The avant-pop songwriter whose career has intersected with that of Ariel Pink focuses on melody and delivers a delightfully weird full-length.

John Maus: We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves

John Maus first gained notice while collaborating and playing with fellow Cal Arts classmate Ariel Pink more than 10 years ago. Though both have since developed cultish followings by releasing distinctive takes on murky lo-fi, Maus has steeped his music in new wave signifiers, an association furthered by his deep, commanding voice. Whether he's evoking Joy Division's Ian Curtis or Bauhaus' Peter Murphy, Maus opts to abstract the genre, inserting noise into unexpected places and walking the line between sincerity and surreality.
From the beginning, he's been an artist fascinated by the parameters, paradoxes, and possibilities of pop. Earlier this year, Maus took a walk through New York's Central Park Zoo with a journalist from Self-Titled. "I didn't realize that the music I was making was especially weird," he says in the piece. "Honestly, I thought I was making Top 40 kind of stuff. It wasn't until people kept telling me so that I realized my work was thought of as something 'other' than that." If you're at all familiar with the Minnesota native's swampy retro-futurist synth-pop, you may understand why he might place emphasis on the word "other." One experience with his body of solo work (or brave live performances) makes clear that his could be categorized as "outsider" art, but it's difficult to say that without also seriously considering why. He makes thought-provoking music that's disguised as something else.
We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, his latest full-length, is the most vibrant and toothsome expression of Maus' pursuits yet. He keeps his vocals awash in gothic reverb and echo-driven effects, blurring the lines between what he's saying and emoting. Sometimes, as on "Cop Killer", a Jan Hammer-indebted number on which Maus sings over an iced bed of keys, the results are outlandish and oddly funny at the same time, in the way that certain scenes in David Lynch films can leap from chilling to comically exaggerated. ("Cop killer, let's kill the cops tonight/ Cop Killer, kill every cop in sight," he sings.) And then there's "Matter of Fact" immediately thereafter, a song whose staccato, orc-like chorus line is "Pussy is not a matter of fact." They're not the kind of earworms you want to find yourself singing aloud in public, but it might happen anyway.
Sonically, Maus works a minimal, primitive setup: sputtering drum machines and an arsenal of 1980s-vintage synth presets undercut his lyrics just as much as those exaggerated, often grotesque vocal turns do. Sometimes, these songs seem to exist solely to pose questions: Top 40 cheese or ironic cool? High-brow or low-brow? Honesty or posturing? Artifice or reality? But what makes We Must Become his finest full-length yet is how fluidly he communicates it all by foregrounding melody. On "Keep Pushing On", Maus' monastic, cellar-level singing lends the song the feel of a Gregorian chant-led exercise tape. Though the vocals and basslines on arpeggiated fever dream "Quantum Leap" mirror Joy Division's to an almost cartoonish degree, you still get a good sense of Maus' persona in the music. There's a genuine, almost maniacal sense of glee in the way he seems to approach each turn.
When Maus takes the stage, he plays with notions of performance by singing over his own backing tracks. He pogos, he screams, he runs-in-place and pulls his hair and spits and sweats and clenches up until he looks like he might burst through his button-down and chinos. It's hard to look away. Now Maus has a full set of songs whose architecture is just as sophisticated and riveting in actuality as it is in theory. While earlier records have been riddled by experiments gone awry (see: "Rights for Gays" and "Tenebrae", from 2007's Love Is Real), they also didn't feature the revolving parts and aerodynamic hooks of "Believer", the closing track here and one that glitters from any angle. And although there's another vocalist at his side in the lullaby lilt of "Hey Moon" (songwriter Molly Nilsson, who wrote and performed the song on her 2008 album These Things Take Time), the way Maus sings to the heavens makes it sound as though he's no longer alone with his thoughts. Spend a lot of time with this record, and it's hard not to feel like you're right there with him.


The second album from the acerbic and eclectic emo-rock band expertly bottles their energy as they sing about constantly pushing for more when given so little.

The Whaler

Home Is Where singer Brandon MacDonald is starting to dissociate. You might be too if you’re battling the inhibitions of being forced to live in a world you did not choose. “I always end up starting over again/The end of the world is taking forever,” she sings, as if in a daze. The band’s second LP, The Whaler, is billed as a concept album about how, to quote one song title, “everyday feels like 9/11”: a cyclical trudge through a catastrophe, its aftermath, and the ways in which we’ve become numb to it. Interpreting their I Became Birds follow-up as solely that, however, sells the record short. Instead, this album is the band bottling their energy as they find themselves constantly pushing for more when given so little: for actual enshrined equality, for the privilege of peace of mind, for the freedom to be an idiot and the luck to be forgiven. Home Is Where just want to live, really live, without feeling like they’re already dead.
After a nervous breakdown in 2021, MacDonald found herself disillusioned with the relentlessness of life and an increasingly apathetic society. She pinpoints the feeling on “9/12,” the shortest song on the record, placing minimalist piano over children babbling to offer one sentence only: “And on September 12th, 2001, everyone went back to work.” The band’s indictment is twofold: We tout resilience as a proud American trait, while unspeakable tragedies become increasingly mundane parts of our days. But MacDonald never sounds as weary or hopeless as the subject matter suggests. She’s wriggling and fighting for something, anything, to change—and that energy is what elevates The Whaler as a rowdy, worthwhile successor to I Became Birds.
Home Is Where approach emo like it’s a college course. Thanks to an unspoken tradition in the genre—cheeky name-drops like Chris Farley, Dale Earnhardt, and their lead single sharing its name with a Pittsburgh emo revival band—that’s apparent just by skimming the lyrics, but the real knowledge is in the music. The Whaler puts Home Is Where’s musical indexing skills on display, merging emo’s past and present into a fifth-wave blueprint of what makes the genre’s evolution so comprehensive. Tilley Komorny sprinkles in Midwest guitar tapping, Connor O’Brien nods to emo’s origins with heavy breakdowns on bass, and Josiah Gardella injects his drumming with the straightforward punk that started it all. Once again, MacDonald contributes delicate singing saw and harmonica to “Whaling for Sport” and the cascading horns that rain down in “Skin Meadow” sound like Cap’n Jazz covering the Olivia Tremor Control. Whirring above are tape loops they manually cut up, stomped under their boots, and popped into the microwave; the final product is pitched up and crinkled, creating a sepia-toned ambiance that lends instrumental outros and dreamy interludes a chilly air. Throughout, MacDonald splits her time between singing, yelling, and screaming, each mode purging a different type of heartfelt defeat. She builds off last year’s split Dissection Lesson to strengthen her scratchy, piercing tone in line with ’90s screamo titans like Orchid, a physically taxing undertaking that shows off her commitment to vocal growth.
Good emo music makes you feel their feelings; great emo music makes you see the world through their eyes. MacDonald’s lyrics render images like chewing on bread that’s turned to flesh, peeling a drunk driver off the asphalt like roadkill, feeding nickels and dimes to ducks in a pond. Even the song titles themselves invoke art film horror in the style of Jeff Mangum, be it pupils morphing into lily pads or a meadow comprised of stretched skin. Her penchant for inverted imagery often returns to the idea of god cowering from humans, and the extent to which pleasure has been drained from monumental events. “An all-knowing god doesn’t know what it’s like to not know anything at all,” she brags at one point. In “Yes! Yes! A Thousand Times Yes!” a minister grants the newlyweds their first kiss, but instead, they stare at each other awkwardly and drive home in separate cars.
Much of The Whaler oscillates between sounding repulsed and disillusioned. Several band members went from being proud Floridians hellbent on rehabbing their state’s reputation to frustrated former residents driven away by anti-trans legislation. When the daily give-and-take starts to feel like a losing bet, it’s hard not to grow cynical and view politicized hatred or mass violence as an inevitable pattern. During “Lily Pad Pupils,” MacDonald identifies with a hangman bringing flowers to the execution, or the whaler watching belugas wash up at her feet. As the song transitions from country emo twang to unnerving post-hardcore in an impressively discreet way, she lets out a scream that quivers with disgust and guilt: “Earn your urn!” How twisted to be forced into a harmful occupation simply by the regional and class boundaries fencing you in. Is a job just a job if it’s the only one available?
The Whaler is intended to make you feel unsteady, from MacDonald’s own spiraling to America’s great unraveling and the blind eye we turn to it. “You’re your own tapeworm,” she later screams, bile burning her throat, as if to question the very idea of nourishment. It’s arguably her most succinct metaphor for our new normal. On The Whaler, Home Is Where stick a finger in their wounds as a bonding mechanism, a gross display that they know how you feel. They’re grabbing a camcorder, sailing into the eye of the storm where the uncertainty and destructive winds come to a brief standstill, and marveling at how their tiny speck of a self is still existing at all. “I’m trying to show you,” MacDonald sings at one point, before amending the phrase: “I’m trying.”


The latest album from the meditative duo is an impressionistic portrait of life spent in transit.

Nomad

When the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō began the journey he would immortalize in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he carried only a paper coat, a bathrobe, rain gear, pen and paper, and a few mementos. TENGGER makes their trip with little more than a synth and a pump organ. Like Bashō’s landmark work of travel writing, the Japanese-South Korean couple’s second album for Brooklyn psych label Beyond Beyond Is Beyond, Nomad, is an impressionistic portrait of life spent in transit. Even when they linger to take in the view, the six songs here are largely formed around the idea of movement as a virtue in and of itself. They unfold with the logic of linked haiku; the individual sounds—gently arpeggiating analog synthesizers, droning harmonium, processed field recordings, the occasional tick of percussion—aren’t necessarily interesting in themselves, but by arranging them into elegant relationships with one another, TENGGER imbue them with a sense of rustic majesty.
TENGGER’s music often lacks rough edges and internal tension, which forces them to find less obvious ways of generating movement, something they do successfully across the album. They take cues from Neu! and Aguirre-era Popol Vuh, creating distinct floating worlds bonded by singer itta’s featherlight vocals and drawing them into one another with graceful precision. Throughout, field recordings of rushing and trickling water and, in “Eurasia,” what sounds like the distant sound of train tracks, introduce notes of motion and unpredictability into their hermetically sealed micro-environments.
But what makes Nomad instantly compelling is the way it both reflects and celebrates the feeling of a peaceful morning walk. Both “Bliss” and opener “Achime” set off with two-chord shuffles, shifting from one to the other at a steady hiker’s clip. In “Achime,” the chords land with a muffled crunch that evokes footfalls, while an organ swells to fill every available groove. itta recently said the group’s aim is to “make music that connects with the sounds of nature and the spirituality of making the music within that moment.” Accordingly, every note is given space and allowed to find its place in the greater whole. itta and synthesist Marqido’s roles almost seem to lie more in guiding the sounds than in producing them; their steady hands and faith in their own sense of timing make Nomad feel intensely personal.
itta and Marquido’s skills—their horticultural attention to detail and patience with their own material—are best-suited to moving at a walker’s pace. Like all good pilgrims, they know the true blessing lies in the journey itself, but that doesn’t stop them from pushing Nomad to a glorious destination. Closer “Flow” is goosed by a thick drone that gives the couple a rare counterforce, something to react to. They move together in ecstatic union, radiating sounds that they shape until they’re all resonating together on a single chord, everything tuned to the same pitch. And when the water once again comes streaming in near the album’s end, it’s clear and bright, fed by the deep wells of feeling TENGGER have drawn from the natural world.

