple of vivid bars can’t hide that he’s wearing a mask.
Tucked away at the back of the 20-track album are some signs that Gunna is figuring out how to address his disenchantment without losing his spark. There you’ll find a few slower, piano-driven ballads (“Life’s Changing,” “Conscience,” and “Today I Did Good”) that probably won’t be chart-toppers but go deeper than surface level. The mood he captures is that of someone who has spent months on the couch devouring cheese puffs and binging sitcoms after a breakup until suddenly reaching an emotional breakthrough. The revelation comes in the form of lots of talk about self-care and working out (“I ain’t been eatin’ no bullshit/And fitness, I wake up, I feel fit,” he croons on “Today I Did Good”), which is admittedly not the easiest stuff to make interesting in a rap song, but it’s his way of acknowledging that public ostracization from hip-hop has beaten him down, and that he’s come out on the other side stronger. On “Collage,” he manages to work in his lifestyle changes in the most Gunna way possible: “I spend 50 racks on a trainer/My payroll ain’t missin’ a payment.” This all may turn into him sing-rapping about an Erewhon smoothie on his next album, but you know what, at least it will be honest.


The Portland duo's second DFA album fuses a utopian concept with nervy, spastic electro-funk.

Shangri-La

YACHT's second album as a duo, their fifth overall, fuses a utopian concept with the brand of nervy, spastic electro-funk we've come to expect from the DFA label. As on 2009's See Mystery Lights, Portland laptop maestro Jona Bechtolt (formerly of the Blow) and singer Claire L. Evans enjoy their smoothest sailing when they fully submit to sweaty euphoria; Shangri-La offers more than enough frantic beats, fidgety bass lines, spiky guitar leads, soaring piano riffs, delirious vocal harmonies, and, yes, cowbells to fit in on any house-party playlist. Still, its idyllic theme can be a bit heavy-handed, and nothing here is quite as indelibly hooky as past single "Psychic City (Voodoo City)".
Shangri-La continues YACHT's trajectory from blips and bloops that suggest their computerized origins to a full-fledged band sound that should translate nicely to hedonistic live shows. But the duo's sense of, well, fun hasn't gone anywhere. See Mystery Lights' nods to T-Pain and Desmond Dekker gives way to an end-times synth workout "Dystopia (The Earth Is on Fire)", which shares a seven-minute video with the tropical-flavored disco-punk of album opener "Utopia". When the pace slows, as on the spacey "Love in the Dark", instant quotables jump out: "I love you like a small-town cop/ Yeah, I wanna smash your face in with a rock," Evans sings, in deadpan multi-track.
Still, the record tends to burden its good times with a few too many ideas that simply aren't that distinctive. Brass-boosted "Holy Roller", which starts as a finger-snapping cousin to Black Lips' religion-minded "Veni Vidi Vici" and ends closer to the doomed stomp of Modest Mouse's "Fly Trapped in a Jar" (by way of dubstep bass-wobble), recommends not worrying about a god. James Murphy-esque dance-rant "Paradise Engineering" finds holiness within.
The basic gist-- and despite its familiarity, it's a commendable one-- is that, as Belinda Carlisle once sang, heaven is a place on Earth. "If we build a utopia, will you come and stay?" asks Shangri-La's closing, title track, all catchy la-la-las and beatific afterglow. Paradise, the song suggests, can be California, Oregon, Texas, or anywhere we choose: an appealing and valuable notion. But it's worth remembering that when new-wave forebears Blondie found "Rapture", it was "toe to toe/ Dancing very close."


The young Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE collaborator makes deeply internal and contemplative rap.

Own Pace

Medhane repeats himself, making his unhurried way through his verses and remaining intent on humble pursuits—fiscal and spiritual comfort, avoiding distractions and vices, snakes or serpents, he might say. If he’s focused on his delivery, maybe then you’ll really hear and understand him. And so he repeats; that’s how Medhane works. The young Brooklyn rapper is a friend and collaborator of Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, and, like his peers, he makes his voice heard by lowering it.
On his first solo full-length, he sounds stern but forgiving, his buttery flow gliding atop dampened soul samples. Medhane’s work is largely about determination, an attribute you can hear reflected in the amelodic nature of his rapping, where each line moves with a similar tempo, not too fast, not too slow. There’s also a softness to Medhane’s writing that complements the bluntness of his pacing. He writes in unsentimental broad strokes, making his lyrics feel like synecdoches for all living. “I know what I need,” he says on “On Me,” keeping the thought internal.
Interiority is everything to Medhane. His deepest insights arrive with the simplest combination of words. “Taking small steps/Trippin’, trippin’, I ain’t fall yet,” he says on “Smallsteps,” calmly, as if the utterance is itself part of his undetermined journey to somewhere, a place he can’t yet envision but will continue striving toward. He offers variations on progress, steady pacing, hope, and gratitude. “Changes and growth all I know,” goes another line, showing Medhane ready to embrace any turmoil or spoils ahead.
Medhane’s tone has changed just a bit since last year’s Ba Suba, Ak Jamm EP. On the brief, 13-minute release, Medhane spoke more about hard work and gain, like he couldn’t look up from the grind. The beats were more chaotic. The new project has a murmuring slickness, a mantric quality. “Remembering the times I couldn’t describe what’s inside,” he raps on “Affirmation #1.” Own Pace is Medhane’s non-stop constant trip to the center of his inner self, filled with the imperceptible detours and contours of the mind.


This collection of the Norwegian producer's best-loved 12" tracks succinctly demonstrates why both he and his epic space-disco sound have been among the most ubiquitous forces in modern dance music.

It's a Feedelity Affair

It would be difficult to argue that the Feedelity label remains a well-kept secret now that its founder and main artist Hans-Peter Lindstrøm has become such a ubiquitous presence in dance music. If anything, it's tempting to ask whether, in October 2006, it's too late to get excited about Lindstrøm's brand of epic disco revivalism. However, It's a Feedelity Affair is packed with tried-and-true musical strategies for putting on a spectacle, and this overdue round-up of some of the greater and lesser-known Lindstrøm tracks off his 10 or so vinyl releases from the past few years makes clear that the Norwegian artist's production style remains as invigorating as ever, despite many of these deeply familiar tunes now approaching half a decade in age. Can we chalk this resilience up to timelessness, or simply good timing?
Partly it's just that disco never goes out of fashion. In dance music the question is always "which disco?", and it's a feature of Lindstrøm's music that it would feel at home alongside so many of the responses to this question that have been offered in the past decade, from the classicist disco of Faze Action in the late 1990s, to Metro Area's italo-disco, to the (so hot right now) ramshackle "hippie" disco peddled by Rub'N'Tug and the like. If the narrative arc of this crate-digging strand of disco fetishism moves from precision and chops to bleary swirl and ecumenical unpredictability, the secret to Lindstrøm's music is how it manages to be all these things at once. Even at his briskest and most uptempo (see the efficient pump of the appropriately titled early single "Fast and Delirious"), Lindstrøm can't resist woozy synth effects, pompous chord changes, and atmospheric percussion; conversely, the collection's most hippy moment, the torpid dub-disco of "Music (In My Mind)" (complete with deliciously smacked-out female vocals) nonetheless retains a delicate, expensive muso sheen.
It's a Feedelity Affair largely foregoes the multi-hued fragrancy and soft-rock glide of Lindstrøm's recent work with Prins Thomas in favour of ostentatiously astral motifs (particularly roaming, noodly synth solos) and more pronounced dancefloor grooves, and it invites the conclusion that the producer's strongest solo efforts are also his most tunnel-visioned. The album's lofty peaks are the now instantly recognisable chill sci-fi sheen of "I Feel Space" and the stately, widescreen bleeps of new track "The Contemporary Fix", whose stereopanning percussion, shards of glistening dulcimer, and endlessly percolating 303 bass aspire to a majestic strain of minimalism that could go anywhere. It's difficult to know whether Lindstrøm would be better served pursuing this line of flight from plush disco, or to follow the path he's taken with Thomas, concocting ever-more sumptuous flights of multi-instrumentalist fancy, such as on their gorgeous, Henrik Schwarz-style remix of Tosca's "Zuri". Either way, it's probably a good idea for him to now steer clear of the warm space-disco which dominates It's a Feedelity Affair, if only because there's little point in attempting to top his past achievements.
Still, even during the most representative and unashamedly retro moments here-- such as on the voluptuous 10-minute suite "There's a Drink in My Bedroom and I Need a Hot Lady"-- Lindstrøm resists charges of being a one-trick pony, weaving together an unlikely assortment of elements in tracks that continually (if often subtly) change direction. The criticism is not entirely off-base: There is something almost gimmicky about his lush, organic instrumentation and overblown psych-out synth climaxes. But while Lindstrøm may be a showpony, his posturing is hard to resent when his tried-and-true strategies are deployed so decadently, almost carelessly, like stray crumbs escaping from a bottomless bag of tricks.


