On the quick follow-up to last year’s A Bit of Previous, the Glasgow indie-pop band’s on-the-fly energy and head-in-the-clouds musings collide in memorable and surprising ways.

Late Developers

Belle and Sebastian may always be remembered for their unlikely ascent in the 1990s: the makeshift band of Glasgow musicians who became international word-of-mouth sensations and helped define the sound of the era’s sensitive indie pop. But what they accomplished in the decade-plus after their dual 1996 breakthroughs, Tigermilk and its quick follow-up If You’re Feeling Sinister, was pretty unusual too. They transformed into a festival-ready ensemble who reached new and gaudier heights, all without the pressures (or perks) of mainstream fame. Last year’s A Bit of Previous, their first proper studio album in seven years, was another improbable triumph, reinvigorating familiar themes of spirituality, sexuality, and existential crisis with an easygoing humility born of experience: Belle and Sebastian were so much older then, they’re younger than that now.
Well, surprise—again. Late Developers, announced less than a week before its release, underlines Belle and Sebastian’s uncanny ability to keep coming out on top. Before the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020, the band was planning to record in Los Angeles with Shawn Everett, the six-time Grammy-winning producer and engineer who has worked with the War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves. Instead, they shelved their intended L.A. songs, rearranging their Glasgow rehearsal space to write and track what became A Bit of Previous and, now, Late Developers. Like the last record, Late Developers carries the anything-goes effortlessness of sessions where, as Stuart Murdoch told an interviewer last year, “You might wake up with a tune in your head and think about the words on the way in, and it wasn’t until you got to the studio that you would nail it down with chords.” Perhaps it’s not heresy to also say: Like If You’re Feeling Sinister, this is a near-simultaneous follow-up that’s somehow even better than its acclaimed predecessor.
The characters from their first two records—who stood out for, say, being into S&M and Bible studies or making life-sized models of the Velvet Underground—inhabited a shared universe. Likewise, Late Developers extends the full-circle gesture of A Bit of Previous. Musically, the new album runs the gamut from sepia-toned folk-rock that might’ve fit on 1998’s The Boy With the Arab Strap to neon synth pop that’s as insidiously earworm-y as this band has ever sounded. As with A Bit of Previous, the emphasis is on the nuances of a large group playing together. Their nonchalant camaraderie is the password to a secret club where anyone can belong. Lyrically too, the bookish outcasts who once ruled the school are now shredding their old letters and questioning their former selfish obsessions. There are, blessedly, no specific references to present-day technology or breaking-news headlines, but clearly they’re living in the now.
Late Developers’ contemporary vision is illuminated, though, by the “then.” Where A Bit of Previous single “Young and Stupid” bounced around the trapdoor of nostalgia with all the deceptive sunniness of mid-2000s Belle and Sebastian, here the A.A. Milne-referencing “When We Were Very Young” is a moodier, piano-driven number that might hit early fans a bit close to home. Murdoch’s narrator, a despondent commuter who can’t muster two shits about his prior creative passions, yearns eloquently for contentment in routine—in “football scores” and “my daily worship of the sublime”—but sorry, too bad: “We’ve got kids and dystopia,” sings the frontman, who recently turned 54. A different kind of time warp occurs on “When the Cynics Stare Back From the Wall,” a previously unreleased song written circa 1994. Ambling chamber pop with guest vocals by Tracyanne Campbell, of much-missed Glasgow band Camera Obscura, it has the feel of a lost classic: a B-side or soundtrack selection that you somehow slept on for 25 years. But its stubborn insistence on sincerity, rendered by middle-aged adults who know all too well about pandemics and political collapse, feels earned where it might once have seemed naive.
As on A Bit of Previous, Belle and Sebastian share songwriting credit throughout Late Developers, and Murdoch isn’t the only longstanding member who captures the album’s spirit of communal urgency and disquieted déjà vu. Violinist and co-lead singer Sarah Martin, who’s been in the group since before If You’re Feeling Sinister, seizes the vintage-B&S sunshine of “Give a Little Time” to make her paradoxically persuasive case for leaving the past in the past. As bass rumbles over the sprightly synth-disco of “Do You Follow,” a call-and-response affair that recalls 2004’s non-album espionage-funk gem “Your Cover’s Blown,” Martin gets in the sharpest jabs: Murdoch, asking what must be a universal question, sings, “Is it me or just the world that’s changing?” Martin, sounding unimpressed, shoots back, “My money’s on you.”
At a lean 11 songs and 43 minutes, Late Developers is packed with moments when the band’s on-the-fly energy and head-in-the-clouds musings collide in memorable ways. Opener “Juliet Naked” bristles with stark electric guitar, all the better to ponder Murdoch’s richly allusive visions of “quicksand on the battlefield,” “prayers and pills,” and the “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” songwriting duo. On the revved-up indie dance of “When You’re Not With Me,” Martin offers to “stop the clock/and make a moment between tick and tock”—a particularly evocative way to revisit yet another longtime pet concern. The closing title track, with horns and gospel-powered backing vocals, is so jaunty and verdant that more than a few in Belle and Sebastian’s demographic may be reminded of the Encanto end credits. But it’s also a cathartic unburdening. Building on the last album’s vulnerable “Do It for Your Country,” where Murdoch compared himself to a “lobster in a pot/a songbird in a gilded nightmare,” he sings here, “Who said that I had the wisdom, had the answer?/Wasn’t me.”
Proving Murdoch’s endearing openness to fallibility is Late Developers’ first single, “I Don’t Know What You See in Me,” crafted uncharacteristically with an outside co-writer, Peter Ferguson aka Wuh Oh. Eerily digestible synth pop with essences of palm-muted guitar and a maniacally catchy refrain, it feels like a late-career attempt to indoctrinate new members of the cult. What risked being a garish embarrassment should end up as a fresh hit for the band’s encore runs. Belle and Sebastian have always been focused on connection, and on Late Developers, they’re unpretentious about sharing that bond and generous in reinforcing it.


Brooklyn songwriter Zannie Owens’ debut is a loose concept album about a lost alien—and an opaque inquiry into the shifting nature of reality.

