The British indie rock duo have hooks stuffed with bait and a keen eye for assessing self-delusion. Their debut is the sound of two women stoking mutiny from a slow descent into madness.

Wet Leg

If you don’t already love Wet Leg, chances are their swift rise and self-deprecation induce a particular kind of cynicism. Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers arrived fully formed with the kind of infernally catchy indie rock hit not heard since the days of Franz Ferdinand and were instantly everywhere: played to death on British alternative radio; on Jools Holland and late-night U.S. talk shows; the subject of approving texts from your dad. They repel seriousness, claiming they only started the band for fun—on top of a Ferris wheel at a music festival, no less—and their songs mean next to nothing. Apparently they barely had time to meet their future label, Domino, because they were too busy “rolling around in the grass doing teddy bear rolls with the guitars.” Their lyrics cringe with embarrassment on behalf of anyone deluded enough to be in a band, with their warm beer and crap patter and arty parties. (It’s often said that their home of the Isle of Wight lags 20 years behind the rest of the UK, and Wet Leg’s suffocating social circle sounds straight out of 2005: the Cribs’ “Hey Scenesters!,” Art Brut’s “Formed a Band” and Arctic Monkeys’ “Fake Tales of San Francisco” writ large.) You might wonder whether Wet Leg embraced indie rock as part of their larky shtick—what could be more ironic than messing around with a destitute genre?—if they weren’t such a good study.
Teasdale and Chambers are carpetbaggers in the ultimate carpetbagging genre: You can play Magic Eye with their speed-addled guitars, tilting the music this way and that to spot flagrant trace notes of the Breeders, Parquet Courts, Wire, Pulp, Pavement, MGMT, the Strokes, Courtney Barnett, Blur, Elastica and a billion more bands besides. (On “Convincing,” the album’s biggest tonal outlier, Chambers sings wryly devastated Angel Olsen cosplay.) But it’s a sound that endures endless retreads as long as the hooks are good. For years, that bubblegum melodic facility seemed to have deserted bands of this ilk. The 2004 British wave stopped wanting to make “music for girls to dance to” and got sophisticated (read: boring), and the space they left was quickly filled by lumpen “whoa-oh-oh” football terrace chanters. Wet Leg have hooks stuffed with bait—and beyond convincingly consolidating past eras of guitar pop, they ply an idiosyncratic line in wild-eyed choruses that unspool in run-on bursts of mania, building to terminal velocity, tripping on internal rhymes, and dragging you down with them.
Exhibit one: that hit. “You could ask 100 people to sing it and it wouldn’t sound the same,” Iggy Pop said approvingly of “Chaise Longue.” The way Teasdale sings it is one of the defining qualities of Wet Leg’s self-titled debut. As she chants about being trapped in bad scene after bad scene, her vocals lurch and spiral, sidling away from the unrelenting rhythm section and canine guitars like a child going floppy to escape her parent’s arms. Her seditious tenor moves songs with slightly pathetic subject matter—wanting to leave a party, getting sucked into your phone—beyond the tediously hymned woes of messy white twentysomethings to lead the charge against succumbing to existential hell. It’s the sound of two women stoking mutiny from a slow descent into madness, scratching at the yellow wallpaper. “It all used to be fun/Now you’re swinging a gun round your head/Seeing red/Can you please repeat what you just said? Or leave a message at the beep,” Teasdale sings on “I Don’t Wanna Go Out” in a tone that suggests a weary smile held up by fish hooks. The riff nods knowingly to Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” a song he said he wrote about “how you feel when you’re young, when you know there’s a piece of yourself that you haven’t really put together yet.”
“Chaise Longue” may have “no deeper meaning,” according to Teasdale, yet it turns out to presage a pointed interrogation of passivity (and with it, expectations of femininity) across Wet Leg. You can hear their recumbent anthem as a jab against the idea that music, especially music made by women, should be introspective and tortured to be taken seriously; or against the type of indie sleaze who wants women supine and supplicating, ideally on his backstage fainting couch. There are plenty of the latter type across the album, expecting adulation for starting a band, as if it’s something that anyone couldn’t do on a whim at the top of a fairground ride; or banking on a quick and convenient transition from exes to friends; or romanticizing denied consent as a sign of mysteriousness. The worst offender is the subject of would-be indie disco staple “Wet Dream,” a well-observed perv who tries to entice a girl home to watch Vincent Gallo films and has a sub-dom fantasy of her in the driving seat—though naturally, she’s only in control in his dreams. “You climb onto the bonnet and you’re licking the windscreen/I’ve never seen anything so obscene/It’s enough to make a girl blush/It’s enough it’s enough it’s enough…” Teasdale sings, repeating the last line as if trying to scrape something foul off her tongue. She dials up the absurdity until the words transform from coquettish brush-off to disgusted protest, pinpointing the feverish moment when polite tolerance snaps.
Wet Leg jab with humor to disrupt these expectations. The glee that greeted the Mean Girls references and basic innuendo in “Chaise Longue” seemed a bit overdone—proof of a listenership desperate for levity (and presumably having overlooked the absurdism in Dry Cleaning’s debut)—but there are genuinely funny moments elsewhere on the album. It works best to amplify the various states of existential horror they find themselves in, though they occasionally land a devastating insult. The moody surf of “Piece of Shit” fields a call from a raging ex, and at first Teasdale stonewalls their accusations, using passivity to rile them even further: “I’m such a slut?/Alright/Whatever helps you sleep at night.” Then she turns on them, joined by Chambers in a strange, mousy little harmony that adds insult to injury: “Yeah, like a piece of shit you either sink or float/So you take her for a ride on your daddy’s boat.”
Otherwise, there’s lots of suck-my-dick, pubes, and wanking, and mocking references to mummy and daddy that can wear thin as Wet Leg lean on the banality of outrageousness. Sometimes when they take the low road, it’s just the low road: “You’re so woke/Diet Coke,” they taunt on “Oh No,” a lyrical nadir that deepens as they consider excessive phone use, a topic nobody needs to write about ever again. (At least they offset it with some thrillingly purgative chaos.) And the last song, “Too Late Now,” is a doubtless surely felt panic attack about the point of it all that concludes: “I just need a bubble bath to set me on a higher path,” a skewering of self-care that already feels passé.
More acute is their keen eye for assessing self-delusion: how what used to feel fun curdles by one’s mid-20s and thrill-seeking simply blunts the lows. While none of these are new observations (they’re the bedrock of the emotional indie-rock that followed the old party-starting kind) Wet Leg approach them with sly nuance. “Being in Love” suggests a permeable barrier between the feelings of total depression and infatuation, a risky romanticization that they sell on the strength of a big, dumb, knees-first mudslide of a chorus. When a squall of noise boils over at the end of “Angelica,” a song about a shit party, Teasdale sings blithely about “Good times/All the time”—it’s “We Can’t Stop” with Red Stripe and wallflowers.
Some dork at another shit party on “I Don’t Want to Go Out” is moving to L.A. with his band. “Are you gonna stay young forever?” Teasdale asks in a daze, before delivering a spot-on Jarvis impersonation: “You said yeah—and I just walk away.” Much as Teasdale and Chambers sometimes delight in childish oblivion (the shambling “Supermarket” revels in the whoops-a-daisy chaos of stoned grocery shopping) you get the sense they can’t imagine anything worse than being condemned to eternal youth. Their debut doesn’t skimp on outlining the horrors of being a youngish woman—but its giddy, wild-eyed pleasures are also a testament to creating your own reality to survive.


The Oregon songstress spreads her wings and tries a few new styles on for size while keeping her earthly vision intact.

La Grande

Simple suits Laura Gibson. The Oregonian songstress knows the power a few well-chosen words and clear images can carry-- all the better when complemented with an economy of instrumentation-- and she put this know-how to good use on her two previous solo outings, 2006's If You Come to Greet Me and 2009's Beasts of Seasons. Those records also benefited from their intimacy and frankness, both embodied in Gibson's voice. It's a gentle thing, wise but vulnerable, and it wraps itself around the vowels with a nasal quality that calls to mind the earliest decades of recorded music. That voice returns more versatile than before on La Grande (sorry Francophones, it rhymes with "demand"), which finds Gibson shedding some of her characteristic simplicity, spreading her wings, and trying a few new musical styles on for size in the process.
A newfound momentum is evident from the moment the opening title track rolls in, all galloping drums, see-saw bass, dust-bowl guitars, and spectral moaning. It ain't exactly "Rawhide", but it's a more assertive move than we're used to from Gibson, whose previous records began quietly and gracefully. From there La Grande dips and sways, holes up and sprawls out again, not unlike the rugged terrain of the northeastern Oregon locale from which the album derives its name. Gibson's quiet moments are still her most striking: "Crow/Swallow" comes close to capturing the elegant melancholy of Greet Me standout "Broken Bottle", while on closing track "Feather Lungs" Gibson makes use of a cappella 1940s vocal-group harmonizations to soften the edges of a song plainly about final repose. However it's thanks to more upbeat tracks such as "The Fire", "Skin, Warming Skin", and the aforementioned opener that these more intimate offerings shine in contrast. This, perhaps, is a lesson learned from Beasts, where a stream of pared-down tracks on the record's latter half, while each affecting on its own, tended to smear together in succession.
New sounds of yore continue on "Lion/Lamb", with its bossa nova rhythm, and "The Rushing Dark", which drifts in and out like an old spiritual sung from a passing river barge. "Skin", easily the record's most momentous track, is, appropriately, also its sex jam: Lines about "secrets... hidden in the hems of summer dresses" and leaving "seeds to break and swell" alternate with a rousing wordless chorus of "ooh-ooh-oohs" while our narrator must keep reminding herself, "it's only skin, warming skin, warming skin." Meanwhile, the romance that may well have led to such skin-warming is given its due on "Red Moon", which has Gibson expressing her desire to "drink up" her lover's "poetry" on what sounds like a vintage microphone. This comes served over Latin-inflected guitar and a recurring sample of an old waltz record, all new looks for the usually more restrained Gibson.
Rather than another exercise in genre-dabbling and dilettantism, La Grande succeeds as a cohesive work thanks to the persistence of Gibson's vision. As a songwriter she's preoccupied with those timeless questions of the human condition, but seldom if ever stumbles into pretension or self-satisfaction. Themes of love, loss, regret, and mortality crop up often, and, significantly, they're well-served by the surrounding songcraft. One wouldn't expect Gibson's latest to bowl over any audiophile chasing the wow!-factor, but for the patient, contemplative listener, La Grande-- much like the campfire depicted on its cover-- is a record worth warming to.


Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny invites some friends (members of Mount Moriah, Sunn O))), and more) to help put his arcane guitar theory into thrilling action.

Hexadic III

A few years ago, Ben Chasny reckoned his guitar playing needed a break or a breakthrough. Over the last two decades, recording as the superb Six Organs of Admittance and in a messy web of collaborations, Chasny had become one of the instrument’s most exploratory new masters. He had woven dizzying acoustic fantasies through psychedelic fever dreams, summoned stately solo meditations on poets and landscapes, and led full bands with cutting electric leads. But after a quarter-century, he detected a complacency that stemmed from endless cycles of recording, rehearsing, and touring. So he made the obvious choice: Combining his interests in chance, games, mysticism, and number theory, he invented an entire personalized system for composing that relied on a deck of cards to determine the notes he’d play on the guitar and, hopefully, force him out of old habits. He called it Hexadic.
Three years have passed since Chasny unveiled his Hexadic system with two records, both released in 2015. The first, Hexadic, is a scabrous, powerful noise rock statement, its arching distortion proclaiming that Chasny hadn’t somehow lost his edge in his new role as a theorist. Hexadic II, however, is cocoon-soft, its fluttering acoustic notes and nearly hummed words stretched like strands across each song. The LPs serve as testaments to Hexadic’s intrigue and versatility. Elsewhere, Chasny has sometimes struggled to explain the system, even as he’s led classes on it, written a book about its order of operation, and designed a deck of playing cards for interested musicians. He’s often had to talk about what it is and isn’t or who influenced it and who didn’t. For Hexadic III, he’s finally asked his friends for help with the demonstration.
Curated by Chasny, the new album collects seven diverse interpretations of the system from his inspirations and collaborators. Heron Oblivion’s Meg Baird and Charlie Saufley float through a gauze of gentle piano and guitar, while Richard Youngs wrestles the system into a surrealist collage of acidic distortion and vocals that flip between chants and rants. It all ends with the gorgeous and haunting “Zoa Pastorale,” a wordless keyboard hymn written by one of Hexadic’s earliest champions, British composer and theorist Phil Legard. Stuck somewhere between the fugues of Bach and the psychedelic extremes of Terry Riley, it’s a stunning little piece and an unexpected application for the guitar-centric Hexadic. Indeed, for the neophyte or the casually curious, Hexadic III illustrates the potential and promise of Chasny’s obscure method in a way that a dozen blog posts or even an instructional manual cannot.
Hexadic’s use of chance means that the relationship between notes likely isn’t what you’re used to hearing in familiar Western scales—it was created, after all, to disrupt those thought patterns. The system’s best results, then, suggest a maze of music, a stream of sound that the players simply seemed to have slipped inside. Moon Duo’s “Square of the Sun,” the smoldering krautrock jam that opens the album, epitomizes this feeling. The notes hang together loosely, conjuring recognizable guitar chords but never quite landing on them. The sensation is that of an ellipsis, suggesting this music might go on forever in search of resolution. It’s so perfect that perhaps it should. Likewise, a trio led by Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley seems set to drift forever toward the horizon; they eke out distorted chords and squeeze and stretch the rhythm, as if examining the output of Chasny’s system in real time, with genuine shared surprise. You can feel them searching for some end or climax, all the while knowing it doesn’t truly exist. Tashi Dorji condenses the quest into two tidy minutes of prepared acoustic guitar, a welcome proof of economy for a system that doesn’t favor it.
The most remarkable track here is the one that most fully rescues Hexadic from the realm of esoterica. On “The Hanging Man,” Jenks Miller begins with a riff that sounds like a sun-warped version of something he might play in his country-rock band, Mount Moriah—a crackling electric lead, all moaning and elegant. There’s a demented calliope organ line and distant vocals that seem to arrive on the wind. These threads gather across four minutes, then coil into a tight, delightful passage, with both the riff and the rhythm reflecting off of Miller’s singsong melody. It may be the first Hexadic song with a legitimate hook, a rarity in Miller’s slanted oeuvre, too. If Chasny’s goal was to help himself and others snap their habits, this is indisputable evidence he’s done it.


The Hungarian producer’s first album for Planet Mu picks up the deconstructive thread of recent left-field electronic music, splitting the difference between academic inquiry and rave hedonism.

Source

In a 2015 interview, Hungarian sound artist Gábor Lázár said that in his creative process, he is “trying to give different answers to my own questions”; composition, in other words, is inseparable from research. Experiencing Lázár’s music can offer a jolt to your own inquisitive state. His tracks are crafted in such vivid detail, it is as though they were organisms viewed through a powerful microscope. At its extreme, this technique can induce a gratifying kind of existential dread.
But Lázár’s first album for Planet Mu, Source, isn’t necessarily designed for dissecting. His 2014 record ILS, on Lorenzo Senni’s Presto!?, was rooted in Lazar’s background in sound design, while his 2018 release on Powell’s label the Death Of Rave, Unfold, invoked club aesthetics and rarefied rave production similar to the style Rian Treanor would pursue on his 2019 album ATAXIA. Source picks up the deconstructive thread running through much recent left-field electronic music—Senni’s trance pointillism, Beatrice Dillon’s interrogation of dub techno—in a playful, danceable manner. Caustic synths, hyperventilating cadences, and skittering pads make for a heady interpretation of soundsystem rhythms, neatly placing Lázár between hedonism and academic inquiry—a feat that’s often difficult to execute with this much charm.
“Phase” is particularly frenzied, with mutated 2-step rhythms and oscillated bass notes stretched to their limits, while “Excite” executes flighty synth lines alongside leaden clang. To craft these complex algorithms, Lázár uses the software Max/MSP, also a favorite of collaborator Mark Fell, who worked alongside Lázár on 2015’s simultaneously jarring and meditative The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making. Source indicates a newfound maturity in Lázár’s sound and spotlights a more palatable application of rhythm and melody, which his past records, for all their virtuoso sound design, sometimes lacked.
Source feels bolder, sharper, and more emotive than the last record; that’s especially true of tracks like “Effort,” where the swiveling bass contorts and jumps almost like dubstep. But where Source falls short is in its uniformity; there are moments where it is difficult to distinguish one track from the other, particularly in the case of “Phase” and “Route,” but the disjointed rhythms and mind-bending curves still make for a hypnotic affair. The energy lets up with the introspective ambient closer “Return”: Gentle keys work a daybreak melody that wouldn’t feel out of place on Squarepusher’s tenderer early-’00s output, as if providing a cathartic breathing space from the earlier delirium.
Source is unrelentingly stimulating, lighting up the full spectrum of sound like the blinking signals on a circuit board. Lázár picks apart dance music’s tropes and investigates how far such forms can be pulled while remaining recognizable. The intellectual detail from past records remains, but the brutalist rhythms make for a stellar execution in futuristic dance.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Talking Head and A-list dance producer gather 22 vocalists-- including Santigold, Tori Amos, and Florence Welch-- for a tribute to Imelda Marcos. Really.

David Byrne / Fatboy Slim: Here Lies Love

Here Lies Love

Here Lies Love should have been truly great. Or at least truly awful. A 2xCD album, with 22 guest vocalists, devoted to the life, loves, and sartorial obsessions of the infamous Imelda Marcos, wife of equally infamous Filipino despot Ferdinand Marcos? Masterminded by two of music's most inventive nerds-- David Byrne and Fatboy Slim? Oddball subject, high-profile collaborators, unchecked ambition: a combination that should guarantee either a left-field classic or a cringe-inducing misstep. A grand or gaudy approach that fits the garish, romantic, obsessive arc of its heroine's life.
Instead we get efficient dance-pop and tropical-tinged adult alternative given the routinized sheen of Broadway showtunes. For a few songs the combination's curious enough to maintain semi-passive interest. Persevere through all 22 tunes, and you'll find an EP's worth of keepers, mostly thanks to strong performances by the usual suspects: Róisín Murphy transforming a just-funky-enough disco pastiche into another of her patented conversational come-ons; Sharon Jones as New Jack Swing-era rent-a-diva. But less than an hour in, the album's initially exquisite-sounding production starts to feel weirdly oppressive. It smothers the playfulness and rough edges of Byrne and Slim's respective obsessions-- Bahia-meets-Bacharach romanticism and shamelessly big beats-- in a layer of icky showbiz schmaltz.
Imagine a Vegas producer staging an all-star tribute to Caetano Veloso, or the Lawrence Welk band rearranging the Jam and Lewis songbook. Or maybe just imagine two oddball pop geniuses choosing to collaborate on a pet project in the waning days of the album era. But once in the studio, the pair contracts some kind of airborne soft-rock virus. Thus infected, they can only manage to write the kind of unthreatening but unfailingly pleasant filler designed to pad out department store playlists when programmers run out of Train songs. How else to explain the weakest songs on Here Lies Love, especially the second half of disc one? And even they're not bad, per se, unless the very idea of bland competence offends you.
Byrne and Slim never misstep here, but they also never surprise. At best you may wind up distantly admiring their craftsmanship. But if musicians are going for scale and spectacle-- and a project like this all but demands it-- shouldn't they, like, go for it? True, most overlong and overambitious concept albums wind up total trainwrecks, but at least then they're sorta enjoyable for it. But like a middling 1,000 page novel, or a three-hour cinematic epic that's just kind of okay, a competent 90-minute mini-musical serves only one purpose: To reinforce the precious finitude of human life. Devote an hour-and-a-half to this? Why? You could listen to Remain in Light twice with time to spare. Or just play "The Rockafeller Skank" 13 times in a row.


Christopher Taylor’s genre-colliding mutant pop proves everything can fit if you don’t give it enough time to sound wrong.