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More interested in earmarking ideas than in formulating an overarching aesthetic proposition, Carly Rae Jepsen’s fifth album diversifies her portfolio of 1980s pop sounds.

The Loneliest Time

Cynicism is typically an unwelcome visitor in Carly Rae Jepsen’s castle. She is a sword-wielding cult hero with an army of believers: in the authority of a fluttering heart, in the gulf between desire and desperation, and most importantly, in the cathartic potential of a verse, chorus, and bridge. Since unleashing her starry-eyed worldview with the breakout 2012 hit “Call Me Maybe,” Jepsen has written songs like Ask Polly letters, full of breathless confessions and earnest wondering.
Yet there is cynicism to be found on The Loneliest Time, Jepsen’s fifth album. It’s folded into “Beach House,” the second single, which chronicles the singer’s misadventures with a series of unsavory men, from a pitiful mama’s boy to someone else’s husband to a (presumably fictional) Jeffrey Dahmer type. Sacrificing melody for character voices, the song chugs along mechanically, as if played by the Chuck E. Cheese house band. Making its unsubtle bid for relevance at a time when social media is flooded with first-person Hinge horror stories, “Beach House” feels corny and dated on arrival. Worse, from Jepsen’s mouth, it sounds plain wrong. Dating sucks; men are terrible. We’ve heard this before—but from the person who brought us “Cut to the Feeling” and “Now That I Found You”?
Though in many ways a red herring, “Beach House” suggests that Jepsen, who has invested heavily in swooning ’80s pop, is looking to diversify her portfolio. The Loneliest Time considers possible paths: dialing her typical pop maximalism up to outrageous new levels of camp; dialing it back to featherweight easy listening. But Jepsen seems more interested in earmarking ideas than in formulating an overarching aesthetic proposition. In the spaces between these experiments, she’s in familiar form, dropping rapturous lyrics into fizzy synth songs like sugar cubes into champagne. The Loneliest Time isn’t the introduction of a new era—a marketing concept that demands artists reinvent themselves every few years (particularly if they are women who have aged out of the term “ingénue”). It’s just a new album. And it’s just fine.
Jepsen’s best new ideas are found on “Western Wind,” a gorgeous meeting of music and message where Rostam stops by to play congas and help Jepsen realize her earth-toned dreams of a love as natural and all-encompassing as the elements. His fingerprints are all over this track, which recalls the gentle percussiveness of Haim’s “Summer Girl” and the graceful unspooling of Maggie Rogers’ “Fallingwater,” two other standout singles for their respective artists that he produced. I would gladly take five more “Western Wind”s, but the next-closest thing is “Far Away,” a song about trying to stay grounded that ends up rollerblading down Rainbow Road, aux percussion section in tow. Rostam reappears only on “Go Find Yourself or Whatever,” a lighters-up ballad whose sentimentality is winningly cut with a dash of snark.
Rostam is one of more than a dozen writers and producers, including Jepsen’s frequent collaborator Tavish Crowe, that she brought on for this album—her own little pop factory. As on previous projects, their output was substantial: Jepsen says she used a “mad, scientific process” to whittle down the tracklist from more than a hundred song ideas. Some that made the cut feel dashed off; you wonder if Jepsen could have written less, more carefully. The breakup banger “Talking to Yourself” feels like two different Dua Lipa outtakes cut-and-pasted together, with some distracting production flourishes tossed in. On “Sideways,” a wisp of a song that barely passes the two-minute mark, Jepsen is characteristically lovestruck, lost in daydreams about her new boo. She’s so busy smiling at strangers, she forgot to write a bridge.
Loneliness isn’t the dominant emotion on this record. It’s mostly felt as the liminal space in between crushes, which remain Jepsen’s pet projects. Even on the title track, an oddball duet with fellow Canadian Rufus Wainwright, loneliness is just a speck in the rearview mirror on Jepsen’s drive to reunite with an ex: “I’m coming back for you, baby!” she yelps in a theatrical spoken-word interlude, just before the strings swoop in and a car engine revs. Her chosen palette leans disco, a genre that implies the convergence of bodies—an antidote to loneliness, built right into the music. The nearby “Shooting Star” shares a similar aesthetic orientation, all rhythm guitar bubbles and spaceship synths and vocoder effects.
The best disco song on The Loneliest Time technically isn’t even on The Loneliest Time—it’s “Anxious,” a slinky bonus track. Here, the dancefloor lights dim slightly and the text brings more emotional nuance, as Jepsen grapples with jealousy and the idea that romance is sometimes distracting, not curative. The song’s placement in overflow seating feels arbitrary, reflecting a recurring frustration: Jepsen’s albums tend to function more as vessels for songs than as fully conceived projects. Releasing both E•MO•TION and Dedicated twice, as A-sides and B-sides, blurred their conceptual boundaries for no reason other than the availability of material; it’s hard to imagine how a theoretical The Loneliest Time Side B could clarify the new record’s somewhat unfocused vision. There’s no question that Jepsen can write songs that transport you—to the heat of the moment, the late-night neon glow, the driver’s seat on the way out of town. With a more defined roadmap, the whole album might have led somewhere worth sticking around for a while.


On their fearlessly creative, beat-heavy new record, the Montreal band spikes their dream pop with trip-hop, nu-metal, and other ’90s signifiers.

Motherhood

Perhaps it was inevitable that shoegaze would lose some of its capacity to awe over time. The genre’s disorienting squalls and nurturing fuzz create the impression of pulling beauty from murk, defying the sense that none of these noises should sound as alluring as they somehow do. It’s a powerful trick, or at least it used to be. But decades of repetition have proven there’s an almost innate property that makes the genre’s distorted guitars and vaporous synths work together so pleasurably, so even the most artful contemporary shoegaze rarely feels as daring as the genre’s heyday works. It’s akin to watching yet another magician submerge themselves in a water tank. Whatever appearance of risk the exercise once held is gone.
All that speaks to how No Joy emerged as one of the most distinguished shoegaze acts of the last decade: They’re one of the few that dares to upend the genre’s fundamental alchemy. The Montreal band, once a quartet but now essentially a solo project for principal member Jasamine White-Gluz, has grown bolder about challenging genre conventions since their 2010 debut, most recently deemphasizing the guitar and dabbling in electronica on 2018’s No Joy / Sonic Boom, a collaboration with Spaceman 3’s Pete Kember. But on Motherhood, No Joy’s fearlessly creative, magnificently beat-heavy new record, the outside genre influences are even more radical and esoteric. White-Gluz spikes her dream-pop with trip-hop, nu metal, and a pastiche of time-stamped ’90s club music, from early ’90s U.K. dance-rock to the breakneck big beat of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. The smeared vocals and synths still scan as shoegaze, but the rhythms are pure body music.
That Motherhood somehow never crosses the line into overkill is remarkable, because sometimes it seems to be trying. To heighten the uncanniness of “Nothing Will Hurt,” a knotty tangle of synthesizers and slap bass with echoes of Luscious Jackson, White-Gluz and her collaborators shoved bananas into microphones and wedged kitchen knives into guitar necks. Much as musicians love to trade stories about them, these kinds of DIY studio hacks usually don’t make much difference, but here the cumulative effect lends to the sense of delirium. Even more audacious is the charcoal-blackened “Dream Rat,” which goes full thrash with a viciously growly assist from White-Gluz’s sister Alissa, the vocalist for the Swedish death metal outfit Arch Enemy. Another metal luminary, Kittie’s Tara McLeod, sits in on guitar for the whole album, and for added texture she plays a bit of banjo on several songs, too.
Each song is a Chopped basket, a mish-mash of clashing ingredients that White-Gluz somehow makes work together, from the beat flips and DJ scratches of “Four” to the snapping snares and Siouxsie and the Banshees wails of “Ageless.” And, like the best Chopped chefs, she treats the Cap’n Crunch as reverentially as she does the wagyu. In the hands of a different artist, the album’s hard drum machines and amplified alterna-rock production might be played for kitsch, but White-Gluz never looks down at the sounds she borrows. As irreverent and inherently whimsical as the music often is, White-Gluz’s songwriting is dead serious. Her lyrics blur in and out of focus, but the audible ones touch on motherhood, bodily sacrifice, and fears of aging out of fertility. “Grateful for the family that loves me still, but I can’t seem to make my own,” she sings on the closer “Kidder.”
That sincerity is the secret to why the album hangs together. While White-Gluz fucks around plenty on Motherhood, she’s never just fucking around. In her hands, eccentric genre cues become a means of making difficult subject matter go down easy. And in the process, she reclaims a very ’90s ideal: the belief that if you earnestly love music styles, however mismatched, they should pair together. It didn’t always work out that way in the ’90s, of course– no amount of good intentions was going to redeem some of those Big Audio Dynamite or Bran Van 3000 records—but here White-Gluz wills it so. In the process she’s achieved something remarkable: a shoegaze album with a rare scope and an even rarer sense of fun and imagination.

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Reworking his 2020 album Actual Presence, the Los Angeles percussionist links up with friends like Deantoni Parks and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, while Laraaji and Iasos lend new-age gravitas.