How Do I Get That Star

Zannie Owens opens their full-length solo debut, How Do I Get That Star, with a Major Tom moment. In “mechanical bull,” the Brooklyn-based songwriter makes a sudden loss of contact with reality feel more sublime than worrisome, like getting mesmerized by the sun’s glow without the retinal damage. “I fumble with the airlock and then capitulate,” they sing calmly, shrugging off a terrifying experience with a lofty question: “Is there such a thing as real or fake?/I press my cheek to the stuff dark matter generates.” Zannie folds into the stardust and space debris, acting as a vessel for an otherworldly odyssey.
How Do I Get That Star is a concept album based on the story of a lost alien finding its way home. The narrative threads loosely through the album, which often feels like whimsical sci-fi expressed through free association and dream logic. Zannie cites the legacy of the Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft and the midcentury poet Jack Spicer, who envisioned poets as conduits for some other lifeform, like ghosts or aliens. Sometimes Zannie’s own convoluted language and spacey observations read as though the details got lost in transmission. But like their muses, they seek a kind of authenticity in the unknowable—a way to break the loop of earthly reality—and they find it in quirky synth-pop tunes with the color and whimsy of a Fisher-Price toy.
Whether or not it’s clear what’s going on in the narrative, How Do I Get That Star is often melodically charming and vocally captivating. Owens’ melodies are decadent and playful as costume jewelry: On the highlight “for a while,” their silvery vocals contrast pleasantly with a bouncing polka beat and soulful pedal steel. Their vocal delivery, which can vary from sing-songy to a breathy flutter, is matched with peculiar percussive zaps, warped guitars, or a thin trap beat.
While the sound of the record is inviting, its layered conceptual subtleties itch to be solved. On “holy ghosted,” Zannie pines for another person’s electricity; on “poison plant,” they fret over the type of energy they bring into the room (“I just want to purify the air just like a tall tree/But I feel like a poison plant sucking life from my apartment”). “Am I just a sound?” they ask on “song of rose pain.” At times their lyrics unfold like scientific parables. On the woozy, baroque closer “Doppler,” Zannie calls out someone whose personality seems to change based on other people’s perceptions, comparing their behavior to the phenomenon observed in wave frequencies. “You were always trying to cheat time,” they sing in a pearlescent falsetto. It could be a simple change of heart or the transits of a corrupt time traveler. And yet, whether they’re channeling a lost Martian or untangling their own complex thoughts about connection and human existence, Zannie’s sweetly synthetic pop melodies make the big ideas feel deceptively close to earth.


On his newest mixtape, the young Atlanta rapper succeeds at sounding like a vague, one-note NBA YoungBoy and very little else.

Legendary

If you ever wondered what YoungBoy would sound like without the emotional complexity, well I got it, it’s Anti da Menace. Raised on the West Side of Atlanta, the red-hot teenager caught a breakout moment earlier this year with the threat-fueled single “Murder Bitch,” which shaves down YoungBoy’s sound to a growling delivery and anger. But YoungBoy is so much more than that, he’s rarely ever just angry, there’s sadness, pain, and regret bubbling under the surface even when he’s not explicitly saying that. Those layers weren’t always instantly identifiable, but through years of YoungBoy laying out his story and developing his vocal tics on countless mixtapes did it all come together.
Anti da Menace’s newest mixtape, Legendary, skips a couple of steps. Like a YoungBoy album, the sound ranges from tender melodic ballads to brash, drill-inflected diss tracks, yet the emotion is unearned. Of the more vulnerable tracks, which are the type of songs where we’ve learned more about YoungBoy than any interview, Anti da Menace isn’t actually that vulnerable. “Flamethrower” has the elements of what sounds like he’s pouring his heart out—strained vocals, a weepy piano-driven beat, vague words of advice from his mom—but he doesn’t actually say anything to back up the mood. It’s completely relying on our pre-existing knowledge that this is what more downbeat Southern pain rap songs sound like, without doing any of the work. “Forgive Me” is similarly impersonal, there’s not much that makes the song about Anti da Menace, the vagueness is an assumption that we already know his story which makes the lines ring hollow.
He’s a lot better off making songs like “Murder Bitch” even if they are a bit one-note. Similar to how Florida rapper Cochise cordoned off a small bit of Playboi Carti by running off with his helium-voiced flow, Anti da Menace does a pretty good imitation of YoungBoy’s menacing side. On “Blood Boy,” arguably the album’s best song, Anti Da Menace’s snarling delivery is so intense that he could probably rip his t-shirt with his bare hands a la Hulk Hogan. The lyrics where he tries to paint the most violent images possible have no weight to them other than shock, but the energy covers it up well enough. Then over a slightly groovier version of SleazyWorld Go’s “Sleazy Flow” on “Switchblade,” he shows some skill by channeling his anger through a gravelly melody instead of snapping. Meanwhile, “223” goes in the opposite direction: The moment a funky bassline becomes more pronounced in the thrashing beat, his growls are cranked up so much that the relatively clean mix can’t stop his vocals from cracking. It’s the weirdest moment on an album that could have used a lot more weird moments.
Even when Anti da Menace occasionally breaks free from the YoungBoy mold, there’s still not much that sounds specific to him. “Enemies” has the acoustic guitar-led frame of a NoCap track, but he’s not lyrical enough to carry that. “Outta Bounds” starts out like a King Von–style crime short, and despite the two-minute runtime, he runs out of story about halfway through. His most promising moment is “Red Rum,” which has shades of Lil Durk with the way he blends the ruthless spirit of drill with Southern pain melodies. And while it’s a bit of a tired sound, at least the focus is more on his relentlessness and not on what he’s saying. Because, hey, not having much to say is fine, the problem comes up when he’s working within styles of rap that basically require that. Leave the balladry to YoungBoy and he’ll be alright.


The Afghan Whigs leader's debut solo album balances guitar-slashing catharsis with candelabra-lit elegance, taking inspired tangents from his signature nocturnal sensibility without departing from it entirely.