The French duo resurface with their first album in 10 years, slamming together the Balearic reverie of Ibiza and the pop-chart tank-top vibe of California, not always to great effect.

Ibifornia

On their last album, 2006’s 15 Again, the French duo Cassius found themselves faced with a not-uncommon problem for European dance acts in the 21st century. Here they were, in mid-career and on their third album, trapped beneath the overlapping shadows of Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx. The result was a mixed bag of funk and house and funky house, broken up by the occasional grab at pop’s brass ring. Naturally, there was a Pharrell cameo. It was a tough spot to be in for a duo with such an unassailable pedigree. Hubert Blanc-Fracard and Philippe Cerboneschi’s roots run deep in the French dance scene. In the early 1990s, they were architects of MC Solaar’s jazzy boom-bap sound, and their records for Mo Wax under an earlier alias, La Funk Mob, were trip-hoppy highlights of the label’s peak years. Cerboneschi, meanwhile, is a veteran of Motorbass, a pioneering French house duo that helped pave the way for Daft Punk’s filter-disco revolution.
For a while, Cassius remained central to a scene they’d helped mold. The duo’s debut album, 1999, was a smart, stylish amalgam of retro cues—disco loops, hip-hop scratches, moody Chicago house—that, aside from the Gwen McCrae-sampling single “Feeling for You,” made few overtures to pop. Instead, it put all its effort into building a sustained mood, translating the sound of hip Parisian discotheques to the album format. With their next two albums, 2002’s Au Rêve and 2006’s 15 Again, they expanded their horizons, determined to out-pastiche their peers. They managed a few memorable singles and some righteous curveballs—see, for instance, the Tom Zé-interpolating “Telephone Love”—but as they vacillated between impish pop, funk maximalism, and squirrelly electronic B-sides, they lost their footing.
Ibifornia is their first album in a decade, not counting 2010’s back-to-basics The Rawkers EP, for Ed Banger, and it suggests that Cassius still haven’t figured out quite who they want to be. Let it not be said that they are afraid to take risks, beginning with their coterie of collaborators: Beastie Boys’ Mike D, OneRepublic frontman and pop gun-for-hire Ryan Tedder, Parisian house vocalist JAW, Chan Marshall of Cat Power, and, once again, Pharrell. What, as another of Pharrell’s collaborators might put it, a time to be alive.
Sometimes, those risks pay off handsomely. “Action” builds to an extended climax of dubwise Afro-disco, and the lustrous Chan Marshall shines like the glint off thick velvet, impervious to Mike D’s yelps. The song might not need all nine minutes of its running time—nor a feinting fade-out and reprise—but it’s plenty hypnotic, with Laurent Bardainne’s saxophone and Arnold Moueza’s percussion keeping the energy at a rolling boil. On “Go Up,” another dramatic disco number, Pharrell is Pharrell, while Marshall is sadness incarnate, her descending refrain of “Jealousy” slumping like the shoulders of an inconsolable lover. Who knew that Cat Power would sound so terrific singing over house music? Someone needs to construct an entire album of club tracks around her.
But those standouts struggle to hold their own amid the album's more overwrought anthems and straight-up misfires. “Feel Like Me” puts Marshall ahead of an imaginary union of Spiritualized and M83, and it almost works; so does the opulent ballad “Blue Jean Smile,” sung by John Gourley (of indie rockers Portugal. The Man). But even the most immaculate mood-setting can’t save it from its ridiculous chorus: “Your blue jean smile says/Let’s have a child/Peruvian style/We’ll let it run wild.”
The Ryan Tedder songs simply feel like they're trying way too hard. “The Missing,” which opens the album, is a hiccuping, sighing, thrust-for-thrust remake of Robin Thicke et al.’s “Blurred Lines,” a maneuver that feels about three years too late (and given the legal brouhaha around that song, why would you even want to go there?), while the soaring, ’60s-flavored “Hey You!” panders shamelessly to the Coachella flower-crown crowd. Like a lot of Tedder’s work, it’s plenty catchy; it’s just too much. Gospel choirs, falsetto yips, bellowing baritone sax, and a chorus that runs, “And if you feel the same/Shadows turn into rain.” To call it bombastic would be putting it lightly.
And then there’s “Ibifornia,” a tongue-in-cheek paean to tropical house music—abuzz with roaring lions, screeching monkeys, trilling loons—that winks so hard it risks eyelid cramps. (Those incessant loons, a staple of Balearic dance music, are a dead giveaway that the song is nothing if not self-aware.) Narrated by the British voice actor Gary Martin, who spells out the letters of the title in a booming, Barry White-like baritone—“‘I’ is for ‘I love you,’ ‘B’ is for ‘brotherhood,’” etc.—it's gleefully ridiculous, and as it builds, it develops into a potent, throbbing, peak-time tribal-house jam. But it’s so over the top that it’s a little hard to take seriously, and therein lies the problem. Do clubbers whose pulses race to the sound of rat-a-tat 909 hi-hats really want to be distracted by goofy, lovey-dovey voiceovers? Do punters coming up on E really want what amounts to a comedy record? Like the portmanteau title, which joins Ibiza to California under the banner of balmy reverie, it’s torn between two things that really don’t have anything to do with each other. When presented with apples and oranges, instead of sangria they made Four Loko.
In an album that foregrounds voices, one of the best and most surprising cuts is “Ponce,” the record’s instrumental closer. It’s the only song credited to the duo alone, and as simple as it is—just a shuffling, barely-there drumbeat and a moody synth line—its emotional pull is undeniable. In its singular focus, it’s reminiscent of Motorbass, but it also sounds undeniably fresh; in its sound and mood and spirit of reinvention, it faintly recalls Mr. Fingers’ recent “Qwazars.” It’s a reminder that, at their best, Cassius remain among France’s most expressive house producers. It’s a shame that, in chasing palm trees from Hollywood to Vila d’Eivissa, they’ve lost sight of the splendors that lie closer to home.


One of hip-hop’s brightest young minds finds himself in a state of deep reflection, maturing into adulthood in real time on his latest EP.

End of the Earth EP

Mavi is an artist who speaks and raps with a wisdom well beyond his years. To listen to a record of his is to witness a scholar on a journey of discovery of both himself and the world around him. He’s a neuroscience student who makes soul music with personal statements that emerge as expressions of a rapidly forming ideology and whose sense of self is connected to communities—the physical communities where he lives and learns, but also the intellectual and artistic ones he’s joined with through his music and studies. These are the raps of a philosopher. And on his latest EP End of the Earth, Mavi finds himself standing on the precipice, turning around to gaze upon the path that led him here.
After the critical success of his full-length debut Let the Sun Talk, Mavi spent the subsequent months balancing the bars and the books, struggling to adjust to his new life as an artist at the vanguard of an underground rap scene alongside cerebral and soulful MCs like MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, and Pink Siifu. For all its prescience, his debut was still the work of an awkward teen transitioning into adulthood, learning how to sustain himself in spite of his earthly desires. The EP reflects that maturation, exuding confidence without devolving into braggadocio. There’s a humility to his perspective, an acknowledgment that he carries a burden passed on to him from the scholars who preceded him. He borrows a famous Nas bar to open “Town Crier,” (“No idea is original, there’s nothing new under the sun,” he raps) then immediately acknowledges it, as if to prove the point. He sees through corporate brands looking to associate with him to “seem a little woke” (“Life We Live”) and questions even his own motives: “What are we supposed to do?/All my idols dead or they took the devil fully in they idle hands/And I am like the man/Imperfect and even selfish when they lie in prayer/I am not on brand.”
This wizened perspective is reflected in the production, draped in swirling soul samples and gentle piano, twinkling tones contrasting with sad strings. The vocal mix sounds cleaner and more balanced than it’s ever been, with Mavi’s baritone at the forefront, occasionally even keeping time in place of a rhythm section. While his vocals are clearer, his thoughts are often purposefully obfuscated, encrypted in a code not necessarily meant to be deciphered by everyone. A student of phenomenology—the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view—he writes verses that are carefully constructed ruminations on his own perspective and its connection to the world at large, beaming messages into the ether for like-minded souls. The specter of Black trauma haunts the record without being its focal point: “This shit in me, not on me,” he told Pitchfork in 2020.
It would be easy to view End of the Earth through a fatalist lens, the result of a journey that ventures far from home only to find the same suffering. “I could walk to the end of Earth/I get there, still hear the screams,” he raps on “Thousand Miles,” the lament of a wanderer carrying his pain wherever he roams. But rather than weigh him down, his accumulated knowledge seems to motivate him, and he balances the power it imbues him with the responsibility that comes with it.
If his tweets are to be believed, End of the Earth is a mere sample of what’s to follow on his forthcoming full-length Shango. On its own, the EP is a captivating snapshot of one of hip-hop’s brightest young minds in a state of deep reflection, maturing into adulthood in real time.