Extra Presence

Like a West Coast Bill Laswell, Los Angeles-based producer, composer, and percussionist Carlos Niño possesses golden ears and platinum musical connections—i.e., talented folks who happen to be his friends. He’s a community-builder and conceptualist who brings an indomitable optimism to every project he helms. For nearly two decades, Niño has lent a utopianist duende to hip-hop, ambient, jazz, and new age. In the defunct Ammoncontact, he was one of the earliest artists to infuse hip-hop with new-age spirituality and cosmic-jazz atmospheres. On 2004’s One in an Infinity of Ways, he and partner Fabian Ammon Alston released a track called “Healing Vibrations.” It’s not a stretch to say that the title of his soul-jazz ensemble Build An Ark’s Peace With Every Step album could be Niño’s musical motto. Extra Presence is yet one more piece of Niño and pals’ sprawling mosaic of beatitude.
Constructed from a 2019 improv performance and then retrofitted with overdubs in his studio during the pandemic, with help from his collaborators, Extra Presence is an expanded version of Niño & Friends’ self-released 2020 album Actual Presence. Like its predecessor, it’s decidedly a headphone listen. These musicians revel in the cumulative power of minutiae coalescing into detailed tapestries. You can hear that approach on “Luis’s Special Shells Alternate Mix”: Featuring said shells and keyboardist Jamael Dean, the track is a miniaturist wonderland of ASMR-inducing percussion and synthesizer textures. The tiniest sound takes on monumental importance in this microscopic sonic environment. Niño’s predilection for gongs, chimes, bells, and other percussive tools lays a heavenly metal foundation for many of these pieces.
In a coup, Niño enlisted ambient/new-age avatars Laraaji and Iasos to add luster to his beatless excursions. The former contributes zither to “AmazonianPulse,” which begins with dripping water, twitchy scratching noises, and insectoid chittering. When Nate Mercereau’s placid guitar and Laraaji’s twinkling zither finally enter the frame, after three minutes of this disorienting collage, it’s like sunlight dappling dense flora. Iasos appears on two tracks. On “Mushroomeclipse,” Iasos contributes, as Niño puts it, “celestial sounds.” This is the music you hear in a dream in which you’re slowly sinking in a calm, clear lake.
On a more kinetic tip, “In the Moment” evokes the pastoral chamber jazz of Third Ear Band via Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s violin, Devin Daniels’ alto sax, Randy Gloss’ pandeiro slaps, and Niño’s tersely suspenseful synth. Funk rarely flows as sparely or blissfully as it does on “Actually,” which pits Deantoni Parks’ slyly funky beats and rimshots against Dean’s pointillistic piano filigrees and Mercereau’s probing bass.
“Dreamishappening” appears in two different iterations, plus a separate reprise. The instrumental’s trip-hop hauntology could soundtrack an eerie scene in a movie. The vocal version features Shabazz Palaces MC Ishmael Butler’s diamond-sharp, interstellar-traveling poetry (“See, I rode in on a moonbeam from the indigo corridors”) amid a paradise of Niño’s crystalline tintinnabulation and Dean’s seductively slurring keyboards. The result is a zenith of oneiric hip-hop, or perhaps D’Angelo’s Voodoo in zero gravity.
The album closes with the nearly 23-minute “Recurrent Reiki Dreams,” whose serene swirl of wind chimes, cirrus-wisp synth pads, and susurrating waves harks back to the calmest moments of Niño & Friends’ 2012 album Aquariusssssss. When you have Iasos in your ranks, you let him burble and drift for as long as he wants, and on “Recurrent Reiki Dreams,” the new-age icon proves that he still has the transcendentally tranquil touch. One should always harbor skepticism toward anyone claiming to make “healing” music—even someone as steeped in aural spirituality as Niño. But on Extra Presence, more often than not, he and his comrades seem to have cracked the code.


On her new album, the Memphis singer-songwriter and guitarist pens her most heavy-hearted songs, treating love and loss like old scars, fondly remembered.

Valerie June: The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers

When Valerie June arrived, she ignited conversations for the daring, easy way she mixed folk, soul, and Appalachian old-time music. The Memphis singer-songwriter and guitarist flaunted the fiddle and the nasal projection of Appalachian balladry on her 2013 label debut, Pushin’ Against a Stone, but they were also overshadowed at times between Richard Swift’s Wurlitzer and producer Dan Auerbach’s hi-fi touch. Tracing the gnarled roots of Appalachian music might lead you to Scotland or to Mississippi, depending, and June only wishes to further tangle those lines, while never fully abandoning the songcraft traditions that represent home to her.
Her latest, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, is probably her most far-reaching (look no further than the trap beat of “Within You”). But, crucially, this doesn’t feel like a calculated step as much as a symptom of something closer to the album’s center: June is carrying a noticeably heavier heart. Throughout these songs of love and loss and the acceptance of bygones, she sounds like she’s finger-tracing her own scars, looking down on them with a half-smile, remembering the story behind each one. It’s not as much a “feel good” record as her prior two, but it is no doubt a “feel more” record.
WIth ambitions set plainly high and an assist from producer Jack Splash, June delicately layers parts beneath her unmistakable voice, like memories converged beneath her calm. “You and I,” an early standout that blends the watercolor-vocal shading of Julianna Barwick into a ballooning ballad, features no fewer than 15 players, not one of whom overstays their welcome. As if to pause for reflection, June places short interludes around the best songs here, the spots where you might be inclined to pause anyway and let it sink in, culminating in an ambient track of birdsong and wind chimes to close out the album.
“Call Me a Fool,” which brings in the Memphis and Stax legend Carla Thomas for backing vocals and a spoken-word intro, is the grand centerpiece, a graceful retrofit of Etta James’ “I’d Rather Go Blind.” When June gets to the kicker, her declaration that the reward of loving the right person is worth any accompanying humiliation—“And I’ll be a fool anytime”—she casually chops off the front vowel of “And,” leaving just this beautiful and cracked “N’d’IIIII,” scratching its way from center stage to the back of the house. It is her perfect note.
June tends to write in easy, sly rhyme schemes reminiscent of the late John Prine, whom she eulogized last April with a solo cover of “In Spite of Ourselves,” the famous duet that they performed while touring together in 2018. For every moment when this style borders on hokey, there are others when it feels complete in its Prine-like knack for waiting until the very last word to earn the listener’s smirk. There’s an unmistakable whiff of “She’s my baby/I don’t mean maybe” when June rhymes “day we first met” with “had not one regret” and inevitably “don’t you forget” on the high-bar-setting opener “Stay.” Meanwhile, a flurry of strings and a solitary flute rise to the surface. The moment speaks for June on The Moon and Stars, simultaneously marveling at all the wonders that are out there, and at the truth that all you need is one good thing right here.

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The South Central rapper RJMrLA follows up his official debut album with a full-length ride-along with DJ Mustard; the fruitful collaboration features some of the producer’s best work in years.

The Ghetto

After grinding out mixtape buzz over the better half of a decade, the South Central rapper RJ spent 2017 polishing his sound and his brand. Around the time of his official debut, last year’s MrLA, he even changed his stage name to RJMrLA. While it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, the new name has weight, believability, and a much higher Google ranking, even if it’s hard to shake the Pitbull-like corniness in dubbing yourself Mr. Anything. His local bona fides got a boost from the fact that MrLA, a slinky, summery record that emphasized his pop sensibilities, was released by 400 Summers, a label conglomerate of DJ Mustard’s 10 Summers and YG’s 4 Hunnid imprints. It helps his standing even more that his latest release, The Ghetto, is a full-length ride-along with Mustard himself.
A few years ago, just after the uptempo sound of a DJ Mustard beat became the dominant sound of rap radio, the producer began to flounder with the album format. At his peak, his debut, 2014’s 10 Summers, crystallized his reach by pummeling listeners with bangers crowded with A-listers. He’s tried to release that same album several times over, but in the wake of an industry that imitated and then moved on from him, DJ Mustard is no longer hip-hop’s center of gravity. So it makes sense for him to share a bill with his new label’s first artist and, by extension, burrow back into his L.A. bedrock. The Ghetto is not the fleshed-out work of auteurship that hip-hop fans have come to expect from the pairing of a single producer with a single rapper. Instead, the stakes feel lower—more like a DJ Mustard compilation with a deserving host at its center. If MrLA was RJ’s breakthrough, The Ghetto sounds like his DJ Mustard-sponsored congratulations.
Over 11 tracks and half as many guests, RJ is the center of the party even when he’s competing with much bigger names. Whether he’s kissing his diamonds on “Make a Million” or setting his dating ground rules on “No Pictures, No Videos,” much of the album is a showcase for RJ’s goofy tongue-wagging. More than ever—and especially with DJ Mustard’s R&B-friendly bracing—he frequently carves songs out of poppy little chunks: a chorus, a verse, a chorus. The rare breaks from the party are not sighs of relief but traumatized tales from the street. On “I Do...,” RJ sounds breathless as he unspools conspiracies over a menacing rattle of a beat: “I think my neighbor talkin’ to the federal officials/I’m paranoid, keep a loaded Tec between my pillows.”
Throughout, DJ Mustard’s beats remain sparse, and he never strays far from the club. Still, The Ghetto is proof that there’s more range in the producer’s arsenal than the “Hey!” chants and strikingly crisp—and basic—percussion that defined his radio run. “Don’t Make Me Look Stupid,” a vainly anxious relationship rebuke, is not a nostalgic take on G-funk so much as a bridge to its future. Simple, menacing keyboard lines are a Mustard trademark, and several songs feature pounding, stammering piano riffs as basslines. Elsewhere, DJ Mustard softens his touch and designs atmospheres instead of rigid boxes. On “Been Hot” RJ raps in the sustained afterglow of a liquid synth that’s adorned only by sporadic snares. Like many of DJ Mustard’s beats, there’s barely anything to it, just beautiful empty space to be filled. Spare as it is, with RJ riding shotgun, The Ghetto is a concentrated batch of some of the producer’s best work in years.


On his third album, the smooth Australian rocker leaves behind the arch character studies and tries to craft something more personal and sincere.