Random Desire

Greg Dulli closes his first official solo album with a richly atmospheric, slowly unfurling ballad called “Slow Pan”—a fitting move for an artist who approaches rock’n’roll with the methodical gaze of a cinematographer. Over the past 30 years, the ensembles Dulli has fronted have assumed different names—first, the Afghan Whigs, then The Twilight Singers, and then back to the Whigs— but his widescreen sensibility has never wavered. Usually, the term “cinematic” is reserved for instrumental music suggesting grandeur and gravitas, but Dulli prefers to drop you into the thick of the action. His records are like romantic thrillers with all the exposition and character development stripped out, leaving only moments of heated conflict and disarming confessions.
Random Desire further affirms Dulli’s vision, even in the absence of his trusty bands behind him. With the Afghan Whigs once again on hiatus—following bassist/co-founder John Curley’s return to school and the 2017 death of guitarist Dave Rosser from colon cancer—Dulli conceived Random Desire as a one-man operation, but ended up pulling in various longtime associates in for guest spots. The branding and methodology have changed, but the intent and effect are ultimately the same. Like pretty much every record Dulli has made since the Whigs left Sub Pop in the early ‘90s, Random Desire deftly mediates between guitar-slashing catharsis and candelabra-lit elegance. It is filled with the nocturnal ambiance, climactic crescendos, and savvy musical references we have come to expect from a Greg Dulli product. The instant you hear the tensely tapped piano pulses of “Sempre” and “The Tide,” you know it’s only a matter of time before the songs erupt into Joshua Tree-toppling surges, with Dulli engaging the most ravaged register of his voice like a guitarist kicking on an effects pedal.
Random Desire also abounds with nods to Dulli’s omnivorous musical taste. He was once the only ‘90s indie-rocker to drop Lauryn Hill covers covers in his sets; now he’s practically adopting a triplet flow on the shuffling slow jam “Scorpio.” The Nick Cave-esque “A Ghost” invokes enough New Orleans voodoo vibes to yield Dulli’s very own “Red Right Hand.”  The album’s most devastating song requires no such theater: "Marry Me," a mournful acoustic ballad, is a mea culpa from a non-committal cad who never worked up the courage to say those words to the one who just walked out on him.
As much as it draws from Dulli’s dog-eared little black book, Random Desire features its share of inspired tangents, when he forgoes the elaborate full-band effect to embrace the mad-scientist possibilities of his solo set-up. The trip-hoppy lament “Lockless” features the album’s most pronounced use of electronics, and a brass fanfare that jolts the song back to life after Dulli powers down into a slow-motion slur. But the album’s biggest surprise is less musical than spiritual. On the bass-driven gospel sprint “Pantomima,” Dulli’s flair for heart-racing hysterics is reoriented around a feeling you rarely encounter in his discography: joy. “Desolation, come and get it!,” he beckons ironically, sounding more like a carnival barker than a prophet of doom. He seems to relish the irony: after 30 years, he needed to make a Greg Dulli record in order to sound a little less like Greg Dulli.

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The Australian pop-punk musician’s second album is a welcome and wide-open look at mid-twenties inertia and queer romance.

The Best of Luck Club

When Alex Lahey released a charming debut album, I Love You Like a Brother, in October 2017, gay marriage wasn’t yet legal in her home country of Australia. Its follow-up, The Best of Luck Club, is a welcome and wide-open look into the artist’s personal life, packed with songs about mid-twenties inertia and queer romance that flow as naturally as an embellished story from the boozed-up patron on the next bar stool. She might start the night as a stranger, but by closing time, she’s got your number and you’re calling her “bud.”
Flashes of this same chumminess shone throughout her debut, but Lahey avoids redundancies by tinkering with her sound. Working with pop-savvy co-producer Catherine Marks, she’s sanded down some of the debut’s rough edges, casting a Tegan and Sara glow on sincere love songs and refined slacker-rock anthems. On “Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself,” Lahey brings in a blaring saxophone solo against a cautiously encouraging message to a friend who’s grabbed the bull by the horns and seems at risk of being thrown off. The spiteful riffs and quick chord progression of “Misery Guts” recall Hole’s “Celebrity Skin,” and the whimsical piano melody of “Isabella” underlines a cheeky ode to what sounds like a vibrator.
When Lahey sang, “We can’t marry even if we want to” on I Love You Like a Brother ballad “There’s No Money,” it was a brief, resigned personal acknowledgment tucked into an album whose descriptions of life and love were otherwise largely non-confrontational. Australia has since equalized marriage, and coincidentally or not, The Best of Luck Club joins the likes of Troye Sivan in celebrating details of specifically queer romance. “You deserve to know the way I feel/When I watch you use your thighs to turn the steering wheel,” Lahey sings on the doting “Black RMs,” a line that will feel uniquely familiar to any girl who’s road-tripped with a crush. It wasn’t that long ago that alt-rock’s most visible queer women were regularly tagged as being sad, serious, emotional—not that they didn’t have reason to be. A generation on, Lahey’s breezy love songs are brightened by everyday descriptions of a life lived openly.
Outright statement, as opposed to suggestion, has always been at the heart of Lahey’s songwriting. The best of The Best of Luck Club marks a new level of maturity, compressing a multitude of emotions within a single song. “Misery Guts” reacts to a painful breakup with equal parts vulnerability and volatility: “I need a minute to relax, so pretty please get off my back, I’m breathing with my hands on my knees!” The stunning “I Don’t Get Invited to Parties Anymore” explores the fragility and frivolity of the early-to-mid-twenties transition, with its minefield of financial anxieties and steadily worsening hangovers. Lahey soaks the verses and chorus in raucous, power-pop riffs, downshifting at the bridge to sing in a clear-as-glass voice: “I’ve lost track, it’s caught me by surprise/Can I go back and not be left behind?” Layers of self-harmonies alternate lyrics—“Everything was better with no jobs or obligations”—and collaborator Lachlan McGeehan takes a heavy hand to the cymbals until the whole thing crashes together like drunk twenty-somethings on a Twister mat.
Lahey may be stuck in the thick of it now, but her ability to see as though she’s already beyond, to address life’s essential contradictions with thoughtfulness and humor, makes her an insightful storyteller. Like a message from a wise friend, The Best of Luck Club is worth revisiting whenever you’re in need of a little perspective.


With flutes and instrumental flair, the New Zealand singer-songwriter adds restless drama to her steadfast, plainspoken reflections on pain and personal growth.