Truck Music

Is Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” a country song or a rap song? Does it matter either way? Genre is useful to understand musical lineage, but beyond that it starts to become a game of semantics. What does it mean for a song to be country, or rock? More perplexing: What, exactly, is pop music if pop music is always changing? Can music that isn’t popular still be called pop?
That’s the question posed by Truck Music, the seventh release from Philadelphia’s Christopher Taylor, who records alongside a rotating cast of musicians as Body Meat. He appears mostly solo here, with some percussion help from Matthew Anderegg. At times Taylor wields noise like a weapon, allowing cut-up vocal snippets to stutter over blown-out synths and skittering percussion. Each song sounds like six songs being played at once, and not a single second is clean or overly fussed over. Taylor seems dead-set on fitting every possible idea in his head onto this album, resulting in a mutant pop record that sounds at various moments like Chicago footwork, post-Young Thug melodic rap, or a less bummed-out James Blake.
That Body Meat apply rules from multiple genres to create a warped new sound is not inherently interesting. What is interesting is Taylor’s ability to create synthetic music with real heft. The songs on Truck Music are, for the most part, chaotic, but as they progress they reveal a skewed logic. A dense mass of video game plings and broken keyboards lock into a recognizable pattern; something clicks in your brain, and the rhythm, which has been there all along, makes itself known.
On Truck Music, that chaos can be purposeful. Album opener “Combo” sounds huge in the same way that an ant hill is huge: Hundreds of tiny sounds pile on top of one another, each individual piece essential to the whole. Single “Nairobi Flex” unravels so quickly that if it weren’t so robust, so present, it would be easy to assume it was a one-take improvisation. The roughly chopped samples on “Shopping” never quite cohere, but they’re weirdly beautiful anyway. In Taylor’s approach to music making, everything can fit if you don’t give it enough time to sound wrong.
Taylor uses pop’s sonic experimentation as a road map, whether evoking a busier version of Missy Elliott’s collaborations with Timbaland, or accelerating the starkly alien sounds of vintage Neptunes to warp speed. The genres he pulls from on Truck Music are sort of beside the point, because the point seems to be: How unrecognizable can an experimental song be while still reading as pop? Though these tracks are too unpolished for radio play, they have all the right reference points to make sense for radio, and that’s part of their magic. Sifting through the wreckage of genre touchstones, Body Meat use the musical language of right now to point toward possible futures.


Collaborating with Rosie Lowe, London-based multidisciplinary artist Duval Timothy translates his chordal sensibility to a short but expansive choral suite where sound means more than words.

Son

Young Duval Timothy struggled through piano lessons, but when a friend taught him the chords to Amy Winehouse’s “Stronger Than Me,” something clicked. Suddenly, he realized how powerful “just a few chords, repeated, looping round,” could be, he has said. As a multidisciplinary artist, Timothy works with a wide array of materials: His projects have encompassed textiles, food, and interventions in public space. But as a musician, he has remained doggedly focused on a singular tonal language, with the chord at its center. I don’t think that’s accidental; the chord, as a structural device, is a kind of musical distillation of his interests. British-born and of Sierra Leonean descent, Timothy divides his time between London and Freetown, and his art is rooted in issues of identity, migration, and the ways people and objects navigate borders. His project Weaving in Sierra Leone, for example, focused on women who painstakingly unravel secondhand sweaters imported from abroad, then weave the unwound yarn into dazzling new fabrics. Fusion, translation, transposition—these notions all underpin Timothy’s work, and they are also part and parcel of chords and their changes.
On Son, joined by the British singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Rosie Lowe, Timothy translates his chordal sensibility from piano to voice, swirling Lowe’s multi-tracked singing into vast harmonic nebulae. There are precedents for Son in both artists’ catalogs. On “No,” from 2017’s Sen Am, Timothy drafted a blueprint for the new album’s airy architecture, layering a single sung word—“no”—into rich, perpetually evolving harmonies. And on “Freedom,” the minute-long opening song from her 2021 mixtape Now, You Know, Lowe’s vocals are re-pitched into whimsical curlicues similar to the forms they take here. But Son is more complex. In some places, there are more than 100 vocal layers in play. Exploded into countless reflections of itself, Lowe’s voice assumes cloudlike shapes—chords—that hover in the air, morphing like murmurations of starlings on the move. Sparingly fleshed out with piano, standup bass, backing vocals, and environmental sound, Timothy’s music has never sounded more expansive.
Longtime friends, Timothy and Lowe began working on Son in London in 2018, bonding over a shared love for choral pieces like “Black Christ of the Andes (St. Martin de Porres)”—a stunningly intricate avant-garde mass for the Black Peruvian saint, written in 1962 by jazz pianist and Catholic convert Mary Lou Williams. They recorded the bulk of the album during a week and a half in Sierra Leone, working out of Timothy’s studio there but also taking their gear outside, where the sounds of their surroundings—traffic, birdsong, playground ruckus—occasionally sneak onto the tape. Back in South London, where Timothy grew up, they sought out architectural spaces with boomy, reverberant sonics. There, they played back rough drafts on a Bluetooth speaker and used a portable recorder to capture the reverb, which mixing engineer Marta Salogni then folded back into the final mix. The results entail a virtual collision of distant spaces: the wooded grounds of Fourah Bay College with a Bermondsey pedestrian underpass; the remote Bureh beach and a Georgian-era chapel in Peckham. You won’t be able to identify any of that by ear, but the way the duality has been encoded into the waveforms themselves feels integral to Timothy’s work.
Though Lowe’s voice plays the leading role, sounds take precedence over words. The first two songs are largely monosyllabic: “Da” explodes its titular syllable into dizzyingly rich a cappella harmonies, creamy as meringue; “Don” arrays plaintive scat singing around the repetition of a terse, percussive outburst. Like Matthew Herbert, whose Big Band both musicians have sung in, Lowe and Timothy revel in the artifice of recording, truncating their loops in jarring ways: In “Don,” background voices captured on tape create an incidental hiccuping rhythm with every looped piano riff. And in places, Lowe’s vocals have been sampled and stacked into chords on the keyboard, resulting in an uncanny quality—the harmonies are too perfect, the vibrato too seamlessly mirrored between voices. But that’s not always the case. In “Play Along,” Lowe’s bluesy solo branches into two parts, first sung in quavering unison, then tipped queasily out of key. And in “He Hu,” in the middle of a seemingly uniform two-note refrain, Lowe seems almost to giggle, just once, as she falters for breath and catches herself—a profoundly human moment on a record of superhuman beauty.
“Son” is the album’s musical and thematic centerpiece. Lowe plays a mother cautioning her son never to listen to anyone who tells him he can’t be whatever he wants to be, but her character sings from the sorrowful perspective of someone all too familiar with self-doubt. “Don’t let somebody tell you you can’t/Dream, dream, dream/Not even me,” she sings, as her ghostlike vocal harmonies sigh behind her. The song was inspired in part by Malcolm X’s autobiography and the 2006 Will and Jaden Smith film The Pursuit of Happyness; its lyrics interpolate lines from Ted Joans’ poem “The Sun My Son.” But behind its languid, ecstatic harmonies lurks a hint of the Afro-pessimism that Timothy has folded into prior songs like “TDAGB”—an abbreviation of the phrase, “Things don’t always get better.” “You think/You’re free,” sings Lowe mournfully: “I was so green/You’ll ripen up like me.”
A brightly colored children’s book that Timothy and Lowe wrote and illustrated to accompany the album is more optimistic. And so, fortunately, are the album’s sonics, which take the blues, a style born of impoverishment, and turn it into an abundance of harmonic riches. The album’s sheer sound is astonishing in its breadth: the cicadas and trembling barbershop harmonies of “Furah Bay,” as soft and natural as breathing; the cresting drama of “Say,” built atop Timothy’s trademark piano arpeggios; the almost cartoonish, Chipmunks-like tremolo of the pitched-up voices in the closing “Gonna Be,” which hiss and wheeze over heartbreakingly beautiful double-bass accompaniment from Tom Herbert.
No one knows when or why humans invented music, but some theories say its origins lie in the communication between mothers and newborns. Perhaps that’s why “Gonna Be,” singing sweetly of future promise, is so powerful: Mimicking a mother’s sotto-voce song to her child, set to the gentle pulse of a heartbeat, it suggests a return to the source, to the origin of all songs—and then refracts that whisper-soft point of light a thousandfold, offering countless paths to follow.

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Australian drummer Alex Knight’s dry, beautiful debut pushes beyond ’90s indie rock trappings and into rougher, textured, more interesting terrain.

Teething

Of all the onscreen depictions of Australia’s natural environments, only George Miller’s 1979 apocalyptic classic Mad Max really captures the solitude and brutality of it all. The film evokes the dry, hot winds and terrifying silence like little else. Teething, the debut record by Brightness (28-year-old Newcastle musician Alex Knight) taps into a similar sense of Australian gothic. It’s a dry, beautiful debut that pushes beyond ’90s indie rock trappings and into rougher, more interesting terrain.
After years as a sideman playing drums, Knight set off on his own to write and record Teething. Stylistically, the album recalls other messy, lo-fi debuts like On Avery Island and This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. When he does expand beyond the tried and true palette of guitar and drums, it’s in clever and affecting ways, like when an organ emerges to underscore the second half of “Waltz,” or in the synth that augments the main guitar line in “Queen Bee.”
Rather than employing these instruments to make his work seem more baroque or polished, Knight uses them to make his songs dirtier, weirder. That synth line on “Queen Bee,” for example, pushes Knight’s vocals lower into the mix; as the song progresses, his voice becomes more and more distorted until it’s nearly one with the guitar. The use of horns towards the end of “Talk to Me” recalls Feist’s brilliant 2011 record Metals, another album that channels the brutality of nature. The work of these two musicians both has a beautiful mania about it, like they’ve been left to fend for themselves in the wild.
Knight’s lyrics sketch portraits of people on the brink of unraveling. On “Oblivion,” the album’s best song, Knight is less a narrator and more the voice in his subject’s head, poking and prodding at their anxieties: “You say the neighbors, they’ve been spying, that you can feel their ears pressed against the wall/And just how long have you been lying there, with bed sheet covers for a pall?” These kinds of unhinged and desolate characters recur in each song. “Surrender” deals with a figure who has to “neck a few more pills” in order to deal with the tedium of life, while the persistent repetition of the title phrase on “Talk to Me” conveys obsession. These lyrics fit with the album’s overall aesthetic, and while Knight isn’t above occasionally falling into cliche, he is never trite in his writing.
The odd result of all of this—Knight’s perfectly measured vocals, the often abrasive edge of his instruments—is that the songs can instill a kind of delirium after a while; Teething feels claustrophobic at times, especially because Knight’s concept of space seems to range between “sounds like he’s standing one inch from you,” to, “sounds like he’s standing one foot from you.” But he doesn't mind committing to the creation of a somewhat punishing work—Knight knows, after all, that nature doesn’t compromise to make its inhabitants more comfortable.