Miami Memory

Edgy comedians like to say they’re testing the waters. Alex Cameron wants you to come on in ’cause the water is fine. On his 2014 debut, Jumping the Shark, the Australian rocker masqueraded as an aging, washed-up musician. His 2017 album Forced Witness was a delightful and at times outright offensive journey to the center of the male psyche, full of sleazy, self-congratulatory exploits delivered with one eyebrow arched. Now settled in a long-term relationship with Girls actress Jemima Kirke, Cameron describes his third album, Miami Memory, as a more sincere statement. For the first time in his life, he says, he feels capable of writing a genuine love song.
As with most things Alex Cameron, it’s best to take “sincere” with a grain of salt. Several of these songs appear scripted for a dirtbag divorcé; others, like “Gaslight”—“Hear me out, I’m a nice guy”—are clearly tongue in cheek. The most memorable line on the record, “Eating your ass like an oyster,” is more outrageous than romantic. And musically, Miami Memory feels like a stuffy reheat of Forced Witness’ groovy ’80s synth-rock. With the assistance of saxophonist Roy Molloy, that album managed to sound sophisticated no matter how self-evidently terrible its characters. Here, blocky synth structures feel mismatched to the themes, and heavy-handed arrangements sometimes threaten to overwhelm the lyrics.
Cameron’s greatest skill is cinematic evocations of pouty, insecure men in stubborn denial of their failings, like Bruce Springsteen trying to get inside the head of Brett Kavanaugh. “I got friends in Kansas City with a motherfuckin’ futon couch/If that’s how you want to play it,” he scoffs on “Divorce,” the voice of a man too mad to recognize that he’s playing himself. Miraculously, the schtick also works outside the sarcastic register. He’s maybe most affecting on “End Is Nigh,” an almost countrypolitan synth ballad about an alcoholic fatalist who’s having a bad time at 12-step meetings: “They remind me of my daddy with that Bible shit/And drinking coffee makes me wanna die more.” You don’t necessarily need firsthand experience with this kind of personal dysfunction; Cameron makes it both painfully real and bleakly comical.
When Miami Memory attempts to reach outside the discomfort zone, it’s less convincing. “Far From Born Again” is feel-good disco-funk about a woman who reminds me of Candy, Maggie Gyllenhaal's scrappy, self-made pornographer on HBO’s The Deuce. But while “Far from born again/She’s doing porn again” is excellent as a one-liner, Cameron never reaches in to explore that tension, the way Candy’s relationship with her puritanical mother complicates her success in sex work. Cameron’s narrator is close enough to the action to criticize hypocritical customers—“Same men that tell her stop are the same suckers that pay”—but distant enough that he comes off as a voyeur.
The best Alex Cameron songs lift—or rather sink—you into worlds created by deeply flawed characters: On Forced Witness’ “Running Outta Luck,” his misguided antihero fell for a stripper and, blinded by love and jealousy, took off on the run from her other clients. On Miami Memory’s “Bad for the Boys,” he’s singing about the trick rather than doing it: “Good old Dane, what a shame/He got done for a sexual harassment claim … Never thought I’d feel bad for the boys.” You hate to say it, but this could be a far funnier song if oblivious, predatory “Dane” wrote it, and Cameron has the rare ability to illustrate the creeper perspective while simultaneously undermining it. Instead, his last lines—“Guess I don’t feel so bad, feel so bad, feel so bad for the boys”—seem like they were supposed to be the subtext.
Perhaps Cameron boxed himself in here: He’s the loudest character in his own music, but he’s also established that it would be out of character for that music to be anywhere near as self-reflective as he is in life. As in the case of Stephen Colbert, it’s hard to drop a winning irony act and remain equally entertaining. It’s easy enough to see why Cameron would like to have it both ways—it’s a lot harder to pull off.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Of MIKE’s four projects last year, War in My Pen is the cleanest-sounding, but the New York rapper still prizes a faraway vibe that rewards close listening.

War in My Pen

MIKE murmurs more than he flows. The 20-year-old rapper doesn’t mix his vocals high or bury them; he floats, cushioned and suspended, within his music. He has a lot to say, but he doesn’t seem concerned about who hears it. He shares this lack of concern with his friends and compatriots—Medhane, Adé Hakim, Navy Blue, Jazz Jodi, several others. Together, they feel more like a huddle than a movement, a group of introverted, dreamy souls trying to hold on to something intangible that they sense might be pried from them.
Notably, one of those friends is Earl Sweatshirt: “I be with Mike and Med/Nowadays I be with Sage and with Six-press, ya dig?” Earl rapped on “Nowhere2go” from November’s Some Rap Songs. Earl doesn’t appear on War in My Pen, MIKE’s fourth projects of 2018, but MIKE’s name was all over Some Rap Songs, and the style they are developing in tandem feels like one complete thought that requires both of them to express. When the sound is this dreamy, and this murky, you don’t really get clear takeaways, but the dazed solitude and determined quiet of MIKE’s music taps into a general sense that there is entirely too much noise; that raising your voice to match it contributes to madness, and that the only reasonable response is to draw inward.
Of MIKE’s four projects in 2018, War in My Pen is the cleanest-sounding; the drums pop more clearly but the sounds around them remain buckled, bent, unreal. The production, provided mostly by MIKE under his DJ Blackpower alias, treats samples like distant rumors: On “neverKnocked,” MIKE raps over a faraway horn section, like some lost Philly soul memory beaming in off the stars. “Rottweiler” warps a vocal snippet until it no longer sounds human; “UCR” chops up church organ into gasps and blurts. The loops are so transformed that it’s hard to tell if they actually loop or just slowly degenerate. The sounds move in the same irregular orbit as MIKE’s thoughts and verse structures— by the time the song cuts out, you are only just beginning to discern its shape. MIKE has cited King Krule as an influence on his aesthetic, but you can also hear something of Ariel Pink’s ability to turn comforting sounds into something clammy, alien and strange.
MIKE’s voice is soft, but he writes with a quietly snowballing intensity that lends itself to immersion and makes quotation tricky. “Who was really there when the bliss wasn’t?” he asks on “neverKnocked.” It’s a resonant line, but it has a lot more weight coming after “Days where I was really in the crib, hungry/Really ’bout to lick something.” This wholeness, the sense that you can’t pick bits out of his music to use however you want, feels like a conscious decision. Even when the music pulls all the way back and exposes MIKE to center stage, like on the brief, hushed “Smoke,” MIKE raps like he’s obscuring his mouth with a napkin. “I remember what I did for hope,” he says, then his words turn unintelligible again. “Papa told me if I waited, I’d be there alone,” he says, later. The next two lines, static.
This catch-and-release game he plays with your ears means that his plainspoken admissions hit harder: “Y’all say I look like my dad/For my mom, that’s a problem,” he deadpans on “Choco.” Few rappers who craft their words as carefully as MIKE display this little regard for their fate in the mix. You have to lean forward, focus hard.
Demanding that your audience listen intensely to your music, in a cultural moment when another album is always a single finger twitch away, is its own radical act. As MIKE blurs the line separating sound from sense, dipping in and out of his own productions, he may encourage as many to tune out as to hone in. But that’s the point. If MIKE’s music has a singular overriding concern, it is devotion—to yourself, to friends and to family, devotion to craft. Small circles, dedicated listeners, strong bonds: These are MIKE’s currencies. The longer you spend time with him, the more valuable they seem. Maybe you are your truest self when only the devoted hear you.


Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus devote their debut record to their singular bond. Each amplifies the other’s songwriting, enriches the detail, and heightens the emotion.

The Record

The steadfast devotion between the women of Boygenius is a subject worthy of a dog-eared literary classic, one that’s passed from friend to friend until the pages come fluttering off the spine. In 2016, Julien Baker spotted Lucy Dacus reading Henry James in the green room of a venue and felt an immediate affinity; the two became friends and developed mutual, unspoken crushes as they wrote each other lengthy correspondences online. A month later, a similar kinship transpired between Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, who traded favorite authors and poets in their own email thread. They were three young singer-songwriters of shrewd sensitivity, tentatively navigating early-career acclaim; “Things were happening for us all at the same time and I think we’ve gravitated to each other,” Baker has said. Cut to 2018, when they got booked together on a triple bill and headed into the studio, thinking they’d record one song. They emerged with six. By all accounts, making that initial Boygenius EP was an ineffable experience, the consequence of which should not be diminished through careless simile: “It was not like falling in love,” Bridgers states. “It was falling in love.”
It’s not just that Boygenius poke fun at the degree to which male artists are lionized—in the EP artwork imitating Crosby, Stills, & Nash; their recent recreation of Nirvana’s 1994 Rolling Stone cover; and the new album’s working title contenders like In Rainbows and The White Album. It’s not just that their commitment to making music together pushes against the competitive forces of patriarchy, in the same spirit as women-led supergroups from Wild Flag to the Highwomen. It is that the three women seem to actually love each other, as expressed on their long-awaited debut album, ultimately titled The Record. It’s a kind of love that rejects the ingrained impulse for women to route their emotional, spiritual, and erotic attention away from their peers and toward men—what the feminist poet Adrienne Rich diagnosed in a famous essay—but also troubles the commonly accepted division between romance and friendship. Boygenius are teammates, confidantes, soon-to-be onstage make-out partners; the songs on The Record are largely for each other, about each other, littered with inside references.
This time, Dacus, Bridgers, and Baker bring in the best guys in the business: Jay Som’s Melina Duterte on bass, Autolux’s Carla Azar on drums, Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin as engineer, and Catherine Marks on co-production. The Pulitzer-nominated novelist Elif Batuman wrote the introductory essay; Oscar-nominated actress Kristen Stewart directed three Boygenius music videos. Boygenius embrace how we are always responding to and being formed by others, and how this porousness can enrich our lives. As they wonder on the album’s opener, in braided unison: “Who would I be without you, without them?”
“With You Without Them” is a kitchen hymn sung under soft morning light; it is a song about history, inheritance, and in that spirit carries on with the swooning folk harmonies last heard on the EP’s closer, “Ketchum, ID.” Dacus, Baker, and Bridgers express gratitude to the preceding generations who shaped the people they love—their father, their father’s mother—and ask to take part in this lineage, sharing storylines until they and their intimates become a kind of family too. “Give me everything you’ve got/I’ll take what I can get,” the trio sings a capella, then reciprocates the request: “I’ll give everything I’ve got/Please take what I can give.” The first four tracks of The Record were written independently, and “With You Without Them” is so evidently by Dacus, a ditty she’d sing while washing dishes; it shares a bloodline with her Historian cut “Pillar of Truth.” Here and elsewhere, her voice provides a warm and sturdy foundation, cradling the others’ like a well-loved rocking chair.
Being a touring musician might mean only a brief layover at home, and so the next song drags you out the front door into the Sprinter, Converse laces untied. Led by Baker, the rabble-rousing idealist who was railing against George W. Bush as a 10-year-old, “$20” is a madcap adventure that invokes the spirit of a famous Vietnam protest photo as it tells a story of youthful recklessness. The Tennessee singer taps into her past as a hardcore frontwoman, fulfilling her wish for More Sick Riffs; she also activates a combustive, daredevil streak in her bandmates, who ditch the refined patience of their EP to scream like hell. Later on, the three trade verses on the headbanging “Satanist,” in which they play adrift kids scrounging for shady ecstasy and trying on renegade poses. “Will you be an anarchist with me?/Sleep in cars and kill the bourgeoisie,” Bridgers sings—then a minute later unleashes wails that sound both like the victim trapped in a burning building and the fire engine racing to the rescue.
Banter flies while Baker is at the wheel, and at other parts of the ride, it’s like the passengers have lapsed quietly into their own thoughts. Guided by the cashmere fog of Bridgers’ voice, “Revolution 0” and “Emily I’m Sorry” exist less within the Boygenius milieu than the rippling, snow-lined headspace of Punisher; the other band members seem only to enter in the form of graceful backing harmonies. Bridgers alludes to real-life incidents whose details remain obscured, former lovers who occupy an uncertain position in her life. The backdrop to the hushed, crumbling apologia “Emily I’m Sorry” seems to be a defamation lawsuit that strained an already-fraught relationship; Bridgers’ mind wanders to apocryphal wastelands, to Montreal, as she entreats the person she loves to forgive her for going astray. “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am,” she confesses.
The closer you get to somebody, the more you can fail them, and The Record recoils with the humiliating reminder of our own insufficiency: Surely, we imagine, they can do better than us. On the skydiving country-pop song “Not Strong Enough,” the trio offers a rejoinder to Sheryl Crow as they profess to lack the toughness, the solidity, to be what another person needs: “I tried, I can’t/Stop staring at the ceiling fan.” It’s a cowardly and relatable strategy, preemptively curbing disappointment by shrinking away. Elsewhere, they wonder whether distance would have been better in the first place. The Simon & Garfunkel redux and album highlight “Cool About It” explores the anxious, conciliatory phase after a breakup when you emerge from a relationship into a wilderness of pleasantries and deceptions. Friendliness is its own agony: “Wishing you were kind enough to be cruel about it,” Baker sings.
To be wounded, actually and acutely: this is the price of real intimacy. And real intimacy is what you find on The Record, the melding of what’s yours and mine—a favorite Joan Didion quote, songs by Iron & Wine and the Cure, passages from Ecclesiastes—until what’s left is something greater than the sum. Reimagining the EP standout “Me & My Dog” from a new and wiser vantage point, the album closer “Letter to an Old Poet” is, in one sense, an account of Bridgers moving on from a terrible crush. But it’s also subtle testament to the influence of our friends as we carry on in life. The song alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a Dacus staple, as it seems to actualize a wish in one of her best-known lyrics: “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers/Dedicated to new lovers.” As we evolve into new versions of ourselves, our friends accompany us into the unknown, bearing witness to and taking part in our transformations. They may hurt us sometimes, but it’s worth it; in the end, better than anything is being understood.