Messages to God

Here’s the annoying thing about creating anything: You have to reckon with a time lag. Pure feeling can never survive the time required to decide to register it, and then jot it down. So you have to invent the thought anew, render it writerly, symbolic, neat. New Zealand musician Sarah Mary Chadwick, whose work has always privileged immediacy and primacy, brings pause and contemplation to her eighth studio album, Messages to God. In a quavering contralto thick with indeterminacy, she mirrors the experience of trying to clamber out of the darkness, but never knowing when it will end, or whether the light at the end of the tunnel exists at all.
Her previous three albums, released between 2019 and 2021, found solid footing (and a bleak sense of humor) in abjection, referencing heavy drinking, self-harm, her own suicide attempt. Lines tended to end in an anti-climax or a joke, alongside a streak of cruelty. “Tried to end it all, I’d not tried lately/August 11, 2019/And I didn’t call my mum/’Cause I hate that bitch,” she sung on 2021’s “Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby.” The effect was one of emotional overstimulation rather than purgation.
Messages to God documents Chadwick’s attempt to find help and health, a process that’s boring and often irritating, like a slow, dull scratch. During the effort to move forward, she often falls back into her past, landing on heartbreak and hopeless nostalgia loops. But there are flashes of scattered beauty, lightning bolts of pure joy. “Well I’m here/I’m glad I’m still alive,” she sings like a secret on “I Felt Things in New Zealand,” a pause from her carousing vocal performance. At times Chadwick herself becomes a reliable and loving guide. On “Drinkin’ on a Tuesday,” a rollicking, boozy anthem, she proffers some genuinely great advice: “You gotta have a song to sing that will bring you to its knees with its beauty/And you gotta have a joke to tell that’ll help you make friends drinking on a Tuesday.”
In her previous triptych of albums, musical gestures were largely deprioritized in favor of Chadwick’s dramatic vocal delivery. Melodies were few and far between, as well as tonally inconsistent. She played her piano like a teenager throwing a tantrum during a school recital, bashing out a few chords here and there, keeping the composition as spare as possible, yet still furiously alive. She used her limited technical ability in service of her emotionally excessive performance. Here, pop melodies serve as a foil to Chadwick’s grave messages. A grand piano line, reminiscent of Aphrodite Child’s “Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall,” meets bluegrass slide guitar on “Don’t Tell Me I’m a Good Friend”; a psychedelic swirl of flutes surrounds her voice on “Only Bad Memories Last.” These flitting, willfully frivolous additions bring further drama and tension to Chadwick’s songcraft. The depression and abjection that once characterized her songs made them purgatorial, motiveless. Now, Chadwick floods them with wild and frenzied motive-seeking, performing the quest for lightness and reason with equal ferality.
Messages to God departs from her previous ultra-stalwart, self-immolating approach, as Chadwick makes a concerted effort to find beauty in the mundane, allowing herself to experience the drag of the time lag in order to do so. “I’m just trying to move my life/Away from strife and into love,” she sings on “Someone Else’s Baby,” operose and hesitant. Learning to get out of your own way requires understanding why you were acting as a roadblock in the first place. On Messages to God, Chadwick attempts to use that intense self-inquiry to move forward, knowing it’s a journey she must undertake for herself. Her most musically and emotionally dynamic work to date, Messages to God may not inch her much further toward heaven, though it makes a great leap towards Chadwick’s goal here on Earth: to perfectly transcribe the wretched, muddy, disgusting, beautiful mind.


The London electronic musician’s painterly, atmospheric production style yields deftly layered headphone music adorned with occasional dancefloor flourishes.

Now Is

Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, has always searched for new ways to approach his synthesizers, whether translating sketches into scores on Articulation or daisy-chaining effects pedals to create the busy textures of Howl. The London producer’s restless tone-seeking and expressive ambience easily meld with other mediums. Recently, his music has provided the ominous underpinnings of a contemporary dance production, the pulsating cues for a soccer documentary, and the droning accompaniment to supermodel Bella Hadid having a dress sprayed directly onto her body. With Now Is, West has crafted a soundtrack to his own pandemic-induced lockdown. Appropriately, it’s sometimes tedious and occasionally revelatory, oscillating between comforting recollections of the past and tentative inklings of the future.
An inward-looking suite of tracks made in solitude isn’t exactly new territory for West, whose painterly, atmospheric production style yields deftly layered headphone music, in spite of some propulsive dancefloor flourishes. And the decidedly contemplative bent of Now Is is nothing less than routine among the growing canon of records predominantly created in lockdown; West’s former labelmate Nils Frahm recently stretched the “stuck-in-quar” mood into three painstakingly pensive hours. Many of the tracks on Now Is were conceived as miniature scores to film clips or as deliberate counterpoints to the sinister tone of 2021’s Overflow, but they’re still beholden to West’s usual palette of stuttering synths, sparse rhythms, and reverberating flourishes. While songs like “Echoes” and “World Turns” refine the sound of previous Rival Consoles albums, West is most compelling when he’s consciously subtracting familiar elements or introducing new variables.
West says that while recording Now Is, he tried to be “confident enough to bring very subtle details to the front and let them just be.” Classical music served as one of his primary muses, though he’s more interested in channeling the delicate interplay and timbre of orchestral sound than replicating the dense structure of symphonic bombast. “Running” and “Vision of Self” embrace the tenets of minimalism, featuring short synth motifs that resemble string arrangements, repeating and slowly shifting as embellishments are introduced. Hearing these songs gradually transform and reveal themselves requires patience, but neither track feels like it’s building to some inevitable crescendo—here, the journey is the point.
Now Is occasionally gets bogged down in tunes that sap the album’s deliberate momentum, such as the cold, percussive “Frontiers.” Written as an ode to dramatic Icelandic scenery, it’s a track that you might expect to mirror the sweeping landscapes of a nature documentary, but it settles for the fade-into-the-background energy of generic video-game music (probably an ice level). Just before its conclusion, Now Is enters another lull as West leans into the acutely listless tendencies of ambient music (“The Fade”) and toys with nu-jazz stylings (“A Warning”).
The warped melody of a muted piano offers resolution at the album’s close. The instrument is rarely the centerpiece of West’s music, which makes its use here all the more striking. The gentle hiss of the looped piano on “Quiet Home” lends a sense of physical space and grounded reality, contrasted with West’s typical array of electronic noise suspended in reverb. In interviews, West insists that he rebelled against the notion of writing a predictably mournful pandemic-era record, but the album’s sparse, willfully earthbound final minutes betray the melancholy at its core. Thankfully, Now Is doesn’t devote too much time to wallowing. West is far more interested in the musical possibilities that a stretch of enforced downtime can eventually reveal.


The Afrobeats star balances the formula to unite home and abroad with big pop songs that can compete across cultures and an underlying theme that embraces his roots.