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Upon its release Superunknown wasn’t just a highly anticipated album from a critically acclaimed rock band—it was Soundgarden’s long overdue turn to come out on top. The 1994 album's being reissued in two-and-five-disc sets; some 20 years later, the album represents the platonic ideal of what a mainstream hard rock record should be.

Superunknown

Upon its release on March 8, 1994, Superunknown wasn’t just a highly anticipated album from a critically acclaimed rock band—its multi-platinum success and Grammy wins practically felt predestined. This was Soundgarden’s long overdue turn to come out on top. Though they were the first late-’80s Seattle-scene spawn to sign to a major label, and dutifully embarked upon traditional career-building exercises like opening stadium tours for Guns N' Roses, they would be soundly leapfrogged on the charts by their Emerald City peers in Nirvana and Pearl Jam; by comparison, Soundgarden’s metallic sonatas were seemingly too knotty (and naughty) to inspire the same magnitude of crossover success. Sure, 1991’s Badmotorfinger landed a bare-chested Chris Cornell on the cover of SPIN, and an MTV ban of the allegedly blasphemous “Jesus Christ Pose” video brought the band more attention than if the station had actually aired it, but Soundgarden appeared destined to be the perennial bronze medalists in the Grunger Games.
By early 1994, however, the playing field had changed considerably: Though Pearl Jam were still the most popular rock band in America, they were actively trying to be the least visible one, declaring a moratorium on videos and interviews in an orchestrated (and ultimately successful) campaign to kill their own hype. Nirvana, likewise, were in the midst of a similar retreat, and though their story had yet to reach its tragic conclusion, ominous warning signs were in the air. But as a band that enjoyed a steadier ascent than their flannelled friends—and whose records got progressively better after jumping to a major—Soundgarden didn’t seem so conflicted about success. Their response to the Seattle-scene media storm wasn’t to try to avoid it, but transcend it, and embrace the opportunity to, for a moment, become the biggest band in the land.
Usually, it’s a bad sign when the wild-child frontman of your favorite group cuts his hair and starts wearing shirts. But the clean-cut Cornell that emerged with Superunknown was emblematic of the album’s mission to deliver maximal effect with minimal histrionics. With its despairing worldview, gold-plated production, and CD-stuffing 71-minute running time, Superunknown is a quintessential ’90s artifact. But thanks to its still-formidable high-wire balance of hooks and heft, the album nonetheless represents, some 20 years later, the platonic ideal of what a mainstream hard rock record should be. And even if that’s an ideal to which few contemporary bands aspire (aside from, say, Queens of the Stone Age), Superunknown remains a useful model for any left-of-center artist hoping to achieve accessibility without sacrificing identity.
For Soundgarden, the push toward pop was the result of incremental evolutions rather than a spectacular leap. Where Badmotorfinger introduced flashes of psychedelia and paisley-patterned melody amid Kim Thayil’s pulverizing riffage, on Superunknown, these elements become featured attractions. The once-oblique John Lennon references gave way to unabashed homage—centerpiece power ballad “Black Hole Sun” is pretty much “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” turned upside down and dropped in a heap of soot and coal. That song counts as Superunknown’s most wanton act of subversion—setting its apocalyptic imagery to a tune so pretty, even Paul Anka can dig it—but if that element of surprise has been diluted by two decades of perpetual rock-radio rotation, the album boasts a wealth of less celebrated deep cuts (the queasy psych-folk of “Head Down,” the dread-ridden doom of “4th of July”) that retain a palpable sense of unease.
Even the album’s eternal fist-pump anthems—“The Day I Tried to Live”, “Fell on Black Days”, “My Wave”—are infected with misanthropy and malaise, making Superunknown the rare arena-rock album that makes just as much sense in blacked-out bedroom. (And yet, despite the junkie intimations of its title, “Spoonman” is really just about a man who plays with spoons.) That said, if you don’t hate the world now quite as much as did when you were 18, you may find yourself skipping over the leaden likes of “Mailman” and “Limo Wreck,” while developing a newfound appreciation for how bassist Ben Shepherd’s India-inspired oddity, “Half”, injects a welcome dose of absurdity into the mix.
By fortuitous coincidence, Superunknown hit stores the same day as Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, an album boasting a similarly expansive scope and thematic framework, albeit approached from a drastically different set of influences (’80s new wave, goth, and electro as opposed to ’60s classic rock). The connection between the two albums is strong enough that the two bands toured together in 1994 and—despite some shit-talkin’ in the interim—are reuniting once again this summer for a joint-20th-anniversary jaunt. For casual Soundgarden fans who still own the record, a concert ticket may ultimately be a more efficient way of celebrating Superunknown’s birthday than by shelling out for this reissue (available in two-and five-CD box set iterations), whose bonus material mostly amounts to demos and rehearsal tapes that cast this epic album in a more normalizing light. However, you do develop a greater appreciation for the final product when you hear the ideas that got scrapped along the away or relegated to B-sides, like the dirgey embryonic arrangement of “Fell on Black Days” (a.k.a. “Black Days III”), the free-form ambient stew of “Jerry Garcia’s Finger”, and a club-friendly industrial funk mix of “Spoonman” by Steve Fisk that sounds like a test run for his beat-driven project Pigeonhed.
You also get a glimpse of the band’s future course with a beautifully spare acoustic treatment of “Like Suicide” that points the way to 1996’s more temperate Down on the Upside, the album that effectively triggered Soundgarden’s subsequent 13-year break-up. But then the go-for-broke, peak-conquering triumphalism of Superunknown was itself a harbinger that the writing was on the wall for this band at the time. When Cornell sings, “Alive in the superunknown” on the album’s acid-swirled title track, it’s both a valorous testament to Soundgarden’s last-gang-in-town fortitude and a telling prophecy of the uncertainty to come, with grunge’s early ’90s stranglehold on alt-rock radio soon to be loosened by the emergence of pop-punk, Britpop, electronica, and nu-metal. But amid a musical landscape now splintered into infinite subgenres, Superunknown remains the very definition of no-qualifiers-required rock—a tombstone for a once-dominant aesthetic, perhaps, but also a solid, immovable mass that endures no matter how dramatically its surroundings have changed.


Justin Vernon of Bon Iver teams up with the post-rock outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees for a loose, weird, and rewarding album.

Unmap

There's a moment in "The Wolves (Act I and II)", a song on Justin Vernon's debut album as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, where you first suspect that there's more going on with this dude than meets the eye. Up until that point, the record is, as advertised, ascetic and stripped down, the product of a person alone in a cabin for months with only a guitar for company. The songs early on bring to mind snow, wood, creaky furniture, drawn breaths-- organic materials that could have been just as easily assembled 80 years ago. But as Vernon sings the "what might have been lost" refrain in "Wolves", you hear something strange creeping in: One of the many voices, which are layered and harmonized, both full and falsetto, is run through some kind of vocoder-like effect. It's subtle at first, added without drawing much attention to itself, but it even so it feels like the floor dropping out. Just like that, the song is broken wide open, and Vernon's music is infused with a sense of unexpected possibility.
That boundless feeling was confirmed on Bon Iver's Blood Bank EP, released at the beginning of this year. One if its songs, "Woods", was an a cappella number with every voice processed, as Vernon stretched and trilled the phrases like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and T-Pain. Yes, these effects became absurdly ubiquitous last year, and the mere fact that it was used was nothing special. But Vernon is operating in a milieu-- an emotionally driven singer-songwriter on a noted indie rock label-- where people don't usually do such things. Especially so early in a promising career, where you're not sure how your audience might react. My sense is that Vernon was able to put expectations aside; he had a sound in mind and he went for it, without worrying too much about what a "Bon Iver" song should be. And that in itself was exciting.
So after Emma's deserved success, the nifty stopgap EP, and Vernon's long stretch on the road winning new fans, his next move proves to be yet another welcome curveball: teaming with the post-rock outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees for a short album of experimental pop as Volcano Choir. Vernon's voice is one of the most distinctive going right now, so you can always hear him in this music. But at the same time, Unmap in no way feels like any sort of follow-up to Emma. This is partly because these tracks aren't really songs. Words mean very little, and there's not much in the way of verses or choruses. Instead, Vernon's voice becomes a texture, a tool for shading the tracks and bringing them into focus. Collections of Colonies of Bees, who have over the last couple of records proven to be the rare instrumental rock band with ideas about how to keep things both surprising and musical, bring Vernon into their world, which turns out to be a very good thing.
When it all comes together, the results are dazzling. "Seeplymouth" is one highlight. With its repeating guitar chimes and chanted voices, it begins with a loose, jazzy feel weirdly reminiscent of Peanuts composer Vince Guaraldi. But then, after a sung passage by Vernon, it continues to build in intensity until it's a huge, pumping mass of crashing drums and wailed voices, something apocalyptic and almost unbearably intense. Equally impressive, and much closer to a conventional song, is the following "Island, IS", with its hyper-repetitive keyboard pulse drawn from modern classical, loping drums, and Vernon singing mesmerizingly opaque phrases that sound like the product of automatic writing.
Heard back-to-back, these two tracks suggest a sort of fusion between the U.S. and UK versions of post-rock. There's definitely some Talk Talk here, in the way assumptions about sound and structure are re-thought from the ground up and used in service of a new kind of song. But there's also a sense of Tortoise's studiousness, the way existing genres are toyed with and then broken down for parts. But despite the looseness and the grab-bag approach, the best of the songs on Unmap-- the airy opener "Husks and Shells", with its plucked acoustic and Vernon multi-tracked into reverb-heavy choir, and "Still", which is a longer, better version of the EP's "Woods" augmented by droning keyboards and Steve Reich-like figures-- feel right as rain, like these weird mash-ups were there all along, just waiting to be discovered.
Some of the tracks are unformed explorations that weren't pursued as far as they could have been, but even these have something to recommend. "Dote" puts Vernon in an echoing cavern and stretches his voice out to a rich, gothic drone that sounds like something Kranky would have loved to put out in the late 1990s. But it lasts only for three minutes and feels like it's just getting rolling when it crashes sharply into "And Gather". But then, fortunately, the latter is another short, intriguing track, bringing to mind Animal Collective's Sung Tongs with its acoustic guitar figure, handclaps, and chants. So where half-formed ideas are found, sharp editing keeps the album moving along. The only track that doesn't work is "Mbira in the Morass", which finds Vernon straining for a kind of bent soul vibe over a shapeless background heavy on the titular instrument. Still, one skip on such a truly experimental record-- they're really trying stuff here, not totally sure if it's going to work-- is an impressive feat. And for Vernon, the possibilities now seem even more vast.