On his first album under his own name, the artist behind Neon Indian returns with the funniest and most musically accomplished songs of his career.

World of Hassle

For Alan Palomo, the past eight years were an education. In the time since 2015’s VEGA INTL. Night School, his shimmering third LP under the Neon Indian moniker, Palomo felt the need to hone his chops. “I realized I was the least technically adept person in my band,” he recounted in a recent interview with Tone Glow. So he became a more accomplished musician, learning to sight-read and digging deeper into international pop music of the 1980s. He arrives anew on World of Hassle, his first album under his own name. Gone are the submerged vocals and nostalgic haze of his chillwave landmarks like 2009’s Psychic Chasms, and in their place is a clearer facsimile of disco, funk, and boogie: ever-present influences that were once buried in the mix. It’s been a long time since the last Palomo record, yes, but it’s because his vision required serious dedication to realize.
Opener “The Wailing Mall” announces a vital touchstone: Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man. Across World of Hassle, Palomo writes in a wry, self-aware tone that injects humor into each song, and he occasionally scrapes the lower end of his register for effortlessly cool talk-singing. These tools transform songs like “Nudista Mundial ’89” into convivial party-starters. Finding a goofball compatriot in Mac DeMarco, Palomo describes reveling at a nude beach, folding in cartoonish vocals around a sticky hook. “This ain’t no place/It’s a state of mind,” he sings of their debauchery. Playing the role of hedonistic sleazeball, his commitment to the bit makes the breezy atmosphere irresistible: The dizzying synths and candied falsetto sound like a margarita-infused reverie.
In the past, Palomo drenched his vocals in reverb and layers of texture, letting the grooves do the heavy lifting. On World of Hassle, his singing takes center stage alongside his sharpest storytelling to date. On “Big Night of Heartache,” Palomo aims for an economical beachside tearjerker by way of Hiroshi Sato’s 1982 city pop masterpiece Awakening. Amid romantic musical signifiers—seductively bent guitar notes, keyboards that swoop across octaves—he gets unceremoniously dumped, but not without bargaining (“I’ll lose the mustache”). The best city pop can make you feel on top of the world, and Palomo uses its luxurious setting to satirize a manchild in a moment of smallness. “I’m not crying, you’re crying,” he sheepishly retorts to an ex-lover, emasculated and ashamed.
World of Hassle is Palomo’s most fun record because it’s his most accomplished. His studied approach is clear on a track like “La Madrileña,” where a loping synth melody bolsters his hypnotic vocal delivery, showcasing his newfound ability to communicate a clear mood. On “Meutrière,” French singer Flore Benguigui’s vocals ooze charm alongside laser-sharp synths, painting a neon-lit noir. World of Hassle abounds with these simple pleasures: The percussive taps in “Stay-at-Home DJ” are delightfully waggish, the saxophone across “Club People” blares with magnetic verve, and the flurrying synths in “The Return of Mickey Milan” accentuate the album’s most memorable chorus. Palomo’s previous albums sounded like the ghosts of ’80s memories. On World of Hassle he offers some unforgettable nights of his own.


This shadowy collective’s debut album is as nebulous as its members’ identities. An amorphous mixture of guitars, electronics, and wispy vocals, it mimics the blurriness of a dream.

Princ€ss

Can you really proclaim yourself a “supergroup” when all your members are anonymous? On Princ€ss’ self-titled debut, the mysterious collective teases us with this question. Going purely off their nebulous music, one could start to draw any number of guesses: Could this be the result of a one-off power trio of Tirzah, ML Buch, and Mica Levi? Or a hazy bedroom jam session helmed by Lolina and Astrid Sonne? Perhaps it’s merely a family affair from the label it emerged from, Dublin’s wherethetimegoes, which over a series of low-key releases has documented the myriad experimental sounds germinating across the city. Dabbling in disembodied drill, cloudy laptop pop, shapeless dream folk, and iridescent organ drones, the label has staged a quiet rebellion against its city’s reputation for raucous punk bands and pubs overflowing with Celtic fiddle music vying to appease the tourists.
However this enigmatic collaboration came to be, the music itself feels like an amalgamation—a mutant, multi-headed half-band frozen midway through evolution. Chorus-soaked guitars seep into buzzing string drones, while vocalists seem to come and go at their leisure, sometimes appearing so distant in the mix you’ll question if you actually heard them or not. It flows with the blurry logic of a dream, yet Princ€ss’ hypnagogia isn’t exactly nocturnal, but shimmering and bright, more a blinding desert mirage than a foggy city street. The claustrophobic, field-recording-like nature of the mixing makes the whole thing sound as if you’re hearing it from inside your phone, yet its disconnected loose ends still give it an expansive quality that billows like a slowly shape-shifting cloud.
Though Princ€ss occasionally flirt with more traditional song structures, rolling out echoing shoegaze guitars, those chords and vocals feel like just small pieces of the puzzle. Such seemingly song-like forms are eventually overtaken by smaller details: In “Point of View,” it’s a distorted pulse that emerges halfway through, pulling the rest of the track into its digital mulcher. On “Sometimes,” the singer’s sparse vocals and a wilted guitar line sway back and forth until a sighing synthetic tone emerges, washing everything out like an engine releasing steam. Instruments constantly seem to be breaking down; the spindling harp melody of “Hoist Point” practically collapses beneath the overblown sound of a creaking cello, until that too becomes eclipsed by a silvery ticking rhythm like coins clinking together.
Rather than tearing itself apart, however, Princ€ss’ debut moves with a remarkable, slippery unity. “Crying” opens the record with a heaving, churning mass of strings, while quieter moments like “Wow” draw a peaceful bath of swirling, washed-out synths. It’s hard to pin down much about Princ€ss, but their music speaks to a sense of absence. As a “band,” they seem to lie at the very edge of whatever the term might mean these days. Guitars bleed into plastic loops, songs disintegrate into formless electronic dust, and traditional instruments are subsumed into a wall of hypnotic feedback. Princ€ss’ debut asks a lot of questions, but in refusing to answer any of them, they instead leave us floating, unresolved, and in between.


On his debut mixtape, the Manchester rapper deploys his thick, graceful raps with expert precision. It’s a promising opening statement, crafted with candor, wit, and a slick sense of style.

Respect the Come Up

Manchester rapper Meekz has a voice like treacle: thick and heavy, with a tang of burnt sweetness. His accent—sculpted in the city’s Gorton district—means he can rhyme “stupidly” with “luckily” and “mumsy” with “comfy.” Meekz seems to be aware of the fact that his voice is compelling, employing it sparingly and deliberately. Since first surfacing in 2018, he’s eschewed ubiquity; rather than churning out a constant stream of singles and social media posts, he’s kept his catalog to a handful of carefully crafted singles that funnel hints of No Limit, Luniz, and G-funk swagger through bottom-heavy production. He makes events of his music videos—rolling tanks across industrial wastelands for “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop;” hanging out of a helicopter above London on “Respect the Come Up”—then retreats, as if his permanently-affixed ski mask isn’t enough to fully conceal him from the world. Respect the Come Up is his first full mixtape, and relatively tight at 10 tracks. It serves as an exacting personal manifesto as much as a public broadcast, one summed up in the spare arrangement, and title, of its opening track:  “Say Less.”
For all his introspection, Meekz and his producers make rap in widescreen. The sax on “Hustler’s Ambition” is pure Michael Bay; the Dave-featuring, heavy-flexing “Fresh Out the Bank” boasts strings fit for Steven Spielberg. On “Take Losses,” he channels boxing pay-per-view bluster with Tyson Fury in his corner. Lyrically, he zooms in and out with casual ease, tracing a line between street ennui and the boredom of riches: “It’s sick to imagine all these things that I think in the mansion, going into an Instagram caption,” he offers on “Instagram Caption.” A zig-zag flow makes these reflections sound idle, even as he toes a balance between blunt force and wisecracking. Such is the sheer mass of his voice: It gives a half-baked, half-sung chorus like “I need more money” a gravity it doesn’t deserve. But just as it’s easier to accept that gravity is simply there than it is to explain how it works, Meekz sweeps you along with his candor—and soon offers rewards, turning out pithy, searching lines with disarming nonchalance.
The themes here are well-worn, even after less than a dozen tracks. But songs like skippy, guitar-picking highlight “Patience” suggest Meekz can speak for an audience beyond his personal confines too. And when he does, with that voice, you can’t help but listen in.