Made In Lagos

It’s been 10 years since WizKid first debuted in Lagos, becoming synonymous with all that is good in Afrobeats. Four years ago, Drake’s “One Dance” introduced the Nigerian pop star internationally, broadening his audience and spotlighting a genre on the verge of becoming a global powerhouse. The 30-year-old singer has picked up the skills to dualize his music, making art with one foot planted firmly at home while the other seeks success in new markets. From making dance records designed to conquer Lagos, he’s expanded into other territories, by leaning heavily on Caribbean influences. It hasn’t been an easy task, and in the time since WizKid gained international recognition, his crossover credentials have been in question back in Africa.
His stateside debut, Sounds From the Other Side, struggled to make a dent commercially. His contract with Sony demands that he continues to play for a global audience, making music that would not work connect locally back home. To work around contractual restrictions, he’s paired with producers and DJs, appearing on their records as an invested guest, to start records in the Nigerian market. More complex still is the ever-changing scene in Lagos, where a new guard of musicians including Omah Lay, Fireboy, and Joeboy are expanding the borders of genre and redefining the local sound. WizKid’s legacy is secure, but in 2020, he’s a king under threat of deposition.
Made in Lagos dispels those doubts over 14 tracks. Here, he’s finally balanced the formula to unite home and abroad with big pop songs that can compete across cultures and an underlying theme that embraces his roots. The project is dedicated to Lagos, Nigeria’s bubbling creative hub, historically the beating heart of Africa’s art community. It’s home for WizKid, the place where he was born, raised, and first accepted. It isn’t his first love letter to his hometown: His previous ode to the city’s popular Ojuelegba neighborhood brought Drake into his life and launched his crossover campaign. He continues to embrace his people in art and in action: As young Nigerians around the world participated in the recent #EndSARS protests against police brutality, WizKid delayed his album release and joined in, marching alongside fans in London and becoming a vocal advocate on social media.
Made in Lagos is narrow in its sonic approach, but for good reason. Where previous projects were outsized cocktails of club bangers and experimental pursuits, WizKid’s measured take on his fourth album betrays refined maturity. His sounds are familiar, his delivery sure. And the sincerity bleeds through the songwriting. “Inna inna inna, I know say dey go pray on my downfall/I’m still a winner winner,” he asserts early on, as horns travel through the winding melodies of “Reckless.” Wizkid’s delivery of patois and pidgin English interpolating with lush saxophone instantly set this apart. He has refined his approach, finding comfort in exploring the intersection of two sound cultures: Lagos exuberance meets Jamaican rhythms.
For a project dedicated to the Nigerian city and its country, the core of Made in Lagos highlights the cultural exchange between Africa and the Caribbean. For many generations, the music of Lagos has enjoyed a healthy Island influence. From reggae to dancehall, to soca, local creatives in Lagos chop and mix music along a wide spectrum of Island sound cultures. Lagos might have birthed WizKid, but Kingston provides the inspiration.
True cross-cultural explosion happens within the bounce and deep drumming of “Mighty Wine.” You are instantly transported into a late night in a small club in Victoria Island, bodies gyrating from joy. Damian Marley’s gratitude and introspective verse elevate “Blessed” into an anthem fit for those windy sunsets driving through the incessant honking cars of Lagos Island. On the ground, Lagos might be a city of struggle and shadows, but its very heart is aspirational, and to survive its horrors is to be blessed. WizKid captures the feeling of escapism on the hook: “Say tonight man no go stress o/Say tonight, me and my guys we go jam gbedu.”
Other collaborators elevate their records, playing on their strengths in a diverse fashion. H.E.R. redirects flowing positivity into romance on fan-favorite, “Smile.” The mid-tempo reggae production attracted local criticism for its cultural detachment and simplicity when it was released in July. A poignant music video might have softened that stance, but within the full project, its familiarity feels like home. Ella Mai’s openness makes for the perfect duet, bringing a slow burn to the R&B standout “Piece of Me.” “Meet me for lobby o, I know nobody can satisfy ya,” WizKid brags. Alternative Nigerian vocalist Tay Iwar’s sunny infusion of tropical fun over lush instrumentals on “True Love” provides a highlight, while rising singer Tems continues her steady ascension with a sultry performance on “Essence.” Despite a pedestrian chorus, Burna Boy still rings in the party on “Ginger” amid rolling drums and exaggerated promises to a lover. Skepta relives his “Bad Energy” success on “Longtime,” and even though the new collaboration drags uncomfortably, a little déjà vu can be excused.
Made in Lagos doesn’t pretend to dig deeper than escapism and a bit of symbolism. Love and gratitude drive the affair forward, with rich approaches to its mid-tempo production. With 10 years of African success under his belt, WizKid’s play for increased global reach is transforming his artistry. The beauty and novelty within Made in Lagos is a consequence of that metamorphosis. For African artists pushing for crossover success, a full Afrobeats takeover of the Hot 100 remains the Holy Grail. WizKid’s latest is a fine addition to make that a reality.

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For his latest solo record, Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach recruits a free-ranging band and jams out a loose, soul-inspired record that feels like longtime friends playing ego-free in basements.