The singer-songwriter’s ninth album arrives as a sweeping, sterling, often confounding work of self-mythology and psychoamericana: Lana’s in the zone.

Lana Del Rey: Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd

In 2014, Lana Del Rey told a journalist that she wished she was dead, and for what seemed like years after, scarcely an article was written about her that didn’t mention it. Back then, the singer was still miserable at the sour critical reception of her debut album. She was, perhaps, peddling its underlying fatalism, pushing back on allegations that her noirish Born to Die persona was fabricated. Almost certainly, she was harboring the sort of creative ambition that craved association with tragic geniuses like Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
Lana has lived many days since then and seemingly found some of them worthwhile. In due course, particularly since the release of her 2019 national pulse check Norman Fucking Rockwell!, her songwriting received the recognition she always knew it deserved. In conversation with Rolling Stone this month, Lana described a great unburdening in her psychic space. She is still talking—and singing—about death. But now, rather than an escape hatch, it’s a framing device through which to peer at her life. “The Grants,” which opens her ninth studio album, climbs to the metaphorical mountaintop, guided by John Denver’s sense of mystical wonderment, to receive wisdom from on high. “My pastor told me when you leave all you take is your memory,” goes the chorus, resolute like a hymn, wrapped up with gospel backing vocals and orchestral ribbons, “And I’m gonna take mine of you with me.” To whittle the raw material of life into meaning, worth preserving—this is the writer’s task.
It’s one that Lana takes up vigorously, even if that meaning is sometimes legible only to her. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd arrives as a sweeping, confounding work-in-process. It’s full of quiet ruminations and loud interruptions; of visible seams and unhemmed edges, from the choir rehearsal that runs through its opening moments to the sound of the piano’s sustain pedal releasing at its end. Beauty—long Lana’s virtue and her burden—fades or is forgotten, like that titular tunnel, its mosaic ceilings and painted tiles sealed up and abandoned. Here, Lana is after something more enduring, the matters “at the very heart of things”: family, love, healing, art, legacy, wisdom—and all the contradictions and consternation that come along with the pursuit.
Blue Banisters, Lana’s album from 2021, introduced many of the ideas that stand out here: revisiting old material with new relish, releasing pop’s conventional structures and polish, writing about loved ones with tender specificity. Lana, née Elizabeth Grant, opens Ocean Blvd with a track that bears her family name, and she holds her father, brother, and sister close throughout, as if bracing for loss. On one song, she exhales a prayer amid jazzy squiggles, calling on her grandfather’s spirit to protect her father, a maritime enthusiast, while he’s deep-sea fishing. She entreats her brother Charlie to quit smoking. The matter of bearing children—her sister’s daughter and Lana’s own hypothetical offspring—comes up repeatedly, on “The Grants” and “Sweet,” a tradwife fantasy tucked in a mid-century movie-musical score. “Fingertips” broaches the topic of motherhood with a devastating admission of self-doubt: “Will the baby be all right/Will I have one of mine?/Can I handle it even if I do?”
Such a sentiment could easily be extrapolated into a comment on millennial unease, but this feels more personal. It’s Lana, a self-made emblem of vulnerable womanhood—in her own words, “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution”—at her most genuinely unguarded. She was nervous to send early sketches to producer Drew Erickson, she said, and even in finished form, the material sounds like it’s for her ears only. With its solemn hush, meticulously rendered but opaque details, and lack of organizing logic, “Fingertips” seems disinterested in holding our attention. There’s no rhythm, no structure, only the strings and the Wurlitzer picking up Lana’s breadcrumbs as she wanders the misty forest of her own memory.
Elsewhere, Lana throws stones into these still waters, most memorably on “A&W.” She writes from the perspective of the other woman, a familiar figure in her discography—sometimes, a sympathetic lonely heart; here, a symbol of the ire that unorthodox women unleash. “Did you know that a singer can still be looking like a side piece at 33?” asks Lana—unmarried and child-free at 37, a subject of constant physical scrutiny. The title is a fit-to-print stand-in for “American Whore,” and Lana cycles through her many avatars: an embattled attention-seeker, an illicit lover, an imperfect victim (“Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?”). Then, after a radical about-face that steers the song from voice-memo balladry into boom-bap playground rap, she is someone else entirely: a girlish brat tattling to someone’s mom. A critic, albeit a clumsy one, of empowerment feminism, Lana here embodies characters that point to just how little girlbossing has done to remedy societal malice toward women. They reflect an enduring taxonomy, reified in a post-Roe landscape: We are whores who deserve what we get, or else children to be saved from our own decisions.
Where do we go from here? To church, apparently. Lana follows “A&W” with a sermon on lust from Judah Smith, the Beverly Hills pastor and influencer who counts the Biebers (and Lana too) among his congregants. The four-and-a-half-minute homily, accompanied by melancholy piano, is presented with little comment beyond an occasional laugh or affirmation, possibly from Lana herself; given its placement, the track seems designed more to inflame than to enlighten. At the end, though, comes an interesting kernel: “I used to think my preaching was mostly about you,” Smith concedes, “...I’ve discovered that my preaching is mostly about me.”
Now more than ever, Lana’s preaching is mostly about her, reflecting a growing instinct to self-mythologize. On Ocean Blvd, she sings explicitly about being Lana Del Rey, with lyrics like “Some big man behind the scenes/Sewing Frankenstein black dreams into my song” pointing all the way back to the industry-plant allegations that surfaced around the time of her debut. That backward-looking gaze also settles on hip-hop, a longstanding presence in her work that was substantially dialed down after 2017’s Lust for Life. The trap beats are back, at least in the record’s final stretch, where they accompany some of Lana’s most willful provocations. Her lyrics flirt with transgressions that have previously landed her in hot water, within and beyond her music: casual Covid noncompliance, brownface. There’s a sense of doubling down, of insistence that her path is hers alone to forge. On “Taco Truck x VB,” the chimeric closer that is partially a trap remix of Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s “Venice Bitch,” Lana elbows her way in front of the criticism: “Before you talk let me stop what you say/I know, I know, I know that you hate me.” She is fresher yet out of fucks.
Lana is a postmodern collagist and a chronic cataloguer of her references: Take “Peppers,” which samples Tommy Genesis’ ribald 2015 track “Angelina,” name-checks the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and interpolates a surf-rock classic, all in the span of four minutes. At her best, Lana reinterprets others’ work with intention, percolating their meaning through a personal filter. The way that she now applies this same approach to her own past material—beyond the “Venice Bitch” remake, there’s a sliver of “Cinnamon Girl” in the Jon Batiste feature “Candy Necklace,” and chopped-up strings from “Norman Fucking Rockwell” on “A&W”—suggests an artist who is tracing her own evolution and also submitting her work, ripe for reimagining, for entry in the greater American songbook from which she so readily draws.
One of Ocean Blvd’s key takeaways is that perfection is not a requirement for inclusion in this canon. Part of the title track is spent extolling a sublime flaw—a specific beat in the 1974 Harry Nilsson song “Don’t Forget Me.” Lana cites, by timestamp (2:05), the moment when the singer-songwriter’s voice breaks, cracking open the track with raw emotion. As an indicator of Lana’s mindset, this embrace of imperfection may help explain some of Ocean Blvd’s excesses and experiments, which nobly pursue profundity and succeed only sometimes. Still, there are 2:05s to be found within the sprawl.