The duo’s grab-bag approach continues on their third studio album, an 18-track marathon with more good than bad but little of substance.

Cloud 909

For the Southern California rap duo Audio Push, adaptability has been a double-edged sword. Oktane and Price have been in the industry for nearly a decade,  and though they’ve been signed and released by Interscope twice since 2009, and have released a dozen mixtapes, two EPs and two studio albums in that time, they remain anonymous to many rap fans. It’s not for lack of talent; more for lack of a stable identity. Since entering the industry, during the Great Jerkin’ Craze of 2009, the Inland Empire natives have tried on so many looks, from aping Tribe to aping Lil Wayne, that it’s become difficult for the casual fan to pick them out of a lineup. They have no trouble keeping up with the times; in fact, their problem is that they blend in too well with whatever’s going on.
The duo’s grab-bag approach continues on their third studio album, Cloud 909, an 18-track marathon with more good than bad but little of substance. With its constant toggling between conscious, swag, and street lyricism amid its peaceful, sun-warmed beats, it splits the difference between early Kendrick and current Drake, and loses much of the charisma somewhere in the middle. Oktane and Price are strong rappers, with flexible flows and a gift for beat selection. Their music is polished and professional. But, if you have ten hours to burn, you can listen to the new record ten times over and come out knowing very little about either one of them.
That’s partly because whole songs are given over to nonsense. Take “No Bad Days,” for instance, all haze and bass rumble, over which the duo are content to stay firmly within cliché. At least a portion of the album seems to be freestyled: When Price (or is it Oktane?) raps on the latter half of “Update” that he’s going off the dome, it’s a kind of eureka moment, given how little order there was in the verse that came before. And even when the rappers drop a profound line, they switch subjects so swiftly that the seriousness comes to seem like a cheap device. On the opening track, “Clouds,” we learn that in Inland Empire, funerals are so frequent “half of us stopped dressing formal.” But a couple bars later, the fact that kids are listening to Lil Yachty over Biggie is lamented in exactly the same tone.
This somewhat flip feeling use of casual violence is also part of a barely legible recurring skit, in which Oktane (or is it Price?) leaves a heated situation to chill with his girl. These poorly acted moments add little to the album and it’s unclear exactly why they exist, other than to give the duo a prompt to rap from, as if they’re conducting a cipher and being offered topical suggestions. The most unintentionally comical of these moments precedes the song “Sanctified,” when the protagonist’s mother calls and leaves a message. “I heard there’s a lot going on in the streets, I need you to come to church to get sanctified,” she says, sounding just unbelievably bored, almost exactly the opposite of the tone you’d expect a worried mother to take. The message leads into this hook: “Pull up with the squad and shit/Looking like Gods and shit/All of that hatin’/I ain’t even bothered with/Everything sanctified.” It’s safe to say that the song doesn’t dwell on the sacraments or otherwise make hay out of its ostensibly religious theme.
Some personality peeks through on “Honda,” a frank if somewhat self-righteous ode to financial modesty that’s reminiscent, with its spare guitar beat, of West Coast stalwart Baby Bash. The best song here, “Pump Fake,” opens with Price rapping in double-time over a snappy beat that could have made the first YG album, with its canny combination of gleaming synths, snares and bass. It’s a perfect production cue for the duo—they can ride just about anything, and the more space the beat takes up, the less heavy lifting the lyrics have to do.
It’s not unusual for rappers with sharply developed flows to have a similar problem, particularly now that a marketplace that used to be saturated with lyrical lyricists has come to value a variety of other skill sets. Joey Bada$$ had a similar issue when he first emerged: the smoothness of his flow could trick you (and apparently him) into thinking he had more to say than he did. But the New Yorker was 17 when his head-turning first mixtape came out in 2012, about the age that Oktane and Price were when they first got signed. They’ve named two of their three studio albums with the area codes of their hometown, while one mixtape was simply named Inland Empire. This constant reference to where they’re from isn’t reflected by any kind of substantive pride in the music; it feels more like the person who doesn’t know what kind of tattoo to get, so they get copy after copy of their state outline or state flag. There’s nothing wrong with those tattoos, but would you get three of them?


The Philadelphia band Nothing make gentle-sounding, springtime shoegaze with an alt-pop tinge that would seem all at odds with their gritty punk and hardcore pasts—until you listen to the lyrics.

Tired of Tomorrow

On the surface, the stories that swirl around the Philadelphia band Nothing feel out of sync with the music on their second album, Tired of Tomorrow. The group’s oft-discussed past includes violence, jail time, and a mob of hardcore guys wanting to beat up singer/guitarist Domenic Palermo. Before forming Nothing, Palermo spent two years in jail for stabbing someone at a show. (Notably, the group's 2014 debut was titled Guilty of Everything). Maybe as a result of the incident, he was jumped this past year in Oakland and suffered brain trauma.
Beyond the extracurricular activity, members of Nothing have played in hardcore and punk bands before their current gig—bassist Nick Bassett was in an early incarnation of Deafheaven, then founded Whirr. Nothing’s dark, sarcastic online presence (they’ve beefed with Slowdive, after all), youngish punk fanbase, and current label affiliation are the marks of a more aggressive act. But the music they make is gentle, springtime shoegaze with a '90s alt-pop sensibility. If you weren’t aware of the story around the group, you wouldn’t guess at their gritty past or present.
That is, until you start digging. Life doesn’t amount to much on Tired of Tomorrow; the lyrics are filled with existential fear, boredom, anxiety, decomposition, infection, and disease. Life's seen as a nightmare with humans “made of blood and semen/piss and shit.” Elsewhere, people are empty, “useless,” and “sifting through decay.” On “Vertigo Flowers,” named for the dizziness Palermo suffered after being jumped, he angelically sings: “Watch out for those/who dare to say/that everything will be okay/Watch out for those/who want to be/anything at all.” As you may have guessed by now, “Everyone Is Happy” is not about being happy. (Weirdly, “Eaten by Worms” kind of is.)
There are some love songs, too, and they don’t end well. On the fuzzed-out, hypnotic “ACD (Abcessive Compulsive Disorder)," which brings to mind Hum, Palermo, in a more romantic mode, sings: “Swallow, corrosive confection/Decay, rotting in your wound/I can, wallow in your filth/I live to” before adding “You know me and you know I am not well…/And I will leave you/With a bad taste in your mouth.” People cry, then glide or get pushed away.
But those are just words, and as Palermo would be the first to tell you, words are useless. The guitars, though, are sumptuous, humming, and pure. “Curse of the Sun” sounds like My Bloody Valentine and the Smashing Pumpkins collaborating. Nothing recorded Tired with Will Yip (Title Fight, Braid, Balance and Composure), and he deserves a lot of credit for creating an invitingly deep sound. It’s familiar but new; varied but consistent; full of ambience but sturdy. The guitars are light and pretty but register plenty of muscle. A piano drifts in and away without messing up the flow.
In the gorgeously warped, drifting “Nineteen Ninety Heaven,” Palermo intones, hazily, that “life’s a nightmare.” But while these sounds can often feel like outtakes from Siamese Dream with a more depressed and inward vocalist, you’d be wrong to take the bait and call the record a "Siamese Nightmare"—as dark as the lyrics are, it's not shocking or scary. It's more of a sweet reminder. In fact, Tired of Tomorrow has been my go-to warm-weather record, a collection that sounds happy, and more importantly comforting, even when you know, as you always did, that there's no point in going on, but that we all do anyhow.


On their first album in six years, the post-rock stalwarts bring new urgency to their signature gliding rhythms, jazz-inflected guitar lines, and analog synth tones.

Any Day

The Sea and Cake have been so consistent and so singular for so long that the words “taken for granted” now turn up in their reviews as much as “Chicago” or “post-rock.” Their albums do seem to blur together, with each record subjecting the band’s signature components—John McEntire’s gliding rhythms, Archer Prewitt’s jazz-inflected guitar lines, and analog synth tones warmer than a wool sweater—to slight shifts in texture, personnel or backing instruments. But the overall quality of their discography makes a strong argument against the idea that artists must amass a canon of releases that build upon each other in linear fashion. Like a prescription refill, a new Sea and Cake album offers a fresh dose of the same soothing medicine.
But there’s a new urgency to their 11th full-length, Any Day, which comes after a six-year absence. Continuing the Sea and Cake’s tradition of instantly immersive album openers, “Cover the Mountain” springs into action as though the long-dormant band has just been zapped by a defibrillator. Sam Prekop cuts immediately to the swooning chorus as McEntire locks into a brisk, galloping beat. That momentum carries them into “I Should Care,” an equally dazzling follow up whose jangly riff and gently stomping backbeat are as close as this band has ever gotten to ’70s power pop.
The Sea and Cake’s post-millennial releases often saw them embedding electronic production tics into their songcraft—to the point where latter-day singles like “Weekend” and “Harps” could almost pass for Cut Copy festival jams. Any Day strips away many of those flourishes. During the band’s extended absence, they parted ways with longtime bassist Eric Claridge, and while the multitalented McEntire subbed in for him in the studio (with McEntire’s fellow Tortoise compadre Doug McCombs taking over for live shows), they’ve also filled out the space in their sound with more naturalistic elements. The title track’s breezy bossa nova gradually cascades into a quiet storm, thanks to some subtly powerful flute and clarinet work from Brian Wilson associate Paul Von Mertens. The nocturnal near-instrumental “Paper Window” forges a different sort of Beach Boys connection as it blossoms into a loopy psychedelic pastorale with wordless harmonies that suggest a post-rock Pet Sounds. “These Falling Arms” is the sort of lovely, acoustic number that might have soundtracked a slow dance at an Enchantment Under the Sea-themed prom in 1963.
With Sam Prekop on vocals, though, a Sea and Cake album is genetically incapable of sounding like anything other than a Sea and Cake album. His distinctive, soulful sighs are forever the warm breaths spreading and receding across the music’s glassy surface, unmistakable and ephemeral all the same. Even as the band locks into familiar motorik grooves on “Starling” and “Circle,” Prekop’s elliptical lyrics, at once intensely intimate and deliberately evasive, keep the songs from settling into a soft-rock cul de sac. “I don’t know what clarity/Feels without setting free,” he sings on the latter track. It’s a suitably cryptic line that nonetheless perfectly summarizes the Sea and Cake’s long history—an eternal glide toward the haziest of horizons.