Yours, Dreamily

While he's best known as one half of the Black Keys, Dan Auerbach's built himself quite a resume of extracurricular actives in the past few years, largely behind the boards. He's produced for artists including Ray LaMontagne and New Orleans piano legend Dr. John, and helped give Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence its sweeping, cinematic sheen.With his latest side-project the Arcs, the guitarist and vocalist steps back into the spotlight, recruiting Truth and Soul Records founder Leon Michels, Black Keys touring bassist Richard Swift, Menahan Street Band member Homer Steinweiss, Amy Winehouse collaborator Nick Movshon, and guitarist Kenny Vaughan.
Instead of coming across as a "Dan Auerbach & Co." record though, Yours, Dreamily strikes a more collaborative balance, with all members receiving songwriting credits and an overall feeling of longtime friends jamming ego-free in basements (never mind the fact one of those practice spaces was New York's Electric Lady Studios). In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Auerbach said they were inspired by "old soul records, Captain Beefheart, and newer hip-hop".
Much like Auerbach and Patrick Carney's well-meaning but poorly-executed rap-rock experiment BlakRoc, the album was recorded quickly in two weeks, though fans of the Akron, Ohio's last stadium rock duo standing will find plenty to enjoy here. Rollicking opener "Outta My Mind" could easily be a lost Black Keys Attack & Release B-side and the Arcs incorporate a love of psychedelia and the Stax Records catalog more successfully than the group's last outing. There's a lot of influences coming together here, but they work sonically, from the clop of horses and bird chirps on the country-tinged "Everything You Do (You Do for You)" to the orgiastic shrieks and frenzied saxophone on "Come & Go".
While nobody's claiming to be innovating wildly here, the biggest flaw of Yours, Dreamily lies in its ham-fisted and occasionally rote lyrics ("Pistol Made of Bones" is the biggest offender). With the exception of the horn-heavy, Junior Kimbrough-referencing "Velvet Ditch", which Auerbach says was inspired by a motorcycle trip he took from Nashville to Clarksdale, Miss., too many of the songs here come off like failed attempts to write a Muscle Shoals version of "Bad Blood". It's not the first time he's sung about ill-fated romance (his acrimonious split with wife Stephanie Gonis in 2013 made tabloid and music blog headlines alike)—see also his 2009 solo album Keep It Hid—but over the course of 14 tracks, it grows slightly repetitive.
Thankfully, his wearied tales get a welcome assist from Brooklyn-based all-female mariachi band Flor de Toloache, who provide ghostly backup vocals and a much-needed sense of perspective on slow-burning highlights "Put a Flower in Your Pocket" and quasi-ballad "Chains of Love" (disappointingly not an Erasure cover). On tender lead single "Stay in My Corner" (inspired by the May 2015 boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao), he pleads his allegiance to a lover claiming "I will fight for you" but it sounds like it's himself he's trying to convince. Like that fight, the Arcs will draw audiences (they've already been booked as a musical guest on an upcoming episode of "Late Show With Stephen Colbert" and are sure to be a lock for the festival circuit) and Yours, Dreamily draws spirited performances from its players, but works best as a one-off event.


The Berlin-based DJ’s new album relies on rototom drums and the interplay of diverse guests to build exhilarating, dynamic soundscapes.

Eyeroll

In the early stages of writing Eyeroll, Berlin-based DJ and producer Ziúr started calling it her “jazz album.” “I mean it’s not really,” she admitted in one interview, “but I guess it’s my kind of jazz.” There is a marked difference between this body of work and her older records, which are icy expanses of fractured electronica; 2021’s Antifate, for example, is spare and heady, blanketed in a digital frost. On Eyeroll, Ziúr crafts warmer yet more extreme textures, responding to the composed poems and vocal improvisations of a handful of guests.
Ziúr’s collaborators are a fierce and versatile cohort. Among them are Egyptian poet, singer, and composer Abdullah Miniawy; Manchester-based rapper Iceboy Violet; and New York DJ and multimedia artist Juliana Huxtable. Each has a distinct, angular presence. On the crackling “If the City Burns I Will Not Run,” Miniway reads a poem in Arabic that depicts a charred and war-torn land—a hostile place, but no less of a home. As Berlin-based composer James Ginzburg modulates a drone that hits glass harp frequencies, Miniway’s cadence ripples just above a whisper, and Ziúr meshes his soft trills with dappled rhythms on rototoms—tunable drums that change pitch as they rotate around a threaded metal ring.
The instrument is fundamental to Eyeroll; Ziúr recorded the album mostly at night, and sought out percussion that wouldn’t make too much noise. The rototoms, which she tapped and scraped in dizzying patterns, became the foundation of each track, evolving and resurfacing throughout the record. On “Move On,” Ziúr thumps out a clubby dance beat, goading Iceboy Violet’s pillow-muffled rap. On the title track, the skins sound like they’re being pelted by rubber balls, mimicking a frenetic free jazz drum solo.
Songs like “Malikan,” “Move On,” and “Nontrivial Differential” make a strong case for jazz as a descriptor. Each cut features skewed and splintered trumpet, played in frantic blasts by Miniawy. On “Malikan,” sparse percussion and bass that warps like a sagging floorboard become off-kilter accents to Miniawy’s horn and ululating howls. His playing is cleaner on the skeletal “Nontrivial Differential,” leaving space for the vocal acrobatics of Welsh experimentalist Elvin Brandhi. The largely improvisational singer has exceptional vocal control; she can plunge to smokey, lounge crooner lows, snap to shrill yelps, and summon hellfire like Diamanda Galás.
Brandhi’s verses are among the most exhilarating on Eyeroll. On the title track, she clicks, shouts, and screeches, straining her throat into a dry moan that sounds like her uvula is being stretched out with surgical clamps. Ziúr’s sole lyrical contribution, “I roll the shittiest cigarettes, ” becomes a darkly funny admission in Brandhi’s mouth—a mundane detail contorted into a fiendish mantra. Ziúr allows room for Brandhi to flail, but sculpts some of her most interesting sounds to bristle against her voice. On the spectacular “Cut Cut Quote,” the producer ekes out noises that recall crisp, creaking leather. As Brandhi whips into a frenzy, barking out harsh consonants and foaming at the mouth, Ziúr ramps up her rototoms and discharges barbed lines of synthesizer. In the hands of a sensitive and dynamic composer like Ziúr, her collaborators are emboldened by the racket.


Chicago guitarist Brett Sova records for Ty Segall's God? imprint under a name inspired by a classic Jimi Hendrix LP. He blends massive, shredding guitar solos with muffled, unsteady psychedelic music, and the best tracks on his second LP Early Surf brim with potential.