When German techno artist Wolfgang Voight makes music for the dance floor, he\n\ usually goes by Mike Ink, Love ...

Pop

When German techno artist Wolfgang Voight makes music for the dance floor, he usually goes by Mike Ink, Love, Inc, or M:I:5. Indie rock label whores may remember Voight as one half of Burger/Ink, whose hypnotic Las Vegas was Matador's inaugural electronic release. The ambient side of Voight's personality is revealed by his work as Gas.
Voight suppresses the playful streak he exhibits as Mike Ink when he sits down to make Gas music. Previous releases like Zauberberg and Köenigsforst adhered to a strict formula of sampled symphonic passages (sometimes described as Wagnerian, though they could be from anywhere) swirling atop an incessant 50Hz bass thump. This steady 70-80 bpm bass pulse is the Gas trademark. Though it seems a bit comical at first (and definitely would have turned me off a few years ago), the bass anchor becomes mesmerizing over the course of an album, lending the intricate string patterns needed thrust and clarity.
On Pop, Voight switches things up. Gone are the gloomy samples, and the signature bass heartbeat appears on but two of these seven long tracks. Instead of containing linear motion, Pop is an exercise in sonic texture. UK music scribe Simon Reynolds pointed out that electronic music labeled "IDM" frequently has a marked fascination with timbre. Much of Pop takes this idea to its logical extreme, backgrounding things like melody and rhythm in favor of pure sound.
I read an essay about Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopédies that compared the famous piano pieces, all very similar in melody and structure, to viewing a sculpture from different angles. Just as a few steps to the left gives insight into a visual work, identical musical elements can be shuffled slightly to provide a deeper look. I'm reminded of this analogy when I hear the first three tracks on Pop (no titles, natch). Each of these contains a warm synthesizer drone that wobbles gently between two pitches and several layers of fuzzy electronic distortion that trigger images of wind and trickling water, but slight tweaks in the arrangement of each track casts light on the construction of individual sounds.
Together, these carefully placed packets of noise blend into an immersing, downright amniotic environment, especially at sufficient volume. The delicate synthesized drones will veer too close to new age music for some, but fans of Eno's dreamiest ambient work and Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II will find Pop easy to curl up in. The fourth track finally brings the familiar bass drum, paired with a loop of a gorgeous ringing sound that could be a sampled electric guitar (similar in tone to passages of Burger/Ink's Las Vegas). The fifth cut is pure sonic velvet, the layered drone radiating a palpable warmth. I wouldn't have complained if this track had been stretched to the length of a CD; sadly, it lasts a mere eleven minutes.
But while it begins cozy, uneasiness begins to creep into Pop just after the halfway point. By the sixth track, the mood becomes downright eerie. Though many of the textures from the first three tracks are present, the mix feels all wrong, with the synth punched up to ominous levels, and the temperature seems to plummet. Here, the cover art of Pop seems to come into play.
The photographs in the liner notes consist of extreme close-ups of tree branches. At this vantage point, the twigs take on another quality, and we get a small glimpse of the worlds that exists between knots on a twig. This change in perspective reminds me of the opening montage in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, where the camera moves from the placid long shots of Lumberton to the guy having a heart attack while watering his lawn down to the horror happening at the microscopic level of the soil. Greater detail makes the world increasing unpleasant.
Similarly, as you move deeper inside the world of Pop, it changes. The closer adds a marshal kick drum (this time complete with hissing high hat) to the previous track's drones, finally fleshing out the threatening scene. It's an unsettling end to a fascinating sound ride, and when it fades out, you'll enjoy the silence with sharpened ears.


Perth's Methyl Ethel makes dream-pop for insomniacs—shadowy, nocturnal music whose surface shimmer barely conceals the fidgety, restless soul lurking underneath.

Oh Inhuman Spectacle

As one of the most isolated cities on the planet, Perth has proven fertile ground for autonomous eccentrics and studio shut-ins, from Sleepy Jackson/Empire of the Sun impresario Luke Steele to Tame Impala mastermind Kevin Parker. And to that list we can now add Jake Webb, who launched his equally wiggy outfit, Methyl Ethel, as a solo home-recording pursuit in 2013. But while mounting acclaim prompted Webb to turn his private concern into a flesh-and-blood touring band, Methyl Ethel’s debut full-length, Oh Inhuman Spectacle, is reflective of the project’s humble, hermetic beginnings, with Webb handling all the production and instrumentation.
Webb is clearly a devout student of 21st-century art-rock, where old-school psychedelia converges with modern technology—think Radiohead circa Kid A (complete with a song called "Everything Is As It Should Be"), Yoshimi-era Flaming Lips, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, the more meditative end of MGMT. But he melts these sources into something more intimate and claustrophobic, with a distinct, disarming voice that infuses his deceptively serene soundscapes with a nervous tension. Through the haunted-house fog of "Also Gesellschaft," he delivers his mission statement with Gollum-like creepiness: "Sometimes, I want to dig a hole and then crawl into it/ I don’t even know if I will come out again/ but I invited you inside." The result is dream-pop for insomniacs—shadowy, nocturnal music whose surface shimmer barely conceals the fidgety, restless soul lurking underneath.
In spite of the obvious attention to getting the mood right, parts of Oh Inhuman Spectacle feel like works in progress. "To Swim" introduces an entrancing, quiet-storm R&B groove but breaks its spell after a too-brief two minutes where "Depth Perception" takes its sweet time building up only to sputter out after a single verse. Webb is still working out the difference between channeling his influences and mimicking them: from its space-bound harmonies to its pulsing backdrop, "Unbalancing Acts" is such a blatant act of AnCo karaoke that some disillusioned fans may actually prefer it to anything on Painting With.
But if Webb is still mastering the finer points of songcraft, he’s got a handle on melody, the most important piece. The trembling guitar line of "Rogues" is pure ’80s dream-pop, but the song’s vacuum-sealed groove and confessional vocal hew closer to "Dreams." On the jangly highlight "Twilight Driving," Webb lets in a little sunlight through the drapes. "It’s the early morning baby, I say, why don’t you hit the snooze," Webb sings, before the relationship is consummated with a bedsheet-rustling sax solo. On an album that’s mostly consumed with paranoid, paralyzing 3 a.m. thoughts about unfulfilled desire, alien abductions, and fever dreams filled with "10,000 screams," "Twilight Driving" extols the virtues of staying in bed for the right reasons: because you have someone there to share it with.


Shlohmo is part of a new wave of producers who make use of every musical ingredient available to them; they source samples and influences from any decade, genre, or style that they’re interested in. His latest EP makes brilliant use of vocal processing and has a guest spot from How to Dress Well.

Laid Out EP

Shlohmo (real name is Henry Laufer) is the flagship artist of Friends of Friends, a label whose artists are making it more and more difficult to distinguish between genres. The producers in FoF's stable draw on every musical ingredient available to them; they source samples and influences from any decade, genre, or style that they're interested in. What's most impressive about what Shlohmo and his peers are doing, and what's epitomized on Laid Out, is the way that they can transform vocal samples into instrumental elements while retaining the immediacy and accessibility we normally associate with pop vocals.
Two sections of the Shlohmo's new EP, Laid Out, have an uncanny catchiness. The first is from the single "Don't Say No", featuring Tom Krell of How to Dress Well singing in his most desperate falsetto. The other sticky section is the loop from the best track on the EP, "Out of Hand". There's an obvious difference between the two: one features a singer emoting as best he can, with provocative, romantic lyrics. The other has just the ghost of a vocal, with words that are difficult to make out. But there's no difference in the intensity of the emotion that both songs conjure and the instrumentation in both is geared towards emphasizing those central refrains.
"Later" the six-minute centerpiece of the album is similar to "Out of Hand" with its looped, anguished vocal sample. Only here, the voice is blurred beyond the point of recognition. The track doesn't have the same kind of grab as its predecessors (perhaps because the repeating loop is less recognizable as a human voice), but it's equally intense, with waxing and waning drum machines that surround and heighten that go-for-broke sample.
Laufer's last project, the Vacation EP, played around with these kinds of melodies and samples, but that record largely avoided pop leanings. It was withdrawn, soft, pretty, akin to Nicolas Jaar's debut Space is Only Noise or to Teebs' Ardour. And while it was solid, Vacation was made for people who were already comfortable listening to electronic music. The first three tracks on Laid Out have far more ambition: they're meant to pull in pop and R&B listeners who might not otherwise be drawn towards electronic music.
The last two songs on the EP, "Put It" and "Without", hold more back and function almost as sketches of the songs that come before them. Each has an instrumental through-line that one can imagine being replaced by a stronger sample. They're smart and well-constructed but they can seem out of place, and dwarfed by what came before. Still, those first three: Shlohmo's already one of the better producers of his young generation and Laid Out should add substantially to his growing reputation.


The Swedish artist’s new mixtape is the next step in his shedding the mantle of wannabe rapper and fully embracing a more comfortable role as a pop experimentalist.