André Bratten explores the same depopulated yet emotive spans of synths, drums, and bass as his Norwegian post-disco peers, but also distinguishes himself with an ominous atmosphere and darker hues. At six tracks, his Math Ilium Ion looks like an EP, but its half-hour length and lack of filler makes it feel like an LP.

Math Ilium Ion EP

André Bratten explores the same depopulated yet emotive spans of synths, drums, and bass as his Norwegian post-disco peers. But he also distinguishes himself with a sound you might peg as Teutonic before Scandinavian. While the likes of Prins Thomas and diskJokke range over earth and space, none cover precisely the furrowed, cratered landscape Bratten claims. Featuring dark hues and rough crags, it inspires visions of low, ore-spined mountains. In an Oslo-producer family portrait, you'd imagine Bratten as the lurking one, in the black ribbed turtleneck, looking on severely as porn-mustached Todd Terje makes bunny ears behind Lindstrøm's bucket cap.
At six tracks, Math Ilium Ion looks like an EP, but its half-hour length and lack of filler makes it feel like an LP. Bratten consistently cultivates ominous tension, even as he instills a certain measure of stubborn optimism, pressing corroded frequenices into diamond-hard melodies. He avoids clear-cut builds and releases, laying parts with their own internal tension in rows and letting their ripple mete out catharsis. This is especially clear on "Trommer & Bass", where heavy basses and scissoring percussion seem to strike at a stationary target, with relentless assassin-like accuracy, for almost five minutes, until the hammering finally drops and glides.
Bratten's music has a monstrous mechanical movement, but his tuned toms and chattering patterns are offset with live-feeling accents that rattle in the grid, giving the sense of someone striking a head in real space. The music feels wonderfully self-generative, as if willing itself into being. With its controlled speaker fry and choked-out melody, album highlight "Yours Sincerely, Andre Bratten" ingeniously un-crumbles together. Bratten's sounds don't just lurch in; they take shape before our ears. You can picture him slowly turning knobs to tame each wild tone into the groove, which is never far away, even when it decays into textured abstractions that keep alertly pushing it forward.
Though many passages of Math Ilium Ion are highly kinetic, only "Trommer & Bass" is ready for the floor. The record's games with time are clearly built with the listener in mind. "The Little Things, Fools and Kings" opens with a terrific little near-catastrophe. Many tiny elements seem to accelerate in at different rates but arrive simultaneously at the same place, to be promptly drawn taut with one oozing lump of saw waves. By the time we get to the two "Misconception" tracks, mutated rave overtones have subsided into something more like ambient house, deep and broad and full of subtle activity. Since we are fully immersed, it's welcome.
The only thing even slightly bothersome about Bratten is that sometimes he doesn’t quite nail the landings, which is strange since he takes so much care until then. The abrupt endings of several tracks are startling after all the subtle permutation we've been through, and a little unsatisfying. But that minor complaint really means that, when so much similar music is available, it's easy to stay invested in these long tracks all the way to the end. When the next groove is always one antsy keystroke away, that's saying something for Bratten.


On a debut EP that occupies a space between the cathartic stadium pop of fun. and the vulnerability of Lorde, the young singer-producer offers the kind of love songs generations of queer kids craved.

Make My Bed EP

King Princess’ breakout single, “1950,” is about as close to perfect as a pop song can get. Like Lorde’s “Royals” or Mapei’s almost-hit “Don’t Wait,” it accomplishes a lot with a little: Sparse 808 drums, sentimental piano, and hazy guitars bubble as they build to a timeless torch-song chorus. “I’ll wait for you, I’ll pray/I will keep on waiting for your love,” the 19-year-old singer and producer promises. Effortless, infectious, and anthemic, it’s a track designed to launch a career.
Instead of attempting to recapture the magic of “1950,” the four other full-length songs on King Princess’ self-produced debut EP, Make My Bed, build out the world it creates. Signed to Mark Ronson’s new Zelig Recordings, the artist known offstage as Mikaela Straus writes love songs that are as self-aware and sardonic as they are pleadingly authentic. True to the dramatic emotional landscape of late adolescence and early adulthood, Make My Bed alternates between overwrought emotion and unbothered disaffection, love and loneliness, pride and sheepishness. Straus’ music is the natural descendant of the left-of-center pop that has ruled the airwaves since she was in junior high; King Princess occupies the sparkling, melodramatic space between the cathartic stadium pop of fun. and the bare-all vulnerability of Lorde.
Those artists succeeded because they knew how to speak to their audiences, nailing the skyscraper highs and ocean-floor lows of teens’ emotional lives. But being a teenager now is different from being a teenager even five years ago. Straus proudly identifies as a lesbian, and she’s conscious of the political and cultural significance of using feminine pronouns to identify the objects of her affections in her songs. She cleverly frames the unrequited love at the core of “1950” as an homage to how, as she puts it, “queer love was only able to exist privately for a long time, expressed in society through coded art forms.”
At a time when artists like serpentwithfeet and Lotic are expressing radical queerness by getting as far away from pop’s rigid boundaries as possible, it’s a stretch to equate Straus’ work with the protest music of the ’60s, as she did in a recent interview. Yet it packs its own kind of punch. Throughout Make My Bed, queer desire isn’t a focal point so much as a given: Like Troye Sivan, Straus’ palpable comfort with her sexuality is what makes her work transgressive.
“Talia” is the kind of single past generations of queer kids longed for. Backed by hums and soft snaps, Straus bares her soul: “You’ve walked out a hundred times, how was I/Supposed to know this time that you wouldn’t call/That you wouldn’t come home,” she sings, her throaty vocals cracking with emotion. Although it’s awkwardly stapled on to the verse, the chorus soars to the same heights of romantic longing as the songs that end John Hughes movies, complete with Jack Antonoff-level power chords and pounding synth drums.
Straus reveals a wicked sense of humor on the washed-out “Upper West Side,” dismissing a rich girl as “another bitch from the Upper West Side,” before arriving at a pre-chorus that captures the cognitive dissonance of an Instagram crush: “I can’t stop judging everything you do/But I can’t get enough of you.” Straus often layers her vocals with harmonic effects that recall Imogen Heap, and the result suggests a singer shyly peeking out from behind a curtain. It’s a tool, and sometimes a detriment. “Upper West Side” would have benefitted from some moments of vulnerability, but she relies on a chorus of muted “oohs” and “ahhs” to convey that feeling.
Being yourself in public is scary, especially as a queer 19-year-old trying to launch a pop career, but Straus seems up to the challenge. This early on, it’s easy to see why she might be more comfortable hiding behind the boards. But, for all her talent as a producer, she’s at her best when she sings with the courage of a soldier rushing into battle, speaking frankly about the sometimes frightening, sometimes joyful, never-ending process of growing up.


The UK producer’s second album sounds more ready for the club but features the same neon, wistful, song-centric style of his debut.

All That Must Be

The narrative around George FitzGerald’s 2015 debut Fading Love described a dance-music insider turning his back on the form. It had all the makings of a “Judas!” moment. The UK producer had gone from club-centric labels (Scuba’s Hotflush, Will Saul’s Aus) to an imprint of Domino, a fixture of the indie establishment. He’d softened his sound and traded breakdowns and build-ups for more songlike arrangements. He even admitted to Resident Advisor that he was tired of club culture and the DJ life.
But if any fans did gripe about FitzGerald selling out, that would have been some truly narcissism-of-small-differences kvetching, because really, the album barely broke from his earlier work. His earliest productions leavened peak-time club fare with pastel colors and pneumatic volume, and as Fading Love moved away from the dancefloor, it doubled down on super-saturated chord stabs, wordless vocal loops, and other emotive tropes, painting a wall-to-wall picture of wistfulness. The tempos tended to be slower than before, and the track lengths shorter, without the DJ-friendly intros and outros of a 12" release. But in sound and mood, the album slotted comfortably into a long tradition of dance music made for home stereos, borrowing bits from Moderat, Jon Hopkins, Four Tet, and innumerable other artists whose reach stretches from the club to the sofa and back.
It was a canny strategy: Four of the album’s 10 songs have each racked up more than a million plays on Spotify, and “Full Circle,” the album’s melancholy highlight, has more than 12 million plays—the kind of number that’s nearly unthinkable for an artist coming from his corner of the dance scene. So you can hardly blame him for sticking with that direction on All That Must Be, his second album, in which overflows with yearning. If anything, the new record inches ever so slightly back toward the dancefloor: its beats lie within house music’s typical tempo range, he’s stretched out his track lengths a bit, and the basslines feel more forceful, as though FitzGerald were writing in anticipation of how his tracks will sound on club sound systems.
FitzGerald has often built his music around the snippets of voice that became ubiquitous right around the time of UK bass producer Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo,” and on the last album, he began working with actual singers; two tracks on the new album—“Roll Back,” featuring the dovelike falsetto of the UK funky musician Lil Silva, and “Half-Life (Night Version),” with Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn—are the closest things to “proper” songs that he’s ever written. Even when he’s not working with singers, he tends to tie on wordless vocal strips as though they were satin ribbons, a technique that helps infuse his music with warmth. The choppy vowels of both “Burns” and “The Echo Forgets” sound directly descended from the hiccupping through-line of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”
But FitzGerald hasn’t quite figured out how to get the best out of his singers yet. Thorn has one of the most distinctive voices in the business, yet on “Half-Life,” he pours on sticky-sweet synths until it sounds like she’s drowning in a honey whirlpool. And while he may nod toward song form, FitzGerald doesn’t really do verse/chorus structures: Just like his club tracks, his songs here are created by adding and subtracting layers around a beat and a bassline. That repetitive focus may lend a certain hypnotic power—in the best tracks, you feel like you’re traveling through a long, neon-lit tunnel—but it also means there are few melodic or harmonic surprises. In track after track, cycling chords encircle wistful ostinato leads, shifting between tension and release as predictably as the tide.
All That Must Be feels more cohesive than his debut, but its songs also tend to blur together. The opening “Two Moons Under” and then “Frieda,” which follows, are in complementary keys, paced at nearly the same tempo, and share virtually identical elements, which continue to turn up in track after track: rumbling bass synths, muted pads, and swirls of arpeggio, all held together by those rose-tinted wisps of breath. Taking a cue from Boards of Canada, the synths are constantly slipping out of tune, as though they’d been recorded on a haywire tape recorder. But instead of conferring character, the omnipresent warble ends up sounding forced, like an Instagram feed over-reliant on filters that mimic vintage film cameras.
It all adds up to a mood that can be frustratingly one-note. All that wistfulness feels like something pasted on, rather than something earned. FitzGerald would be the first to admit that his tastes gravitate toward melancholy: One of his early tracks was titled “Fernweh,” a hard-to-translate German word that denotes the longing for far-off places. But All That Must Be doesn’t quite live up to its own heartstring-tugging goals; too often, it’s just kind of comfortably glum.