Early Surf

If there's one thing you need to know about Chicago's Brett Sova, it's that he shreds. He records under the name Axis: Sova, which stands as a solo project in the studio but morphs into a full band on the road, and in either formation the most interesting element is easily his guitar. When there is percussion on Early Surf (his second LP, and his first for Ty Segall's God? Records imprint), it's minimal, synthetic, and purely functional. He's only two full-lengths in, but he's already established a reputation for buzzing, unsteady, occasionally muffled psych music spiked with a few giant guitar solos for good measure. He's established a formula—"avant garde yet burly"—that he delivers once again with Early Surf.
The trouble with this sort of psychedelia is that it sometimes veers toward abstraction and facelessness. That's definitely a concern here, as Sova's somewhat of an elusive figure in his music. He's the guitar-wielding figure on the album's cover, his features blotted out by blinding light, singing poems that address uncertainty and unclear identities. His distorted and effects-laden vocals cut off words, and he occasionally comes across as dour and reserved, but his oblique storytelling (with references, for example, to the overpowering nature of artificial light and television) and amorphous guitar leads hint at a larger aesthetic unity. On "Ask Me About My Smell", in which a woman named Heather does, indeed, ask him about his smell, he steps away from his heavier persona and lets a sense of humor shine through.
Early Surf's best moments brim with potential. "Fractal Ancestry" shows a guitarist and songwriter unafraid to explore different approaches: Over seven minutes, Sova's guitar melody operates within a loose structure, but things always seem to be in a state of flux. His solos guide the song down alternate routes as he continually shifts the balance from the right speaker to the left, peppered throughout with sci-fi sound effects. Again, his approach mirrors his lyrics: "Open the door, let it close behind you. What do you see now? It's just another door." At his best, Sova seems like the type of guy who could endlessly swing open new doors to unexpected places.
Unfortunately, a few of the songs just don't have legs. The two-minute track "Secret Hand" seems to be building to something enormous before it just sort of fizzles out. It happens again on the album's title track: Sova named his band after a classic Jimi Hendrix LP, and for a brief moment at the start of the song, it seems like he's going to do his namesake proud by springboarding off his earworm and heading into the stratosphere. Instead, he just stays the repetitive course, only changing his approach in the song's final seconds. Sova's undeniably the sort of guy you want to hear go long—the lengthier jams are undeniably the best. When he's not going on an epic journey, however, he winds up spinning in place.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 2003 debut by the North Carolina rap trio, a ridiculously hard throwback album that plugged hip-hop’s golden era into the internet age.