Stardust

Since the release of his breakout single “Ginseng Strip 2002” almost a decade ago, Swedish artist Yung Lean has fought to be treated as more than a gimmick. Though the song’s dreamy instrumentals signaled that it wasn’t just comedy rap, Lean was unquestionably imitating his favorite American rappers, dropping profane bars about sex acts and drug trips swaddled in an ironic vaporwave aesthetic. But as much as the record seemed tongue-in-cheek, there was always an obscured sincerity at the core, perhaps exemplified by Lean’s stage moniker: On the one hand, “Yung Lean” is something of a joke about carbon-copy rap names, but it’s also a legitimate play on his government name, Jonathan Leandoer.
Stardust is the next step in Lean’s shedding the mantle of wannabe rapper and fully embracing a more comfortable role as a pop experimentalist. After blowing up stateside, his early work suggested an attempt at a more mainstream rap career. He scored a feature from Travis Scott and a cameo on a Gucci Mane mixtape, but his flow and voice were still developing, and his attempts at straight-up rap felt awkward and out of place. Like many who experience sudden onset virality, he had to learn how to be a musician, working out his creative and personal growing pains in the public eye. Fame in America came with easy access to drugs, and Lean’s early success was marked by a series of tragedies, including the death of his manager, Hippos in Tanks founder Barron Machat. Lean opens up about his time in rehab and inpatient facilities in the documentary Yung Lean: In My Head, and it’s evident that he’s worked to find the clarity and strength now mirrored in his music. On Stardust, he exudes newfound confidence, but he’s also learned to make the flawed vulnerability of his voice work in his favor.
Lean’s voice has often been unfairly described as inaccessible or grating. But the very dissonance of his delivery and persona explains his appeal: the emotionality of the sad boy aesthetic juxtaposed against material flexes, a frequently imperfect voice over ornate and beautiful beats. On the outright ballad “Waterfall,” he stretches into a yearning falsetto, while on “Lips,” his voice withdraws into a more intimate mumble. His direct rapping now has a considerably more developed sense of cadence, like on “Nobody else,” where he flips effortlessly between a vocal-fried sing-song delivery and a more clipped flow. Set against the glistening voices of his Drain Gang associates Bladee and Ecco2k on “SummerTime Blood,” Lean’s tone is rougher and more down to earth, whereas his collaborators tilt toward the angelic. On “Starz2TheRainbow,” featuring Thaiboy Digital, several layers of overdubs circle and collide with one another, transforming Lean into an erratic choir.
Though promoted somewhat modestly as a mixtape, Stardust contains the most high-profile collaborations of Lean’s career. Alongside FKA twigs on album opener “Bliss,” Lean approaches post-punk, channeling New Order with guitar tones and a drum machine. Lean is a hopeless romantic, but twigs gives the song an outright sensuality, making it less a feature and more a duet where the two artists circle each other in a heated frenzy. On “Lips,” Skrillex lays down a smooth instrumental somewhere between UK speed garage and jazzy lounge piano, a leftfield sound for the EDM monolith and Yung Lean alike. The palette Skrillex employs on “SummerTime Blood” recalls “Where Are Ü Now,” but Yung Lean’s voice could not be more different from the spick-and-span choirboy vocals of Justin Bieber. If you took a time machine back to 2013 and told a music writer that the face of brostep and that weird Swedish kid who raps about AriZona Iced Tea would work together, they’d probably laugh you back to the future. In 2022, the union sounds natural.
The appearance of Salem’s Jack Donoghue on “All the things” is less surprising. Witch house influenced and ran parallel with American cloud rap from groups like Raider Klan, TeamSESH, and Green Ova, who laid the groundwork for the sound of Yung Lean’s Sad Boys production collective. A woozy trap ballad that turns into a stomping rave banger midway through, “All the things” retrofits the chorus from “All the Things She Said,” the signature hit from queerbaiting Russian duo t.A.T.u. The infamous trance-pop duo is, in many ways, a symbol of the kind of career Yung Lean could have had: an imported one-hit wonder mainly remembered for their lost-in-translation take on American pop. The t.A.T.u. reference almost knowingly places Lean in a lineage of global pop, but his work stands apart as a genuine melange of international influences that’s found an organic audience across borders rather than a blatantly commercial product.
Every musician is inevitably shaped by their origins, but Lean’s music has never been regionally specific, and he’s always performed in English. Stardust acts as a bridge between two worlds, uniting English-language pop stars with a long tradition of Swedish hip-hop known as “Svensk rap,” which conforms much more squarely to traditional rap beats than Lean does and is generally performed in Swedish. “Paradise Lost” features fellow Swedish singer Ant Wan, whose music reflects his mixed heritage as a Swede of Assyrian descent, blending reggaeton, Afrobeats, drill, and R&B with a bilingual flow. That Lean’s music is distinctly Swedish yet more popular than ever indicates pop’s global turn; Ant Wan’s sound isn’t too far off from a multilingual icon like Bad Bunny.
Though Lean first gained exposure through mimicry, he’s found his own voice, and a clear confidence in it, by abandoning imitation as a form of flattery. Rather than emulating Travis Scott or Drake, he’s found a niche more like that of FKA twigs, a pop provocateur and distinctive visual stylist who glides seamlessly between the mainstream and the esoteric. Memes still contribute to his success, with “Ginseng Strip 2002” recently worming back into the public consciousness as a TikTok phenomenon, but Lean has moved beyond the limits of genre and easy gimmicks. Stardust shows his potential for invention.


The Brooklyn band’s 12th album explores new ground and blossoms within the social, spatial, and economic confines of New York.

Romance

Over the two decades the Brooklyn-based kosmische noise-crew has unleashed their experimental ephemera, it’s hard to find two moments on an Oneida record that resemble one another. Their 12th album, Romance, explores new ground yet again, literally and metaphorically, as an examination of where one fits in the tumult of suddenly inhospitable environments. Across 11 tracks clocking in at 72 minutes, Romance offers a comprehensive yet concise survey of the best of Oneida’s vast and varied catalog—transfixing ambient loops, expansive krautrock jams, and even straight-ahead rock, while taking less time than ever to get to the point.
Romance blossoms within the social, spatial, and economic confines of New York’s constantly morphing music culture. For better or worse, Oneida’s story is tied up with a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn, where cultural institutions (and this band is An Institution) foster the very energy and excitement that attract the forces conspiring for their downfall. From around 2006 until 2011, the band called the Monster Island complex on the Williamsburg Waterfront home. Long before 285 Kent or Death By Audio, Oneida was woodshedding there for hours upon hours in their dedicated studio the Ocropolis. Romance has only remnants of two tracks recorded there, with the rest spanning a variety of locations in New York and one in Barcelona.
Losing their dedicated space seems to have forced the band into a new mode of introspection, where they don’t ruminate on ideas quite as obsessively as in years past. Romance is their most chiseled effort since the mammoth 2009 triple-album Rated O, possessing a mode indelible to Oneida, one of strong self-awareness, an intimacy both immediate and lurid, and—most importantly—loads of fun. The hilarious and raucous “Cockfight” takes a barebones ultimate punk riff, atop which singer Hanoi Jane sounds like he’s sparring with a hell-raising alter ego. It is an honest-to-goodness moving song, particularly the sudden coda of swirling electronics.
Whether the Romance referenced in the title is that of love, actually, or the imagined, Wildean lifestyle of The Artist, is still up for debate. But the band zones in on vocals and lyrics in a new way that offers a narrative of language, and, perhaps, a manifesto: “Repetition is resistance,” chants Bobby Matador on the hazy, heady “Reputation.” There are also plenty of Romantic motifs to explore, here, where cedar groves offer metaphors for patience (“Cedars”) and murders of crows hover over the entire affair (“It Was Me”).
Opener “Economy Travel” transforms a classic repeated psych organ riff into an abstract, fractured colossus, perhaps a loose metaphor for the hierarchy of experimental music cultures. Here, a Kung-Fu “grasshopper” implores an elder while placed quite literally underground, “Beneath the lava/Beneath the crust.” The repeated phrases are disrupted by impossibly heroic drum fills, made that much more impossible by double-tracking Kid Millions in stereo. The split-stereo technique is repeated on “Lay of the Land,” another expansive track that subsumes to a swell of guitar, ebbing in like an evening tide and storming out like a tsunami.
The first real semblance of groove comes three tracks in, on the three-minute “All in Due Time,” where a motorik beat propels billowy synth over a vocal lament on things happening as per the title. “Good Lie” is a surprisingly gentle, Wayne Coyne-inflected meditation on saving face. Moreover, there is no bitterness to Romance. There are occasional flurries of rage and anger but Oneida confronts what comes to them head-on.
Their closest kin these days spreads throughout the New York diaspora, with shades of endurance-jam champions the Psychic Paramount, and corollaries to the many directions taken recently by Liars (not for nothing, Oneida and Liars did a 2003 split). But there’s still something so very Oneida about Oneida. The band’s last appearance on record, the 2016 Northern Spy release with Rhys Chatham, What’s Your Sign?, cemented them in an echelon of avant-minimalist outliers. But Oneida are the rare experimentalists who can hammer away at a riff or idea incessantly and somehow make it really last.


The two distinct, exceptional songwriters in Wolf Parade-- Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug-- combine to create a record that seems focused on skewing darker, on sounding nastier, more perilous, and less straightforward than its predecessor, 2005's Apologies to the Queen Mary.