On her compact debut, Lætitia Tamko’s inimitable take on DIY indie rock feels victorious. She explores ideas of home, community, and sharing space with others who don’t necessarily see eye to eye.

Infinite Worlds

Just about 20 minutes into Lætitia Tamko’s compact debut as Vagabon, Infinite Worlds, she sings a line so cutting that, upon first hearing it, I had to remove my headphones and take stock of my surroundings. “What about them scares you so much?/My standing there threatens your standing, too,” Tamko sings on “Cleaning House,” broadcasting a simple but eminently resonant message that defines why these eight songs feel so important, especially now. It should be no secret that Tamko’s thought runs through the minds of all those made marginal by prejudicial thinking—and actual executive action. It could be your skin color, the way you dress, who you worship or love, but nonetheless that question flashes through the minds of those made to feel less. A simple, evocative guitar plucking in the background guides this sentiment with precision into the ear of a listener, and down into their gut.
Yet, Tamko’s inimitable take on DIY indie rock is never downtrodden. It’s victorious—even when her feats feel pyrrhic. Her soaring, winsome, and mutable tenor is unlike any of her peers in the New York scene. She also shreds. More importantly, Tamko’s first proper album is a stunning document of what indie rock can look like from a viewpoint that isn’t necessarily widespread in the genre. Infinite Worlds is an album interested in grappling with seemingly intractable and very personal questions about sharing space, finding a home, and fostering community in a world that can be caustic to those very actions.
Some of the songs that appear on Infinite Worlds started as rougher drafts on 2014 EP Persian Garden. Listening to the earlier work, it’s clear how much Tamko has grown. She moved to New York as a teenager from Cameroon, and until she graduated from college in 2015, music was more or less a hobby. Her Bandcamp demos eventually led her to the Bushwick community art space Silent Barn, and a venerable DIY scene that includes artists like Frankie Cosmos and Crying (members of both bands contributed to Infinite Worlds).
“The Embers,” the album’s opener, was originally a song called “Sharks,” and it has transitioned from whispered confession to empowering paean. The song’s anthemic, steady guitars and booming drums recall the sound of Modest Mouse or Built to Spill, but her voice is the anchor to all these songs. It’s a powerful tool that can move from soft to loud, confrontational to relaxing, with an uncanny grace.
Tamko shows this in songs like “Fear & Force” and “Mal à L’aise.” On the former, she sings about a failed relationship, isolation, and the search for a sanctuary. “I’ve been hiding in the smallest space/I am dying to go/This is not my home,” Tamko sings, alternating between breathy harmonies and straightforward delivery (Greta Kline, aka Frankie Cosmos, provides backing vocals). The latter is one of the most interesting songs on the album: a piece of gauzy, ambient pop, not unlike the Cocteau Twins. Sung completely in French, “Mal à L’aise” is a sound collage made of a spectral chorus of voices, processed and multiplied (including sampled vocals from Julie Byrne/Makonnen collaborator Eric Littmann). These sounds shuffle around in an indistinct musical space, which is both haunted and relaxed. It’s almost close to new age, conjuring up the work of Harold Budd or Grouper, but Tamko gives the airy vibe of this song weight with lyrics that touch on accepting social discomfort and embracing oneself.
Throughout Infinite Worlds, Tamko interrogates what it means to occupy space with others who don’t necessarily see eye to eye, be it parents, peers, or strangers. Sometimes imagining that ideal world leads to bouts of doubt, or even magical realism (see “100 Days”). But Tamko keeps coming back to the same point: the community you want to live in is one you have to make. Guided by a more mature sound, Infinite Worlds is the rock music we need nowadays, when it seems like home, wherever it might be, is getting farther away.


Melina Duterte’s second album as Jay Som sounds exploratory and playful, like a jam session among friends that’s just hit its stride.

Anak Ko

Melina Duterte’s process has always been entirely self-contained. On her first two releases as Jay Som, she recorded, produced, and engineered everything herself. This “recorded alone in her room” quality has often resulted in her music being described as bedroom pop. The label is inevitable given that she works in a home studio, but it flattens the complexity of her work. Her excellent debut album, 2017’s Everybody Works, mashed together electronica, indie rock, and pop while retaining a gauziness that felt immediate and personal. Huge guitar hooks gave some songs the bright thrill of ’90s pop, while echoing, repeated vocals created moments of hypnotic drowsiness.
While Anak Ko—which means “my child” in Tagalog—is still very much a self-made release as Duterte recorded and produced the record herself, it also finds her opening up her process. She invited people including Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko, Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott, and Boy Scouts’ Taylor Vick to play and record many instruments on the record. The arrangements sound exploratory and playful, like a jam session among friends that’s just hit its stride. From the first few notes of opener “If You Want It” to the meandering guitar solo on “Crown,” the compact and punchy choruses found in Jay Som’s earlier work are replaced with inky, moody bass and guitar. Many of the songs on Anak Ko are longer than those on Everybody Works, as if unravelled and filled with instrumental passages.
It’s these interludes that bring Anak Ko to life. “If You Want It” begins with droning bass that builds and spirals into dizzying psychedelia, giving the song a sense of narrative progression. Similarly, the tension on “Nighttime Drive” comes from the way the guitars transform to a braided wash of violin, maracas, and drums at the end. The soaring arrangement evokes the thrill of whizzing through deserted streets with the windows down. Album highlight “Superbike” sounds most like a song from Everybody Works. Its introductory chords are inspired by Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” a reference that might sound jarring in the hands of a musician less skilled at seamlessly threading saccharine pop melodies through a haze of warped guitar and drums.
The guitar work on Anak Ko is especially mature, warping over and around words and adding embellishment as tactile as embroidery on a linen dress. But with such a heavy instrumental focus paired with distorted vocals, you’re sometimes left grasping for something more concrete. Most of the songs obliquely address heartache, repeating meditative phrases like “if you want it” and “somebody tell me” to gesture at grandiose feelings. Sometimes this repetition works to establish a nebulous confusion and longing, where the meaning and order of words is less important than the delivery. On “Tenderness,” Jay Som’s crooned, slinky repetition of the phrase “tenderness is all I’ve got” feels soothing and vulnerable. A line about “shoplifting at the Whole Foods” sticks out as one of the few moments of specific imagery.
The album could benefit from a few more details to ground the otherwise indirect songwriting. The lyrics’ pastiche of observations and fleeting memories isn’t always clear enough to be emotionally resonant, to cause you to ponder their meaning after the song stops playing. Instead, the appeal is in the temporary pleasure of listening. There is an unhurried joy in these arrangements; it’s clear that Duterte, an immensely skilled musician, gets a thrill from the mere act of playing each instrument on Anak Ko. She’s making this music for herself first; she’s showing us her world, not sharing it.

Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please
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The Monochrome Set arose from the late '70s British punk scene, and their records helped inspire the Smiths. They have a remarkably low profile in the U.S., but this collection of delightful demos, a sequel to a first batch in the '80s, highlights their dry whimsy and melodic ingenuity.