The UK rapper’s first album since his disastrous appearance at last year’s NME Awards is split between welcome introspection and all-caps boasting. It’s a refreshingly candid self-assessment.

TYRON

On February 12 last year, it felt like slowthai’s world was falling apart. The Northampton rapper had toasted a raft of nominations at the NME Awards and picked up a bird-flipping trophy as “Hero of the Year.” But a bad joke taken too far meant the night ended in disaster. His lewd interactions with the show’s host, comedian Katherine Ryan, and a later altercation with a member of the audience—after which slowthai was escorted from the venue—made for grim viewing as video clips circulated online, stripped of context.
The condemnation that followed was widespread and immediate, his career hoisted onto a pyre erected by furious social media users. As hangovers go, the one he woke up to the next day would be monumental. He issued an apology and received vocal support from Ryan. He returned the “Hero” award, asking that it be forwarded to her. She reminded him that “a bad day on social media passes so quickly.” But a year in lockdown offers plenty of time to sit with your thoughts. Though the February 12 release date is a coincidence—pandemic-induced delays pushed it back by a week—it’s hard not to see some significance in TYRON arriving exactly a year to the day since slowthai’s reckoning.
While slowthai’s debut, Nothing Great About Britain, had focused his punkish energy and confirmed him as a righteous voice for a forgotten generation, his gaze turns inward on TYRON, adopting his lyric book as a diary once again. The album is split into two halves of seven tracks each: the first half spelled out in caps lock, with all its implied yelling, and the lower-case second half providing softer moments, with a bed of pop samples and gentle guitar licks beneath slowthai’s spittle-flecked reflections. Four of these second-half tracks were recorded in 2019 and the first months of 2020, while the bulk of the first half was recorded after the disastrous awards show, and the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As repudiations of so-called cancel culture go, “CANCELLED,” featuring Skepta, is among the more ham-fisted. While slowthai at least injects a bit of humor with tongue-in-cheek rhymes of “Harry Potter,” “lobster,” and “vodka,” Skepta’s rigid, boastful chorus (“How you gonna cancel me?/Twenty awards on the mantlepiece/Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury”) only emphasizes the joys of the mute button. “VEX,” “WOT,” and “DEAD,” on the other hand, beg for repeat plays. Here, slowthai is at his cocksure best, weaving around the beat as if it were there for his amusement only. He snarls back at the baying crowd over Kwes Darko’s zappy instrumentals with the same mischievous vim that made early tracks like “T N Biscuits” so inviting.
The album’s bisected structure could be risky in terms of pacing, but the track that forms the pivot point—the cool, confessional “PLAY WITH FIRE”—strikes a deft balance. It channels Dizzee Rascal’s contemplative “Brand New Day” and bristles with witty one-liners (“I’m the next best thing since electric”) and adroit social commentary. The song itself is split in half, and ends with slowthai in dialogue with himself: “Fuck all these expectations/My heart and mind are at war, my soul’s out here playing piggy in the middle/Why do I feel like I’m holding the short straw?” His moment of self-reflection amounts to one of the album’s most revealing passages.
slowthai’s dexterous, free-flowing lyricism provides the foundation of the album’s second half. “focus” is the most casual raised middle finger imaginable: Every second line is quotable, but delivered with the blasé attitude of a kid answering roll call at school. On “terms” he turns stereotypical rap boasts to weighty introspection with a mix of defiance and resignation. A couple of wafty moments—the soft anchor drop of “push”; rap lullaby “feel away”—slip by, overshadowed by two adjacent album highlights: “nhs” and “adhd.” The former, dedicated to the UK’s beloved but beleaguered National Health Service, glides between silly and serious, profound and trite, all hung together with a hooky looping chorus. “adhd,” meanwhile, encapsulates the tussle at TYRON’s core. Listen with a pair of headphones and you’ll feel like slowthai’s pacing on your shoulder, pouring himself into your ears, the coiled-up tension finally loosed as he spits, “Living and I’m dead/Caught in Charlotte’s Web/I can’t feel myself/Mind complexity/Be the death of me.”
In directing his anger inward, slowthai loses some of the urgency and incisiveness that made his debut so compelling, along with the contrast that made that album’s vulnerable moments so striking. But he’s undoubtedly honed his craft, sounding slicker as he retreats from placard rap to the journaling process that got him started in the first place. TYRON’s split setup is a blunt way of showing that there’s more than one side to any person—and any story—and it works, in this instance, as a route towards a more nuanced self-portrait: one that’s honest about slowthai’s flaws, and his frustrations.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The triple album from Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee is their clearest personal statement yet, a shining triptych of what it looks like to be young, black, and euphoric.

Rae Sremmurd / Swae Lee / Slim Jxmmi: SR3MM

SR3MM

Rae Sremmurd were not seen as masters of their own universe until “Black Beatles,” a song whose very premise expanded a longstanding reclamation project: Rappers are the new rock stars. The Brown brothers—Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee—have been trying to prove themselves serious artists to naysayers for years now, defending rap as serious art in the process. SR3MM has a song called “Rock N Roll Hall of Fame,” a continuation of “Black Beatles” that takes their rockstar evolution a step further, claiming the duo as entrants into the canon. “We’re the ones in charge now, who are y’all?” Lee asks, not waiting for an answer. On SR3MM and the two solo records packaged with it—Swaecation and Jxmtro—Swae and Jxmmi not only place their partying ethos in the rock-star lineage but lobby to earn the same kind of respect as artists deemed “classic rock.” In shooting that gap, SR3MM ends up being their clearest personal statement yet, finding their voices almost coincidentally. And let’s face it, few things are more rock’n’roll than releasing a triple album.
Rae Sremmurd have built a reputation as one of rap’s foremost purveyors of bacchanalian splendor, a cartoonish duo living out fame in real time through their raps. Everything on their three new albums is still in service of having (and sustaining) a good time, but there are different destinations in mind: SR3MM is an all-inclusive celebration of success and excess, the full embrace of stardom, its perks and its provisions; Swaecation is a top-down California cruise into a romantic waterfront sojourn; Jxmtro is a stoned reflection mid-lapdance. Together they create a wondrous, shining triptych of what it looks like to be young, black, and euphoric.
It’s tempting to compare SR3MM to OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, a double album in which a dichotomous rap duo separated into solo stars, exploring their respective visions while still in conversation with one another. But as Swae recently pointed out, he and his brother deepen their bond here, as opposed to unyoking: “We going three-sided. [OutKast] didn’t come together. We got to come together—we’re brothers.” And the brotherly love story isn’t just hype because SR3MM feels even more like an act of unity: not even going solo can truly divide them.
The Rae Sremmurd portion of the triple album, SR3MM, with its largely off-kilter and metallic productions overseen and co-produced by Ear Drummers architect Mike WiLL Made-It, feels like a riff on the weirder moments from 2016’s SremmLife 2. It expands their catalog of oddball romps while mining the past (“Powerglide”) and envisioning an alternate rap future (“Perplexing Pegasus”). It’s a different kind of party, because the songs don’t bang so much as strobe. Where previous tracks like “Throw Sum Mo” and “Come Get Her” were club-ready trap hits, few of these songs are meant to scan in that same way. In the spirit of “Black Beatles,” these are attempts to warp the sound of rap radio. On SR3MM songs like “Rock N Roll Hall of Fame” and the Travis Scott-assisted “CLOSE,” Jxmmi and Swae get even stranger, finding more confidence as a team and achieving near-perfect balance between their two styles.
SR3MM is the strongest of the three albums, further proving that the pair work best as a unit, but Swaecation and Jxmtro provide an opportunity for the brothers to stretch out and explore their impulses. Jxmmi has often been pegged as the conservative one and Swae the ambitious one, but it’s more that Jxmmi’s strength is spinning sublimity out of simplicity. When seeing their visions through, this comes to the fore: Jxmmi emerges as a snappy songwriter, and Swae burrows deeper into melody than ever before, transforming from rapper to full-on balladeer.
As a newly minted heartthrob, Swae leans into the elegance of his vocals. Swaecation is about living fast and finding romance in sun-soaked spots, getting wine-drunk and opening up your heart to a fling. There is sex in Maybachs and missed connections on exotic getaways. Only rarely does he find the high of his hit with French Montana, the chart-storming “Unforgettable”—”Guatemala,” which tries somewhat desperately to replicate it, is tourist-resort dancehall—but he settles nicely into his range throughout. On “Offshore,” his stunning duet with Young Thug, he is pushed to his limits, as Thug raps, “I’ll slap the shit out Donald Trump any day” in a verse that also contains illustrative flexes like “Bentley on the side and it’s sittin’ on LeBron James.”
While Swae’s blend of pop, R&B, and dancehall is more daring, Jxmmi’s Jxmtro is more consistent and reveals more of himself as an artist and person. As the more introverted (and less celebrated) of the two brothers, Jxmmi uses his opportunity to rap with fluidity, putting his ideas first for a change, rapping about growing up, outgrowing friends, and prioritizing as on “Keep God First.” He has grown into a full-fledged co-star, weaving together uncomplicated gems like, “I pay my tithes when I fuck with the strippers,” or, “I’ma stack up the cake like Obama told me.” He seems less concerned with selling himself than he is simply being himself. His casual swaggering gets played up by a rapping Zoe Kravitz on “Anti-Social Smokers Club.” When Swae rejoins him and Pharrell for “Chanel,” the song still seems focused on Jxmmi, effortlessly comfortable in the spotlight.
Charmingly, Swae Lee used “Dragon Ball Z” to make sense of Rae Sremmurd’s arrangement on SR3MM: Each brother exists as a formidable artist in their own right, but they are strongest when they form a whole. They have never been apart from one another for longer than two months in their entire lives, and SR3MM is designed to facilitate that relationship, showing who the members of Rae Sremmurd really are, and who they’d like to be. They’re rock stars for the modern age trying to bend the sound of radio to their whims. Even when one takes center stage, the other is always close by.