At Mount Zoomer

Any proper insomniac can recite the consequences of a few frantic, sheet-twisting nights: lethargy gives way to elation, reason falters, your teeth start to throb, and a vague sense of uneasiness gradually mutates into weird, wild-eyed paranoia. Wolf Parade doesn't seem like a band that routinely logs its eight hours: Apologies to the Queen Mary, the group's 2005 debut, was riddled with allusions to sleeplessness, and its follow-up, At Mount Zoomer, is no less restless-- it's a fraught, expansive ode to being way too awake. "We're tired," vocalist/guitarist Dan Boeckner admits, voice defeated. "We can't sleep."
While prepping At Mount Zoomer for release, the band reportedly promised Sub Pop "no singles," which-- no matter how attached you are to the notion of the LP as a singular document-- seems like a self-defeating vow. Paradoxically, for a statement of cohesion (take these tracks together, or don't take them at all), At Mount Zoomer is inherently disjointed, very much the product of two distinct, if exceptional, songwriters. Unluckily for Wolf Parade, the success of Boeckner and co-frontman Spencer Krug's side ventures (Handsome Furs and Sunset Rubdown, respectively) means their stylistic tics are now public information, and, as effectively as these dudes co-exist onstage, they're still singular creative forces.
The band's resolve to enlarge and intensify itself-- At Mount Zoomer seems focused on skewing darker, on sounding nastier, more perilous, and less straightforward than its predecessor, with elaborate arrangements and, you know, no singles-- translates into a lot of proggy diddling (and, ironically, less theremin). The approach yields predictably mottled results: At Mount Zoomer is both captivating ("Call It a Ritual", "Language City", "California Dreamer") and a little bit exhausting.
Recorded in Petite Église, the Quebec church owned by Arcade Fire, and produced by drummer Arlen Thompson, At Mount Zoomer is free from the influence of Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock, who produced the bulk of Apologies. Lyrically, familiar themes abound: multiple allusions to funerals, cities, dreams, empty rooms, and things that mean nothing. Wolf Parade are uniquely skilled at skewering contemporary (see also: urban, digital, accelerated) culture, and these songs relay a sense of being stuck in the wrong spot at the wrong time-- it's a tense, tenuous place to live.
"Soldier's Grin" opens with punchy keyboard and guitar, before Boeckner steps up to outline the scene: "In my head, there's a city at night," he sings, voice clear and desperate. Although the song's objectively optimistic, full of twittering synths and mewling guitars, it's also deeply anxious, and when Boeckner promises "what you know can only mean one thing" it seems pretty evident that that one thing's no good. "Call It a Ritual" is equally uneasy; Krug's quiet, opaque vocals are spectral and strange-- less piercing than Boeckner's, but way more atmospheric-- and the track descends into a dreamy, muddled haze that feels a little bit like sleepwalking. "California Dreamer", another Krug-penned cut, is epic in scope: Although it's only six minutes long, it's relentlessly squirmy, flitting from quiet, guitar-driven dirge to full-band throwdown.
Whereas Apologies to the Queen Mary closed with an unimpeachable tract of songs, from "Shine a Light" on, At Mount Zoomer fizzles and sags after its sixth track-- the record's grueling backend culminates with the contentious, 11-minute "Kissing the Beehive", a stubbornly unmelodic finale marked by a mush of throbbing guitars and histrionic vocals (ironically, it's the only track that Krug and Boeckner co-wrote). At Mount Zoomer is fractured and spastic, and at times, the band's ambition eclipses its strengths. Still, there's something about Wolf Parade's fragility that's profoundly relatable, and the sense that the entire operation could fall apart at any second-- that we're all tottering on the brink of total dissolution-- is as thrilling as it terrifying.


The young rapper’s typically erratic nature is missing from his latest EP. Instead, he is just hurried and sluggish.

Sinner EP

The internet is special, not just because our entire lives revolve around it, but because Lil Tracy is allowed to exist there without much question. Online, Tracy has gone through the gauntlet of erratic name changes like Yung Bruh, Lil Tracy, Tracy, Tracy Minaj, then back to Lil Tracy. He once threatened on Twitter to shoot up his own concert, which was subsequently shut down by the NYPD; Tracy was then placed under psychiatric evaluation for a week. And whenever his loyal fanbase plead for new music, he normally responds by purposely giving them the songs they least desire, like when he dropped his country-rap track, “Like a Farmer”—which of course, became one of Tracy’s signature tracks. Tracy is a hip-hop personality who works best when he’s at his most confusing, which is why a straightforward EP like Sinner falls flat.
Since migrating from the Raider Klan offshoot THRAXXHOUSE—which featured rapper Key Nyata and Lil B’s main producer Keyboard Kid—into the cult phenomenon internet crew Gothboiclique—which includes members like Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, and the late Lil Peep—Tracy’s music has been unpredictable. Tracy’s success stemmed from embracing the style of Gothboiclique, which incorporated themes of heartbreak, death, and drugs, into production based around cheap guitars and eerie synths. He set himself apart from the other members by pulling cadences and flows from similarly turbulent internet icons like Lil B, Spaceghostpurrp, and Black Kray, and making them more accessible. But that erratic nature of Tracy is absent on the EP, exchanged for a rushed project that often sounds like a parody of Gothboiclique music.
On Sinner, Tracy’s lone moment of unpredictability comes on closer “LIL WHORE!” in which his disgust at his erasure from the legacy of Lil Peep manifests. It results in a track where Tracy is unleashed on a rant about how in the year since Peep’s passing he has gone from his closest collaborator to a footnote: “They separated me and my friend, that made me mad/Then they had the nerve to go and run off with the swag.” Disappointingly, the effect of the tirade is lessened by Tracy’s off-pitch vocals and a lazy instrumental that feels unfinished.
The remaining four tracks on the EP feature a Lil Tracy that doesn’t seem engaged—at all—in the music he’s creating. Songs like “tattoos,” capture none of the heartaching pain that initially drew so many to the cult of Tracy: “My heart is cold, I just wanna make you shiver.” When Tracy taps into his moody, death anticipating, sad boy lyrics like, “I feel like I’m gon’ die before my grandma,” he immediately upends it with an unbearable hook, “Used to ask my homies for a couple bucks/Now I’m onto better things chewing on zucchini.” The tracks that portray Tracy’s unstable personality best like “bacteria” and “heart,” lean too strongly on the amateur guitars which would work better as an element of the production, not the main attraction.
Part of the Lil Tracy experience is that occasionally a project as hurried and sluggish as Sinner sees the light of day. But Tracy is an artist impossible to reach a conclusion on, because as soon as next week or maybe a year from now he could impulse drop a mixtape that showcases the complete deranged personality of the rapper, like 2017’s Tracy’s Manga. Tracy just operates in his own headspace, which sometimes leads to aimless music, but, like always, he’ll eventually stumble into something.


Adopting an oblique, exploratory approach to bolero, hip-hop, and synth pop, the Puerto Rican artist’s third studio album meditates candidly on political and personal endurance.

Nacarile

Inspiration came to the Puerto Rican artist Ileana Cabra, or iLe, out of the gloom of 2020. The confinement and lack of social interaction of the early days of lockdown left her feeling adrift, with lots of downtime to reflect on her life and the forces that stir her creativity. The uncertainty of the world felt suffocating, and the only thing she could do was turn to music.
Looking to release these feelings, the singer-songwriter decided to write Nacarile, her first album in three years. The project is her most ambitious and experimental work yet—a cornucopia of art-pop tinged with bolero, hip-hop, protest music, Caribbean folk rhythms, and psychedelia. It is a testament to the strength of her will; she channels her emotions into 11 tracks, illustrating her deep commitment to social justice and desire for personal fulfillment and genuine love. Above all, iLe cares, and it shows in every one of her graceful lyrics.
iLe has always collaged genres, and across Nacarile, she and her longtime producer Ismael Cancel inventively marry and intertwine styles, often within the same songs. Her politics step into the spotlight on tracks such as “ALGO BONITO,” where, alongside reggaeton royalty Ivy Queen, she addresses patriarchal triggers and reappropriates common sexist catcalls, flipping them into urgent demands for progress toward women’s rights. She takes a similar approach in “traguito;” under an entrancing bolero melody, she and the Chilean singer-songwriter Mon Laferte push against the stereotype of a hard-headed, “difficult” woman. They assert that there’s nothing wrong with being free to make their own decisions, or refusing to serve men’s tissue-soft egos. The defiant lyrics don’t pull any punches either, leaving the track’s thesis up for zero debate: “It’s not that I was difficult, it’s that I was how I wanted to be,” she sings. It’s an authentic take on bolero, and the contemporary, rousing theme makes it all the more special.
iLe is the younger sister of brothers René Pérez and Eduardo Cabra, who are individually known as Residente and Visitante, and together as the rap duo Calle 13. She began her career as a background vocalist for the group before slowly earning a larger presence in their live shows and albums. She went solo in 2016, eventually releasing her Grammy-winning debut album iLevitable the same year. From a young age, iLe had close proximity to her brothers’ politically charged songs, as well as the wealth of Latin American icons they grew close to over their career, like Rubén Blades, Susana Baca, Silvio Rodríguez, and Totó la Momposina. These experiences helped nurture her innate activist sentiments and sharpen some of the values she holds most steadfast, such as her feminist advocacy. That political impulse feeds many of the tracks and imbues them with honesty.
Nacarile has more featured artists than all of her previous LPs combined, but their presence only heightens the throughline of the album. Take “Ningún Lugar,” which includes the Argentine rapper Trueno; his deliberate delivery resembles both a Tommy gun and sledgehammer, and reflects the emotional experience of wrestling with political anguish and seeking resilience to carry you into tomorrow. “(Escapándome) de mí” and “Paisaje” are immediate standouts; iLe sings solo, but just as innovatively as her accompanying guests. The former’s Auto-Tune manipulates timbre and pitch, giving her voice an airy quality that helps convey the vulnerability of the lyrics and the fear that accompanies a new relationship. She slips into a more romantic spirit on “Paisaje,” this time trading trepidation for the sincerity of love and all its butterflies.
From the opener’s mood-setting theremin sounds, Nacarile immediately demonstrates iLe’s ambition. The album is an audacious sonic endeavor from an artist who has never been interested in staying on the same worn path others have taken, not even her own. Whether she’s machete-rattling against colonialism, as on “donde nadie más Respira,” or slowing down to a storytime lilt as she passive-aggressively admonishes a toxic ex on “Lo Que Yo Quería,” iLe is devoted to creating the most honest music she can. It’s no secret that despondency can, ironically, inspire an artist’s sharpest senses, but Nacarile is another reminder of just how elegantly melancholy can foster poignant art.


Joe Williams' first solo project is a breath of fresh air for vaporwave.