The Monochrome Set: Volume, Contrast, Brilliance... Unreleased & Rare Vol. 2

For a band that came out of the late-'70s British punk scene and stuck around (with a few extended breaks) long enough to make a towering stack of records, the Monochrome Set still have a remarkably low profile in the U.S. One explanation might be that they're a very British act: songwriter and frontman Bid (born Ganesh Seshadri) has always loved ridiculing the class system, making puns about London landmarks, feigning embarrassment about sexuality, trilling when he's expected to snarl. He's a wit, but he rolls his eyes at clowns.
You could say the same about the Smiths, of course (and Morrissey and Johnny Marr initially bonded over their shared admiration for the Monochrome Set). But it's also true that the Set's early lineups, especially, tended to channel their instrumental muscle and cross-chattering guitar lines into pastiches of intensely uncool kinds of pre-punk music: easy listening, country, bossa nova. 1985's jaunty fuck-you-pay-me "Whoops! What a Palaver", on this collection, even flirts with Gilbert & Sullivan: "I quote in the vernacular/And edit speech oracular/To seek a phrase spectacular/Like 'piss off, you cunt'/Or 'I hate the queen'/Or 'I am one.'"
Still, the clearest reason that the Monochrome Set have never caught on over here is that their studio albums often overreach and under-deliver. The best record they released during their original incarnation was 1983's Volume, Contrast, Brilliance..., a cherry-picked miscellany of singles and radio sessions with a promising "Vol. 1" in its subtitle. Its 33-years-later sequel—shockingly, almost as good—is a set of demos recorded between 1978 and 1991. Some of them were abandoned, others reworked for more-finished records (although only "Black are the Flowers" substantially improved on the version here), and a couple were stripped for parts: the music and lyrics of "The Greatest Performance Artist in the World" ended up in two different songs more than a decade later.
Like the first one, Vol. 2 is a delightful mess. The casual recording quality of some of these demos serves them well: treble and wobble and drum machine play up the sense that even the minor ones have been rescued from the void, and highlight Bid's dry whimsy and melodic ingenuity. (One thing he picked up from his fondness for unfashionable music was a gift for croonable tunes.) "The Greatest Performance Artist," the liner notes claim, was initially dropped because "the band were unhappy with the lack of a real orchestra"; it's almost certainly better for sounding like it was whipped up in an afternoon.
The album's highlight, "I Want Your Skin," was originally intended to be a centerpiece of their 1990 album Dante's Casino, but not actually recorded for it. It's an elaborate and very clever joke, a headbanging riff-rocker with a lengthy, triumphant twin-guitar solo, in which Bid's lyrical persona feints first at being a macho Casanova who adores blue-eyed blondes, then at being a skin-collecting serial killer, and finally reveals the awful truth: the refrain we've been hearing as "I want your skin, honey" actually goes "I want your skin on Eve." (The song's stylistic allusions to Thin Lizzy underscore its punch line; Bid and Lizzy's Phil Lynott were both among the British Isles' very few nonwhite rock performers, and for that matter, the Monochrome Set's name could be a joke about race too.)
Maybe more than any of the band's other albums, this one focuses on their pop-as-commentary-on-pop songs. "Something About You" crouches on the opposite side of the room from the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday", exaggeratedly miming its every gesture; likewise, it took a certain kind of chutzpah for a punk band to write original songs called "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Fly Me to the Moon" in 1978. At times, Vol. 2 is even self-commentary: the opening riffs of "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Cilla Black" are close variations on the ones from Vol. 1's "He's Frank (Slight Return)" and "The Jet Set Junta". The Monochrome Set has always thrived on combing the discarded past for jewels; it's only fair that they should find some in their own.


On her pristine third album, Hollie Cook, a UK singer and one-time Slits member, draws upon 1970s reggae in songs about love and resilience.

Vessel of Love

Many women started playing music because of history’s first all-girl punk band, the Slits. But the British singer Hollie Cook launched her career as a reggae singer after being in the Slits. She was, in some sense, destined. Cook was born in 1987 to Jeni Cook, a backing singer for Culture Club, and Paul Cook, the drummer of the Sex Pistols who infamously helped steal all the gear that history-splitting band used to get started. Boy George is Cook’s godfather, and it is unlikely that Johnny Rotten has been in a photo more adorable than one, shared recently by Cook, of the pair backstage at a 1996 Sex Pistols reunion show. At 19, Cook was tapped by a family friend to sing at a recording session. It was Ari Up: the status-quo-annihilating, dreadlock-donning, firebrand Slits singer—a woman who, in her freedom of mind, was so controversial in punk’s early days that she was knifed on the streets of London; who not only fused punk with reggae, but subsequently moved to Jamaica and made a life there.
Cook eventually joined Ari in the reunited Slits lineup, touring the world with one of the most influential (if rarely recognized) groups in music history. And for the Slits’ 2009 album Trapped Animal, Cook wrote and sang her first song, “Cry Baby,” which also appeared on her self-titled 2011 debut, as “Cry.” Cook credits her Slits experience with turning her on to reggae and emboldening her to make music. In 2014, four years after Ari’s unexpected death from cancer, Cook opened her sophomore album with a heartfelt ode called “Ari Up.”
On her pristine third album, Vessel of Love, Cook sings her desire and pain into an exalted, beaming sway. Cook is influenced by singers like Janet Kay and Carroll Thompson, who helped define lover’s rock in the mid-1970s—the moment when rocksteady grew less political (and male) and more romantic. The producer Dennis Bovell has said “the theme of lover’s rock was to get young girls up front, singing,” and Cook’s work bears out that legacy. Lover’s rock subsisted on just as much yearning as 1960s girl groups, of which Cook is also a fan; she has herself covered the Shangri-Las. Vessel of Love, a collaboration with the producer Youth (of Killing Joke), adds more electronic flourishes to Cook’s mix of horns, strings, off-beats, and space. It incorporates drums from her former collaborator, Prince Fatty, inspired by the soundsystems of the early 1980s, and a few Vessel of Love songs are what Cook calls “Jah Wobble cast-offs that he didn’t end up using so I stole them and wrote music over them instead.”
For Cook, love and resilience are complementary forces. She fights for love and uses it as oxygen, rendering it a sustaining force. On “Together,” she practically turns it into a rallying cry: “Together we are one/Together we are powerful.” There is a thrill to the immediacy of Cook’s music—how the repetition becomes hypnotic, how the slow rhythms move your heart and bones. Cook’s voice is variously anchoring and featherlight, and she is equally compelling when singing of the complexities of heartache or offering a pure outpouring of adoration: “Your beautiful eyes have fallen from the sky,” Cook sings on “Survive.” She always sounds strong and self-possessed, and that is what most makes Vessel of Love sound like pure joy. She calls the highlight “Freefalling,” for example, a song about “being too free to love one person individually,” as she sings of “too much thunder in my heart/To hear you calling.” The title track is so squarely fit for a beach party—“I’m feeling low today/So I get myself high”—that it incorporates samples of crashing waves and squawking seagulls.
At the center of Vessel of Love is an enveloping daydream called “Lunar Addiction.” Its echoing, dubbed-out beats sparkle with a dizzied sensibility; it feels the way infatuation does, floating and unmoored. Cook sings of the moon and the ocean, “lucid and free,” losing her grip of reality: “I’m in a sphere of love/No sense of gravity/Take me away from it all/Transcending clarity.” She blissfully succumbs to its pull. It is perhaps ironic that an artist personally connected to both the Slits and the Sex Pistols by her teenage years would go on to make love songs as intoxicatingly beautiful as this. Those bands resented and rejected love, after all. But punk has always been enamored with reggae, and what Cook does is righteous in its own way: She is herself. By the end of Vessel of Love, it is apparent that an interest in reggae is far from the only thing Cook learned from Ari Up, or the most important thing. She learned to find her voice and make it heard.


A rediscovered gem from the prolific new age composer conjures the dreamy polyrhythms of Steve Reich to blissful and kinetic results.

Música Esporádica

Unless you were a Steve Roach completist—an intimidating prospect, given his discography—you probably wouldn’t be familiar with the prolific new age composer’s ’90s collaborations with Spanish musician Suso Sáiz. Up until 2016, Sáiz’s music rarely landed outside his home country. But starting with the Amsterdam-based label Music from Memory’s handy introduction from that year, Odisea, Sáiz’s thoughtful work began to find new listeners. More music has followed, including a commissioned sound piece, a new album from earlier this year, and a retrospective of his new age band, Orquesta De Las Nubes. Each release showcases Sáiz’s contemplative nature as well as his openness as a collaborator, working with players ranging from Christian Fennesz to his own son.
Now comes the sterling sole release from the group Música Esporádica, Sáiz’s one-off with Nubes members María Villa and Pedro Estevan, Spanish guitarist Miguel Herrero, and American players Glen Velez and Layne Redmond. Esporádica is a bit of a “lost” album, but now it can take its place alongside rediscovered classics like Midori Takada’s Through the Looking Glass, Gigi Masin’s Wind, and Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Post Cards. For what by all accounts was a spontaneous gathering in a nearby studio in 1985, the music feels telepathic, the six players moving as one to create something that feels kinetic and blissful at once.
As the relatively concise six minutes of “I Forgot the Shirts” makes clear, the group often conjures the dreamy polyrhythms of Steve Reich. This is no coincidence; Velez was an integral member of the ’70s and ’80s ensembles propelling Reich’s formidable early run, including Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, and Sextet/Six Marimbas. Velez met Sáiz on tour with Reich, and they bonded over their shared fondness for non-Western music. Velez’s specialities include the Egyptian riq, the Irish bodhran, and the North African tar, and his website dubs him “Father of the Modern Frame Drum Movement.”
Which is great if you are in search of an ayahuasca shaman or Burning Man buddy. But all received skepticism evaporates the moment Velez’s hands hit the animal skin at the start of the 12-minute title track. You can emerge hypnotized even after a dozen listens and still not retain much sense of what transpired. The atmosphere feels charged, as glints of guitar, additional percussion, and wordless harmonizing arise, the players roving in and out of focus. Velez’s pulse remains steady and imparts perpetual motion to everything, a train engine that blurs the landscape just enough to smudge the lines of reality.
“Meciendo El Engaño” is a similar length as “Música Esporádica,” but it moves more slowly. Sáiz takes the lead at the start, allowing his winding melody to swell upwards and fill the space. When Velez’s shakers emerge nearly three minutes in, the waters deepen imperceptibly. Instruments twinkle, voices turn into sirens, and everything turns hallucinatory.
If you skim through the album, many of the sounds here verge on “spa soundtrack,” but the group never falls back onto easy textures. Sáiz’s keyboard washes gather around those drums like storm clouds, at once massive, weightless, and dark. Velez’s frame drums are tribal, but each hit is made with intention, never just as an empty “world music” texture. Allow Música Esporádica to properly unfurl and it reveals itself to be immersive and celebratory, capturing an ecstatic meeting point between friends old and new.