Motion Graphics

“Does the internet dream of itself?” asks Werner Herzog in his new film, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. If it does, that subliminal soundtrack might be something like Motion Graphics, the debut solo album from the New York electronic musician Joe Williams. Until now, Williams has been known best as a sideman; he lent his hand to the squirrelly electronic textures of Co La’s 2013 album Moody Coup, and he also plays in Lifted, Maxmillion Dunbar and Co La’s drift-loving beats-and-improv ensemble. Only now, with his debut album as Motion Graphics, does the musician step out on his own—although “step in” might be a better way of phrasing it, as Motion Graphics is an album largely about inner space, virtual reality, and the infinite expanses that unfold behind computer screens.
You might guess as much from his alias, and it’s clear from his titles, too: “Minecraft Mosaic,” a tribute to the blocky world-building computer game, or “SoftBank Arcade,” which references the Japanese multinational telecom company. It’s also clear from his lyrics, which weave sticky semantic webs that join the natural world with its digital analog. In a cool, clear voice, he sings of rewiring leaves, of windows and screens, of birds-eye lenses flying overhead. “Heaven sent the GUI,” he sings in “Minecraft Mosaic.” In “City Links,” he muses, “Links accelerate/Rendering a time zone/Moving in a mobile home.” It seems likely those aren’t double-wides he’s talking about, but rather our own peripatetic second homes, as we scuttle about like hyperconnected hermit crabs living out of our phones.
But this isn't an album about words; first and foremost, it is an album about sounds. And here, too, Williams’ digital preoccupations are self-evident. Motion Graphics’ palette glows with a vivid, hi-def sheen: faux-choral synthesizer pads and ethereal, new age tones; digital sound effects like birdsong and splashing water; hyperkinetic chimes and pings that mimic your computer's alerts. In Motion Graphics’ universe, a sound is rarely just a sound; it’s often an avatar for something else, too. Nimble hi-hats dance across the gleaming surface of his music like long-legged water striders, but they’re also obvious nods to contemporary hip-hop production, just as his fluttering, phasing clarinets and MIDI-driven Debussy runs invoke classical references.
Those classical influences run deep: “Anyware”—a dynamic relay race of short, staccato phrases passed between marimba, clarinet, and sampler—nods to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, while the gorgeous, freeform “Forecast” dials up a forest clearing on the holodeck and pipes in an ersatz rendition of Astor Piazzolla’s tango nuevo for added atmosphere. It’s rare to encounter references to both DJ Mustard and Steve Reich in the same piece of music, but that’s presumably part of the point of Motion Graphics, an album inspired in part by the seamless (yet jarring) experience of the infinitely scrolling media feed.
Though these kinds of themes might not seem terribly novel—James Ferraro broached many of them with Far Side Virtual, and legions of vaporwave musicians have continued to beat that dead electric horse since—Williams renders it all so vividly and so lovingly that it hardly matters. Listen to the complexity of a track like the pulse-minimalist “Anyware” or the footwork-tempo “SoftBank Arcade” and it becomes clear that he is a proper composer, not just a cut-and-paste artist. And Motion Graphics’ contradictions—simultaneously placid and disorienting, warm and chintzy, intimate and distant—make it a seductively unusual listening experience as warm as the surface of your laptop. There’s no irony here; Williams’ lucid machine dreaming is deeply felt. As vaporwave grows stale, his album offers a breath of fresh air.


San Francisco musician Hannah Van Loon marries the dreamlike eeriness of the weekend’s final hours with the heaviness of shoegaze on a debut album co-written and produced by Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bear.

Sundays

Sundays can be disorienting. The gateways from weekend to weekday, they wear many hats—Sunday Funday, Lazy Sunday, the Lord’s Day, Sunday Scaries—and possess a magical melancholy all their own. This mystique provides the name, and the inspiration, for the debut album from San Francisco musician Hannah Van Loon, who performs as Tanukichan. Through heavy distortion, bleeding basslines, and eerie lyrics, Van Loon captures the spirit of a day whose wide-open nature fosters anxieties as well as ambitions.
The late cultural critic Mark Fisher wrote that eeriness was characterized “by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence… when there is something present where there should be nothing,” and vice versa. Those sensations, of something elemental missing and of something ghostly lingering, permeate Sundays’ ten tracks. With help from co-writer and producer Chaz Bear—aka chillwave innovator Toro Y Moi—who also worked on Van Loon’s 2016 Radiolove EP, Tanukichan marries the eerie and dreamlike qualities of the weekend’s final hours with the heaviness of shoegaze.
The result is a thoroughly dazed album that conjures a daydream so immersive (if not always so idyllic), it precludes any intrusive thoughts. The instrumentation on Sundays feels sun-baked and toasty in its fuzzy beach towel of distortion. “Natural” is a car ride with the windows open and sunbeams kissing every exposed limb. “The Blue Sky” envelops Van Loon in the hazy heavens. The warped, spiraling guitar riff on “Like the Sun” recalls a wind-up music box whose overheated ballet dancer has begun to melt.
Sundays’ eeriness comes from its lack of specificity. There is a void at the center of its songs, filled only with a longing for something that remains unarticulated. Album opener “Lazy Love” is a tussle between agency and lethargy. Its chugging bassline and bouncy electronic drum beat battle the electric guitar’s grumpy wail. “For as long as I remember/Got up over and over/Does that mean anything at all?” Van Loon wonders. Her voice is serene and almost sleepy as she seems to question her apathy.
The bulk of Sundays deals with similar sentiments of lack of control or direction. “Hunned Bandz” revels in this freedom, while “Perfect” drips with uncertainty. “What am I doing/If I could just lay flat,” Van Loon sings on the latter. She wants to bathe in the brightness of morning sun (if she can wake up for it), but restlessness takes over and she becomes overwhelmed. Tanukichan comes closest to pinning down this peculiar sensation on “The Best,” where she frets that her growing numbness will isolate her. Although the backstory never surfaces, Tanukichan fully fleshes out the feeling. Sundays isn’t a record of Hannah Van Loon’s personal history—it’s a library of her emotions.
But the album doesn’t leave you stranded in its liminal space. Van Loon has said that Sundays’ title was meant to capture the “laziness, and dreamy clarity that you can feel after a late night, waking up having to face the world with a new perspective.” On its final track, “This Time,” the heavy reverb and distortion fall away, leaving a perky set of guitar chords, a cool-headed bassline, and an iridescent, organ-like synth. “Oh I know I can be so blind/Maybe it’ll be worth it this time,” Van Loon sings, finally sounding more relaxed than exhausted.


Mike Paradinas’ groundbreaking electronic label celebrates its 25th anniversary by looking not back but forward, presenting a daring selection of footwork, braindance, and experimental beats.

PlanetMµ25

Mike Paradinas, aka µ-Ziq, probably didn’t have longevity on his mind when he launched Planet Mu back in 1995. Originally an imprint of Virgin Records, the label was intended merely as an outlet for µ-Ziq’s own brain-bending productions; there was little to suggest a new chapter being carved into history. Besides, most experimental electronic labels reach little further than their wooden anniversary.
Yet Planet Mu, long free from Virgin, celebrates its 25th birthday in rude artistic health, a glorious reminder that record labels can be held together by inspiration rather than genre. Over the last 25 years, Planet Mu has released key records in jungle (Remarc’s Sound Murderer), dubstep (Pinch’s “Qawwali”) and footwork (Jlin’s Dark Energy), while providing a welcome home to the kind of outsider IDM with which µ-Ziq made his name, notably the work of Venetian Snares. That none of these artists appear on anniversary compilation PlanetMµ25 demonstrates Paradinas’ admirable devotion to pushing into the future rather than sponging down the past.
Footwork has been key to the past decade of Planet Mu, after the label introduced the Chicago genre to European audiences on Bangs & Works Vol. 1. It seems right, then, that two of footwork’s leading lights should provide the most party-starting tracks on this birthday release. RP Boo’s “Finally Here (ft. Afiya)” is a sassy riot of well-worn samples and acidic squelch, while Londoner Basic Rhythm adds glitchy intensity to a remix of DJ Nate’s “Get Off Me (Betta Get Back)” a song originally found on Nate’s 2019 album Take Off Mode.
Taking its cues from Paradinas’ intrepid A&R, the compilation references Planet Mu’s recent adventures in grime (East Man & Streema’s menacing yet wobbly “Know Like Dat”) and outsider pop (the unsettling gloss of RUI-HO’s “Hikari”) while carving a small space for nostalgia. Meemo Comma’s gloriously gothic “Tif’eret” recalls the cinematic proto-hardcore of Meat Beat Manifesto’s “Radio Babylon,” while Konx-om-Pax and Bogdan Raczynski pay homage to Planet Mu’s roots in braindance and extreme IDM on “Rez (Skee Mask Remix)” and “tteosintae.”
True to the label’s ethos, it is the most adventurous, least genre-dependent artists who really shine on PlanetMµ25. Ripatti—better known as Finnish electronic auteur Vladislav Delay—delivers a sound so densely packed with rhythm and chaos on “Flowers” that it resembles five footwork records playing at once. This unholy melange fits surprisingly well next to Speaker Music’s “Techno Is a Liberation Technology (feat. AceMo),” a similarly genre-ambivalent track that sets haunting jazz licks against a drum machine in free fall. Chicago producer Jana Rush’s “Mynd Fuc” also dabbles in jazz, its low-key piano stroll doing little to soothe nerves frazzled by the black-hole turbulence of her drum programming.
Like any good party, PlanetMµ25 can get overwhelming at times; FARWARMTH’s “Shadows in the Air” is like listening to the jerk of a tickly cough, its stuttering production more defect than enhancement. But the compilation demonstrates with considerable panache that even as it passes the quarter-century mark, Planet Mu continues to break new ground. In 25 years, Planet Mu has gone from Virgin Records to virgin territory—a far healthier place to be.

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The Australian singer-songwriter uses the Unplugged format as a showcase for the community of musicians she’s cultivated.

Courtney Barnett: MTV Unplugged Live in Melbourne

MTV Unplugged Live in Melbourne

Courtney Barnett has made her discomfort with pedestals clear. Even as the music press has heralded her as an icon, a wunderkind, the voice of a generation, she’s always worked to foster a second, quieter reputation as a humble collaborator. Fittingly, her appearance on MTV Unplugged functions not as a career retrospective, but a showcase for the community she’s cultivated. Of the eight songs in this set, only four see Barnett performing her own songs solo. Her focus remains fixed on the friends and artists who inspire her, providing powerful context for her creative mission.
Take, for instance, “Nameless, Faceless.” In the song’s original iteration, on 2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett delivered glib verses with her tongue pressed firmly against her cheek—a jarring juxtaposition against the chorus’s dead-serious threats of rape and femicide. In this performance, Barnett enlists friend and labelmate Evelyn Ida Morris as a duet partner, slows the arrangement to a crawl, and adds a chilling piano line. These adjustments don’t elevate the track as much as clarify its purpose. As the piano descends its minor scale, the impotent internet trolls of the verses mutate, by the chorus, into material threats to women’s lives. The addition of Morris’ voice steels Barnett’s own, turning the song’s wry spin on an Atwood quote into a sincere expression of collective fear.
Equally revelatory is a cover of “Charcoal Lane,” the title track from the debut solo album of indigenous Australian singer-songwriter Archie Roach. It’s a near-certainty that Barnett’s North American fans are unfamiliar with Roach, best known for his 1990 single “Took the Children Away.” As infants, Roach and tens of thousands of aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in orphanages. Many were physically and sexually abused, and many more, including Roach, struggled with mental illness, poverty, and addiction. Dueting on “Charcoal Lane” with Paul Kelly, a longtime friend and creative partner of Roach, Barnett pays tribute to Roach while placing her own success on the same map as his suffering.
When Barnett performs alone, it’s clear she’s put great care into rearranging these songs for the Unplugged format. Each song gets an update that foregrounds some previously buried quality—like the low hum of camaraderie that warms “Sunday Roast,” or the bouncy violins that lighten the medical emergency of “Avant Gardener.” These renditions are distinct enough from Barnett’s well-loved recordings that fans will no doubt return to them. On the unreleased song “Untitled (Play It On Repeat),” Barnett’s voice cracks to engaging, expressive effect, but on “Not Only I,” a duet with New Zealand crooner Marlon Williams, she’s a poor match against his buttery baritone.
One musician who does complement Barnett’s gifts as both singer and songwriter is Leonard Cohen. Her set’s closer, a jubilant “So Long, Marianne,” places her voice in a nest of other voices, backing her up in soft harmony as she bids her audience adieu. When the time comes to say goodbye, when the pedestal crumbles and the bulbs in the spotlight burn out, she’ll be fine. She’ll be among friends.