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The largely anonymous London producer patten's ESTOILE NAIANT builds a satisfyingly awkward bridge between his inclinations to amble and to stick a fork in his machinery. On these tracks, room to breathe is as important as the restricted spaces of his earlier work.

ESTOILE NAIANT

patten's music is all sharp edges, cut from shapes that never sit easily alongside one another. The largely anonymous London-based producer has been around for a while, releasing music by others on his Kaleidoscope label, and making his first venture as patten with a CDR titled There Were Horizons back in 2007. His first official release, GLAQJO XAACSSO for No Pain in Pop, demonstrated his Warp fandom. This new collection, ESTOILE NAIANT, offers an alteration of the patten sound, picking up a thread from the more thought-out structures of last year's EOLIAN INSTATE EP, where room to breathe became as important as the restricted spaces of his prior work.
Throwing a veil of anonymity over proceedings rarely has the desired effect, often drawing attention to the personality behind the music instead of deflecting attention away from it. Just look at the endless questions that were raised in online discussions about Burial's pre-selfie identity, and the by-now quite tedious (and, at times, baffling) trove of misinformation trailing in his wake. "I wonder whether the focus could remain more fully on the materials produced without it being about the person, or people, who made it as such," patten said in an interview, on his desire to remain unidentified. Drawing such a big question mark, and making oblique Twitter posts and statements like "best and worst don't actually exist" (from the same interview), make it feel like he's craving attention, not shrinking from it. Besides, he doesn't appear to have much in his locker to differentiate himself from others who have chosen this path.
The net result of the half-thoughts that make up the patten mythos throw the music into a certain light, depending on how it's received. Certainly, if you buy into it, your expectations are likely to be raised. The ideas behind the music of ESTOILE NAIANT mostly work as a reflector of the energy he's using to construct a world outside the music, where tried-and-tested concepts are executed with a degree of precision, occasional inspiration, and a sizable volume of backward referencing to ground already covered elsewhere. It often skirts around junior Autechre mode, where jarring noises barely fit together and accelerate toward a place of further disharmony as the track progresses ("Drift", "Key Embedded"). In softer territory the spectre of Boards of Canada is undeniable ("23-45"). At times, on the better material here, patten builds a satisfyingly awkward bridge between his inclinations to amble and to stick a fork in his machinery ("Agen").
Bringing together strange juxtapositions produces some of the strongest work on ESTOILE NAIANT—the broken-down drum kit skittering over a faltering loop on "Gold Arc", the finicky beat set to a whistling motif on "Winter Strobing". But there's rarely a sense of direction, with tracks that build into turmoil often gaining superfluous extra layers, and works that fade into the shadows feeling oddly inconsequential. The overwhelming mood is one of ideas gathered, processed, and left to dangle in the air without much to frame them. "Maybe there's something interesting about finding methods of working where you can transcend your imagination so you’re not necessarily beginning with an end in sight," patten told Dummy, in a 2011 interview. On ESTOILE NAIANT it feel like that approach still informs what he does, but music that works effectively without end, that circles in place, still needs to find a strong position in the world.


Cordae’s latest album proves he doesn’t have an ethos or a sense of excitement that separates his music from other rappers with a working-class view.

From a Bird’s Eye View

Cordae has made a career off being a Gen Z artist influenced by the sounds of the ’90s. You expect to hear him extolling his hip-hop elders in songs like J. Cole or rapping about adolescent crushes unironically. Whereas many of his peers skew toward lyrics about drug use and subsequent torment, Cordae focuses on financial shortcomings and upward mobility. His 2019 debut The Lost Boy was ambitious, but he often sounds like a school kid who gets the best grades only because he’s the teacher’s pet.
From a Bird’s Eye View is hampered by these deficiencies. His production choices get more solid as the album goes on; he’s someone who’s studied the game extensively, and judging by the tales about his complex relationship with his father, he has a life story that can be emotionally affecting when told with gusto. But it’s easy to tune out Cordae’s music because he doesn’t have an ethos that separates his music from other rappers with a working-class worldview.
Although Cordae can be an engaging writer, on songs like “Momma’s Hood” his delivery is as dry as a teenager forced to read in class. “Jean-Michel” shows his competence as a rapper, but the song sounds like it’s reaching to be a classic ’90s rap interlude and landing at a Big Sean freestyle from L.A. Leakers. “Today” places Cordae with Atlanta rapper Gunna, and while the track isn’t embarrassing, it doesn’t extend beyond the median either. Gunna loves dropping peculiar phrases about shopping and trapping, and there isn’t any of that personality here.
Not every rapper has a sense of humor, but many of the best get by on wit. “Sinister” pits Cordae against Lil Wayne’s crassness, with nothing to show for it but lines like “Quitе nuclear/Amazing what fame could do to ya.” The standout “Chronicles” is an example of what Cordae could do if he took himself less seriously. The production hints at 2010s Jeremih, and H.E.R. turns in a great guest performance. Cordae does his best rapping on “Parables (Remix),” with the intensity of an underdog boxer. But just when you think he’s turned a corner, Eminem shows up at the end to sound like an NFT come to life.
From a Bird’s Eye View works best when Cordae taps into his more playful instincts, dissing detractors and making puns about NFL players along the way. It’s possible to be a pop rapper and be amusingly wild while still having an everyman quality. Cordae runs the risk of just fading into the background.

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This sloppy 15-minute freebie reaffirms that, no matter how many names he takes or projects he starts, the former half of Hype Williams is always half-interesting.

Soul on Fire

Right now, any number of artists are working toward a Unified Theory of Pop, a synthesis of styles that’s able to appeal to hip-hop heads and indie rock fans alike while scoring Hollywood scenes and rendering cutting-edge club hits. Kanye may have gotten the closest, but you can hear the same quest through the likes of Dev Hynes, King Krule, and Mica Levi and the way their omnivorous musical interests converge. If he were capable of a cohesive statement, Dean Blunt might belong to that group, too.
Both as half of the hypnagogic pop obscurantists Hype Williams and across an array of releases under multiple names, Blunt has impressed, baffled, and underwhelmed, sometimes within a single song. At his ineffable best, he can connect the dots between Frank Ocean, A$AP Rocky, and Lauryn Hill, as he did while producing A$AP’s “Purity.” He’s been nearly impossible to keep tabs on lately, unless you’re able to click the WeTransfer links associated with a string of instant releases fast enough. In August, he issued an outlandish rock collection, Muggy Vol. 1. A few weeks ago, another YouTube link led to Inna, an experimental theater collaboration with Levi.
Now comes Soul on Fire, a mere quarter-hour of music that’s fragmented and unpolished, tossed off like a voice memo and hokey like a Mike Huckabee tweet. While it features the likes of A$AP Rocky, the rapper is relegated to hype-man role on opener “Chancer,” shouting about blunts against a backdrop made melodramatic by samples of swollen strings but deaded by Blunt’s somnambulant admission: “I ain’t even gonna try that hard.” At least he’s honest.
At almost every turn, Blunt half-heartedly mushes together aspects of hip-hop and lo-fi indie rock, making the earmarks of each genre sound ludicrous through juxtaposition. Tentative strums of untuned guitar and a primitive drum beat shroud “NBA” in a dour pall, while Blunt’s use of the most banal entries in the hip-hop lexicon (“all about the Benjamins” and “never broke again”) makes the song sound curiously daft. It’s as if Diddy hopped on an instrumental from Sebadoh’s Weed Forestin’.
Blunt might be taking shots at rap culture, with song titles alluding to the likes of YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Fetty Wap. But the chiming guitars and striding viola of “Petty Wap” are so unabashedly pretty that it’s hard not to hear it as a compliment. If only it lasted longer than 82 seconds.... On the other hand, the low-key Rhodes melody and smooth saxophone lines of “Ciao 2001,” which exist just long enough for Blunt to ask, “Are you sure that you wanna re-up,” make a minute feel like an eternity.
No matter Blunt’s number of albums, project names, or YouTube dumps, his hit-to-miss ratio hovers steadily around half-and-half. It’s as if he intentionally deflates expectations to keep away the casually curious. How else do you explain something as enthralling as Soul on Fire’s “A/X,” a nimble recasting of Gang of Four’s love song-as-chemical warfare “Anthrax,” amid such instantly forgettable surroundings? Despite the beguiling mix of Spanish guitar and breathless vocals that newcomer Poison Anna adds to “Beefa,” Blunt dashes the mood by stringing together lazy lines about Ibiza, Beamers, leaners, sneakers, and keepers. You don’t have to be a famous rapper or even fully awake to cook up a less-corny rhyme scheme. But, as always with Blunt, there is at least the suggestion of something wonderful.