The National frontman’s solo debut unwinds the nervous energy in favor of something more laid-back. The music is gorgeous and unfussy, but his performances and lyrics feel nondescript.

Serpentine Prison

Matt Berninger has not been the “average person out in the American heartland” for some time, but that’s not a bad thing. His main band, the National, has continued to release compelling, challenging albums long after they became a worldwide success. Much like his bandmates in underappreciated (and horribly named) experimental supergroups LNZNDRF and Pfarmers, Berninger has used the time between National records to blow off steam and explore new paths. With Brent Knopf collaboration EL VY, he sent up his own rock-star image with eccentric, upbeat new wave. The origins of Serpentine Prison are more sentimental: Berninger initially partnered with producer Booker T. Jones to pay tribute to his childhood love of Willie Nelson’s Jones-produced covers record, Stardust. Jones encouraged Berninger to flesh out some demos written with friends, including Walter Martin of the Walkmen and singer-songwriter Harrison Whitford, a member of Phoebe Bridgers’ touring band. These songs don’t have the nervous energy of Berninger’s main project, instead opting for something even quieter and more laid-back. That leaves Berninger to tie everything together—but his performances and lyrics feel nondescript. With Jones and frequent National collaborator Sean O’Brien co-producing, Serpentine Prison is technically accomplished, but Berninger’s looseness clashes with the record’s professionalism.
In his memoir Time Is Tight, Jones writes that the outside producer must “find and make a place” in a group’s pecking order, something he learned when he found himself lost in the pot smoke of Nelson’s Stardust sessions. (His defense, which sounds like a Berningerism: “I never correctly judged the potency of the grass.”) He certainly finds his place here; like Stardust, Serpentine Prison sounds gorgeous and unfussy. Most of the session musicians have played on National records, but under Jones’ direction they adapt to a jazzier, more organic sound, and Knopf sneaks some EL VY goofiness into “One More Second.” Even the more National-esque songs, like standouts “All for Nothing” and “Take Me Out of Town,” feel part of the new record’s world. “Distant Axis” stands out for its more conventional AOR trappings, but the polish favorably recalls early-2000s U2.
Early on with the National, Berninger’s lyrics often felt like honest sentiments filtered through layers of masculine repression until they came out mangled and esoteric. (See this Trouble Will Find Me-era Tumblr post, which documented normal phrases vs. their Berninger equivalents.) His lyrics became more direct, even lovelorn, by 2019’s I Am Easy to Find, but he still found creative ways to contrast his band members’ complexity; here, he and his band might as well be on different records. Opener “My Eyes Are T-Shirts” and Gail Ann Dorsey duet “Silver Springs” try to build something sultry, but Berninger’s lyrics lean so heavily into self-pastiche that they don’t connect the same way. Berninger can stretch himself: His morally ambiguous lyrics on “Loved So Little” (“It’s only God/Or the devil when you’re in it/I’m always getting caught in the middle”) and smoky delivery match the complexity of the other players.
Berninger’s sentimentality usually pushes back against the National’s reputation for self-serious art rock, but it doesn’t hold up as well on its own. “One More Second” was conceived as a response to “I Will Always Love You,” but the lyrics are so boilerplate (“The way we talked last night/It felt like a different kind of fight”) that it could be a response to just about anything. When Berninger ambles about, barely stringing together melodies on “Oh Dearie” as Andrew Bird’s violin soars and Mickey Raphael’s bass harmonica drones, he feels like the least talented person on his own album. He’s most at home revisiting familiar themes of intimacy and projection on the title track: “I feel like an impersonation of you/Or am I doing another version of you doing me?” It’s not that the emperor has no clothes, it’s that these don’t fit.
The fun of Berninger’s non-National projects is in seeing his quirks emerge in other guises: Is he really mumbling a Lauren Mayberry melody on a CHVRCHES album? Did he really reference Depeche Mode in a musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac? Even when he covered “Stardust” with Jones producing, he brought his mannerisms to an otherwise faithful rendition. But aside from the occasional sneaky homage to Kristin Hersh or Big Star, Serpentine Prison lacks that novelty; it sounds like he’s actively trying to write the kind of modern standards that “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and “I Need My Girl” improbably became. Jones and O’Brien’s production is engaging, but their work begs for something that isn’t so perfunctory and slight. Instead of the modern Stardust, Serpentine Prison is merely a prolific musician’s stopgap.

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Post Malone’s fourth studio album is slick, streamlined, and a little less vulgar and ostentatious than his earlier work—a sign that he’s taking himself more seriously, for better or worse.

Twelve Carat Toothache

Nearly a decade into his career, Post Malone has mostly shed the baggage of his younger years—the days of cornrows, gold grills, saucin’, and shortsighted remarks about rap music. He’s a nine-time Grammy nominee and a stylish guy who, at a quick glance, hasn’t gotten any more tattoos—at least not on his face. He’s become part of the pop music establishment, and his fourth studio album, Twelve Carat Toothache, is accordingly slick, streamlined, and a little less vulgar and ostentatious than his earlier work—a sign that Malone is taking himself more seriously, for better or worse.
For someone so outwardly colorful, Malone has long been a straightforward lyricist with funny and curious turns of phrases in his songs. There was, of course, the absurd saucin’-and-swaggin’ refrain of “White Iverson,” as well as his amusingly puerile mention of “beautiful boobies” on “Spoil My Night.” But he also incorporates unlikely people into his memorable moments, like eulogizing Bon Scott on “Rockstar,” or singing, “Come with the Tony Romo for clowns and all the bozos” on “Psycho.” Even when he flexes, Malone has a penchant for exposing the leeriness of his own desires, as on Beerbongs & Bentleys songs “Takin’ Shots” and “Same Bitches.” On Twelve Carat Toothache, he continues to play it straight, declaring on the opening song, “I was born to raise hell/I was born to take pills,” and, “I was born to fuck hoes/I was born to fuck up.” There are probably more artful ways to phrase those sentiments, but that’s not how he operates: He delivers directly what’s in front of him, whether that’s the front of his mind or a front-facing mirror, as on “Cooped Up” when he lists exactly what he’s wearing (“Gucci my Prada, Miyake/Louie, Bottega, and Tommy”).
The songs on Twelve Carat Toothache swerve between pain and joy, and while Malone has always fit lament into his albums, these new sad songs don’t feel tortured, labored, or ungracious. Instead, Malone deftly plays up bitterness with a wink on the jaunty “Lemon Tree,” trilling his voice with a playful hyperbole. Elsewhere, the wonderfully over-the-top “Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol,” made with Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, opens with a cascade of vocal harmonies. The production booms and the drums thunder as Malone sings about getting too drunk and having all of his teeth knocked out. Though you can hear the sorrow in the tone and the lyrics, the song sounds triumphant—like something that could conceivably soundtrack a raucous night out.
“Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol” is also a rare instance of exaggeration on an album that is musically compact. While he’s great with a hook, Malone’s previous album, 2019’s Hollywood’s Bleeding, was bloated with too many ideas and genre forays. The good hooks remain on Twelve Carat Toothache, but now, the mood of the album is cohesive. “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and “I Like You (A Happier Song)” make up an irresistible one-two pop combo, as frothy as Bud Light foam—the former wastes no time by opening with the chorus; the latter has him jovially singing, “Your heart’s so big, but that ass is huge.” But Malone’s tendency toward being crass is part of his appeal—his gift for melody and radio hits come unfiltered, and he doesn’t need to try to make his come-ons sound particularly attractive. The id is tamer on Twelve Carat Toothache, but it has not disappeared.
The missteps of Twelve Carat Toothache are clustered toward the end; the songs, even the pained ones, are disappointingly saccharine and don’t have strong hooks to overcome the lack of texture. Generally, Malone does not galvanize with big feelings or drill down with vivid descriptions and minutiae; he’s a much better songwriter when he leans on being a little off-kilter, making pop with some element of surprise, like when he sings “Some people got an apple/Some people got a tangerine,” on “Lemon Tree.” During the album’s weaker moments, it’s not just that Malone is writing in broader, blander strokes. He isn’t writing with his typical quirks—like the couplet on “Wasting Angels” that goes, “This is like when I was sane, before the fame/Uh-oh, uh oh, this life is crazy.” Uh-oh, uh-oh is right.
Malone is aware of his talents and even his limitations, but there’s a sense that he wants more, whether that’s earning the respect afforded to someone like Kurt Cobain or just escaping the box created by his reputation and success. He has spoken about how he wanted to make a shorter album without streaming filler, a telltale move from an artist looking to ascend to Career Musician—and the album closes with a demo, emphasizing the time and thought that went into the whole body of work. While a little gloom can go a long way, the rapper/singer’s congeniality is ultimately what makes Post Malone who he is—the type of guy who calls himself “that bitch,” as he does here. On “Reputation,” Malone nods to Cobain by singing, “You’re the superstar, entertain us,” an allusion to the weariness that fame breeds. For better and worse, Malone is still the entertainer.