Millie & Andrea is the project of Andy Stott and Demdike Stare's Miles Whittaker. On their debut LP, the duo offer a mix of hollow dub techno, into-the-red noise, and breakbeats that hiss and spit with static, but the extra flourishes are what prove most surprising.

Drop the Vowels

The primary players involved with Manchester's Modern Love label aren't known for their accessibility. As Demdike Stare, Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker have spent the last five years exploring techno's chillier, more obtuse corners, merging the library-music aesthetic of projects like BBC Radiophonic Workshop with the harsh, pounding dub of Basic Channel. On his own, Whittaker's explored a slightly more streamlined take on dance music—albeit a take that's prone to ear-blasting noise—while psychic brethren and fellow Mancunian Andy Stott's made a name for himself with his slow, bog-dipped dub techno, most recently perfected on 2012's astounding, vocal-heavy Luxury Problems.
The music coming out of this collective is often dark, ominous, and thrilling; that said, the abstractions the trio of artists work in are such that uninitiated listeners could ostensibly accuse this music of, well, not being much fun. That's where Stott and Whittaker's Millie & Andrea project comes in: back in 2008, the pair teamed up under their gender-bending aliases (Millie = Miles, Andrea = Andy) to release an impressive run of 12"s that, while staying true to their tunnel-beat outlook, were exploratory in nature, adding slinky basslines, bursts of melody, and aromatic vocal samples into their smoky cauldron. "Too many people are really too serious about what they're doing," Whittaker told FACT late last month. "And in the end a lot of music's just fun to make." That mission statement was best exemplified on "Stage 2", released at the top of this year and marking the first new music from the Millie & Andrea name in four years; the overwhelming track's clipped vocal samples, dizzying run of tones, and deeply felt bass suggested that, in returning, the pair were looking towards the hedonistic sounds of trap music for inspiration.
It will be a relief to some and a disappointment to others, then, that Drop the Vowels, the project's debut LP, is not a trap record, despite what its trend-baiting title suggests. Whittaker and Stott are still exploring familiar territory—hollow dub techno, into-the-red noise, breakbeats that hiss and spit with static—but they're still fond of coloring outside of the lines as they did on 2009's ecstatic "Ever Since You Came Down". "Stay Ugly" feeds a colorful synth line through distortion, as a drum break cyclically contracts and expands in nastiness; "Corrosive", the album's most easily apprehensible cut, takes clicking footwork patterns and slathers them in fog, arpeggiated tones rippling endlessly in the distance before another chaotic break crashes through to disrupt the proceedings. For those familiar with Whittaker and Stott's individual output, the firmament backing these sounds are unmistakably their creators'—but the extra flourishes are what prove most surprising.
Amidst Drop the Vowels' pleasing left-turns—the clipped vocal sample that kicks open "Spectral Source", a track originally released in Millie & Andrea's first run of 12"s, carries a sugared swing while also sounding like someone being slowly choked to death—Whittaker and Stott excel when zeroing in on texture. The layers of echo and frizzy static applied throughout are done to create a 3D effect—essentially, this is body music, in that the crashing noise feels so uncomfortably close-range that it can resemble someone scraping your eardrums with a knife. Whittaker and Stott possess a gentle side, too: the chaotic tumble of "Temper Tantrum" occasionally peels back to reveal a chipmunk'd vocal sample before emptying its cargo bay to reveal a lush backdrop of drone. Stick around until the track's very end, too, when Whittaker and Stott let loose a single, satisfying bass hit possessing a brown-sound subtlety.
Up to this point, Stott's Luxury Problems stood as the best entry point to his and Modern Love's harsh, uninviting world of razed sonics; while Drop the Vowels doesn't carry the game-changing nature of that album, the relative sonic variety it provides compared to Luxury Problems' expressively singular mindset makes for a solid introduction to one of contemporary techno's most consistently exciting collectives. When working together, Whittaker and Stott pull off an enviable trick of retaining specific stylistic tics they possess separately while creating something that sounds not quite like anything either of the artists have made before, and hopefully they won't wait so long to execute their collaborative talents again.


The underground rap vet caps a prolific mixtape run with a full-length DJ Muggs collaboration that’s loaded with the life experience to go with beats that bring to mind late-’90s Queens.

The Eternal Now

The thing about road trips is that I remember a lot more about the aux cord arguments and hot take debates along the way than I do snapping photos of the Grand Canyon. Admittedly, my biggest flaw as a rap fan is not taking that lesson to heart: I’m so caught up in what’s next that I forget that getting there is the best part. One rapper I wish I’d paid closer attention to is Raz Fresco, who got his start as a Brampton teenager in the early 2010s with a laid-back swag that resembled Wiz Khalifa if he were in the A$AP Mob. Eventually, he fell into the orbit of Atlanta’s DJ Holiday, and then Philly’s Don Cannon, releasing a string of solid, versatile mixtapes full of streetwise smoker’s anthems.
Somewhere in the middle of the decade, Raz Fresco fell off my radar. In that time he got deeper into his studies of the Five-Percent Nation, went to jail, had a near-death experience, and kept tinkering with his music. I wasn’t drawn back in until the pandemic, in the midst of his mixtape series Magneto Was Right, titled after an X-Men comic book fan theory that holds that the antihero Magneto’s idea for a violent revolution to free the mutants was more rational than Professor X’s philosophy of peace. In a little more than a year, Raz Fresco put out nine of these tapes, finding a real groove in the process. It wasn’t radically different from the music he’d released as a teenager, but it was headier and loaded with the life experience to go with beats that brought to mind late-’90s Queens. (I’d now place his music somewhere between the hard-nosed nostalgia of Griselda and the new age flyness of Mutant Academy.) He’s been prolific ever since, leading up to The Eternal Now, a satisfying joint project with reliable production OG DJ Muggs.
Over 15 slow-mo tracks, Raz Fresco uses his buttery flow to weave together hard-earned life lessons, five-percenter lingo, comic book references, and a sense of disillusionment with the commercialization of hip-hop. On “Smoke & Mirrors,” backdropped by Muggs at his dreamiest, Raz name-drops the creator of Spawn, calls someone a “pussy” and “a slave to the charts,” and reflects on his artistic morals: “You can’t get your soul back or reverse the hour hand/This is how it lasts.” Less thoughtful writing sometimes undercuts his message, veering into cliché with the repetition of “Who own the dollar own the country” on “Bloody Money” or repeating tired hip-hop talking points on “Fake Beef”: “Used to paint the walls, now it’s they fingernails.” Save those out-of-touch gripes for the old heads with a YouTube channel.
But I enjoy the way Raz’s raps sometimes feel like a period piece: If it weren’t for a couple of technological and pop culture references here and there, you would think he was living in 1995, not born in 1995. In an era when so many rappers under 30 sound like they all grew up on the same movies and television, he’s going on about Carl Sagan and Rocky IV, which isn’t digging that deep, but hey, at least it’s one less rapper talking about Paid in Full and Steph Curry. There’s a lot of twisty wordplay even if he never blows me away; his skill as a rapper is that he’s really easy to listen to no matter how ruminative he gets. On the horn-blaring “World Peace,” he threads together social critiques (political corruption, neighborhood violence) in a verbose way, but his flow is so smooth that you wouldn’t mind throwing on the track during a candlelight dinner.
As far as DJ Muggs’ beatmaking renaissance goes, nothing here will end up in his highlight reel. The last time a Muggs beat really caught me off guard was when he channeled Coke Wave on Jay Worthy’s “In New York.” His work on this album is by the books. No shame in that, because even basic Muggs is pretty sweet. The grimier, blunt-force instrumentals like “Blow the Spot Up” or “Fifty Bop” are on the duller side, while the standouts are so jazzy and breezy that they could soundtrack Gene Hackman cruising around New York in The French Connection (check out “Spooky”). But at this point, a joint project with Muggs is a right of passage: a victory lap for those who, like Raz Fresco, have survived the grind of the underground rap circuit and arrived at some sort of destination.