The Listening

Phonte, Rapper Big Pooh, and 9th Wonder have always been ’90s rap babies at heart. The two rappers and producer, respectively, grew up idolizing rap acts from the genre’s Golden Age: A Tribe Called Quest and their Native Tongues cohorts, EPMD, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, and Hieroglyphics. “We considered them our big brothers,” Phonte told the Star-News during press for The Listening in 2004. “So we were like their little brothers,” Pooh replied. This was the philosophy the trio brought with them to North Carolina Central University in Durham in 1998.
Phonte and 9th Wonder were both born and raised in small North Carolina towns; Pooh grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and was drawn to North Carolina by a deacon at his church who suggested he attend NC-Central because it was an HBCU. Phonte and 9th first met while moving into their dorm rooms: 9th was carrying a copy of The Source. “At that time, if you saw somebody with a Source mag, it was like a Jedi meeting another Jedi,” Phonte explained in 2019. Pooh came into the fold when he and Phonte met during freestyle sessions in the room of their RA, Joe Drama. That room would become an incubator for the collective known as the Justus League: eight rappers (Phonte, Pooh, Chaundon, Cesar Comanche, Median, L.E.G.A.C.Y., Edgar Allen Floe, and Sean Boog), five producers (9th, Big Dho, Khrysis, Eccentric, and Son of Yorel), a DJ (DJ Flash), and a “Minister of Opinion” (Mike Burvick). They would crack jokes and kick rhymes and indulge in each other’s wide-ranging musical tastes, from the Roots to Led Zeppelin. Bonds formed as Joe Drama’s room became the Dagobah to over a dozen Jedi-in-training.
Their arrangement was casual, little more than friends having fun recording music, until a fateful night in 2001. Phonte and Median were scheduled to rap over a 9th beat called “Speed” but, at the last minute, Median didn’t show up. Pooh was there, though, so he and Phonte joined forces instead to create what would become the first Little Brother song. 9th’s beat is steady and soulful, perfect for uneasy morning commutes across the Raleigh Beltline. Phonte’s writing is vivid and impressionistic, conjuring his position as a slave to a dead-end job (“I’m sharecropping in this paper chase”) that keeps him from seeing his infant son for days at a time. Pooh counters with bars that bluntly lay out where his mind is at during trips through the arteries of North Carolina highways: “I let my life shine in between these paper’s lines/I write rhymes to incite minds/Spending time on this pipeline, 85 North.” They offer two different perspectives on this pink-slip paranoia or, as Phonte puts it, “I was the chisel, Pooh was the sledgehammer.” “Speed” highlights the relatable yin and yang of Phonte and Pooh—direct descendants of Tribe’s Q-Tip and Phife Dawg or EPMD’s Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith—over 9th’s expert manipulation of Bobby Womack and Mobb Deep samples. In an effort to bring the Triangle of North Carolina to the world, Little Brother was officially born.
The Justus League were geeked about their sound, which honored the East Coast-bred boom-bap of hip-hop’s past, but mainstream rap, particularly in the South, had begun to move on. The highest-charting Southern rappers between 2001 and 2003—artists like Nelly and Ludacris—favored booming bass and synth-based rhythms over samples and drum breaks. Crunk music was on the verge of going mainstream: Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz released their landmark song “Get Low” as a single on February 19, 2003, only six days before The Listening landed in stores. Within three years, the rise of snap music in the Bankhead area of West Atlanta would set the stage for the ringtone rap explosion led by artists like Soulja Boy and Dem Franchize Boyz in the mid-2000s. The South had produced plenty of lyrically minded emcees (Geto Boys, UGK, 8Ball & MJG) but barring notable exceptions like OutKast’s behemoth of a double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below released that September, the emphasis is on dances and beats over rhymes. Little Brother was moving in the exact opposite direction, hoping to create music with the thoughtfulness and soul of rappers like Scarface and Aquemini-era OutKast. Waning interest in this brand of rap didn’t deter Little Brother or the Justus League from putting their own twist on André 3000’s declaration that the South had something to say.
But outside of occasional spins on college radio, Little Brother’s reach was minimal. They put together The Listening on the cheap with $2,000, a computer, and some dinky microphones, equipment “you could have found in the back storage room of any middle school or YMCA,” friend and collaborator Joe Scudda tweeted in 2021. As college students working out of dorm rooms and off-campus apartments, they didn’t have anyone to pull strings in the music industry, but they managed to cultivate an early audience through local shows and burgeoning hip-hop message board communities like Okayplayer.
Founded by Questlove of the Roots on the same day the band released their fourth studio album Things Fall Apart in 1999, Okayplayer would position itself as a space for fans to interact directly with artists years before Myspace, Facebook, or Twitter existed. The site’s message boards were a battlefield of recommendations, jokes, and heated exchanges between artists and a small army of rap purists hungry for something outside the realm of Air Force 1s and oversized white tees. Four early Little Brother songs were posted to the website thejawn.com and then reposted to Okayplayer. Once those songs surfaced on the boards, Little Brother quickly found an audience who reaffirmed their confidence and made them into one of the earliest examples of blog rap stars.
The Listening’s 18 songs are tied together by a fictional FM station called WJLR Justus League Radio—“the future of hip-hop music”—that plays from the morning commute through the graveyard shift. Different League members make cameos as hosts, hotline callers, and themselves, creating a Real Hip-Hop utopia where the lyrics hit as hard as the beats. The radio station concept was already tried and true by the early 2000s thanks to the likes of De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, and Wu-Tang Clan, and WJLR served the same basic function of transplanting rappers into their own version of ubiquitous broadcasts. But Little Brother’s love for the past dovetailed with their desire to change the present. They called the album The Listening in direct response to audiences’ shrinking attention spans and perceived lack of appreciation for the finer details of a full-length LP: reading the album credits, memorizing songs, generally marinating in the art. The concept prods at the music industry with the same backhanded humor as the WRMS station from 1991’s De La Soul Is Dead: music nerds airing our grievances through characters and conviction.
The title track, which closes out the project, is the most explicit call-out. The first two verses trade stories of kids only caring about beats blasting out of cars and school days spent listening to Black Star and Big Daddy Kane albums. To drive home the point that “niggas ain’t listening,” the third verse is filled with nonsense bars about “Fly Motorola diploma style ice niggas,” “Gold Bond Armor-All fatigues,” and Jetsons references designed to rattle anyone only half paying attention. The whole thing is soundtracked by 9th’s breezy beat, which is punctuated by a blatant sample of the horns from “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.),” the Pete Rock & CL Smooth standard that sampled them from “Today” by Tom Scott and the California Dreamers. Tongues are darting through cheeks so hard, they’re practically bursting from their ears and touching the pop filters on the mic.
It’s bold and more than a little pretentious to cast yourself as classicist saviors of an entire genre on your debut album, but Little Brother’s understanding of modern radio and their sense of humor cuts the bitterness back to playful snark. For all the self-righteousness, Little Brother’s priorities were simple: hard beats and dope rhymes took precedence over everything else. 9th’s—who produced every song on The Listening except for “The Get-Up,” which was made by Eccentric—production style was nostalgic but forward-thinking, laying pounding drums over sample fragments with enough finesse and energy to not feel sterile. Early highlights “For You” and “Whatever You Say” use vocal chops and drums in tandem to create a new swing for Phonte and Pooh to skip across. The duo recorded “For You” as a literal mic check, but the sheer joy of hearing Phonte and Pooh try to outrap each other with poetic grace (“Microsoft niggas say Word and page up”) and blunt scene-setting (“We fire off like it’s New Year’s Eve”) is infectious. The trio’s love for the genre and its history is palpable—the hook for “Groupie Pt. 2” interpolates lines from Rob Base’s classic “It Takes Two” and “So Fabulous” is a rap nerd checklist for the ages—but the quality of the songs amplifies their passion more often than the references spell it out.
It also helps that The Listening is more than just a sermon for Backpackers Anonymous. Little Brother was content to stand in opposition to the more materialistic music dominating the airwaves, particularly in the South, but they weren’t opposed to the music and culture itself. They were smart enough to realize their own place as everymen within rap’s framework and play to those strengths as often as they embraced their Real Hip-Hop ethos. “Everybody can relate to a Little Brother song. Whether you crunk all day, or you a thug all day, or if you go plant flowers all day,” Pooh once said during a radio interview. The two verses on “Whatever You Say” juxtapose the duo’s failed attempts at picking up dates—Phonte manages to impress a love interest even though his verse didn’t rhyme. On “Away From Me,” a late album highlight, Pooh and Phonte pen thoughtful verses to family members, Pooh to his estranged older brother (“I bailed out in your time of need/But you fucked me over in your time of greed”) and Phonte to his young son (“Hearing your laugh is like music to my ears but the song ended”). The stately beats on both songs magnify the uncomfortable aspects of each story, but Phonte and Pooh’s sincerity and interplay balance everything out.
For all their emotional maturity and old-school hip-hop values, Little Brother leave plenty of reminders that this project was created by an idealistic group of music nerds. Only a fanlike appreciation for the inner workings of a studio session could produce a song as pointed and funny as “Make Me Hot,” where Phonte plays a talentless rapper harassing 9th for beats. Phonte’s verse on “The Yo-Yo” is all fire and brimstone over coffeehouse rappers in “sandals and capris” holding their Blackness over his head while only dating white women. Nearly a third of The Listening’s tracklist is made up of songs about the duo’s imperfect attempts at courting, sleeping with, and reconnecting with women. Their penchant for speaking their truths kept them down to Earth, giving the disses to corny rappers on “Make Me Hot” and the soulful shout-outs to true fans on “The Way You Do It” more impact.
There’s a lot of lyrics to parse, but WJLR’s omnipresence keeps things smooth and irreverent. The transitions between songs are seamless and drive home the comforting atmosphere of a 24-hour radio station. The conceptual reach occasionally exceeds its grasp—some of the skits and ideas drag—but ultimately Little Brother display a remarkable sense of satire and thematic control.
Shortly after the album was finished, a representative from ABB Records felt the potential and reached out to the trio off the strength of their Okayplayer fanbase. After signing with ABB in 2002, The Listening was officially released on February 25, 2003 to widespread acclaim. The Source labeled it “one of the most sonically cohesive hip-hop albums since The Blueprint.” The project didn’t chart, but it made waves on the internet and moved 34,000 units by 2005, a respectable number for an indie debut. Before they knew it, Little Brother had co-signs from DJ Premier, a profile on the MTV News show You Hear It First, and music with Questlove and Pete Rock. Engineer Young Guru was so impressed with 9th’s production work, he connected him with JAY-Z, who was interested in having 9th produce the song “Threat” for his 2003 farewell album The Black Album.
From apartment recordings to touring and making music with their idols, Little Brother came out the gate swinging. But it would be years before they were fully compensated for their work. Eighteen years later, in 2021, Phonte and Pooh revealed that ABB head Ben Nickelberry Jr. had been stiffing them on royalties since at least 2004. After a passionate fan campaign, the duo received the masters to the album and re-released The Listening—complete with instrumentals and bonus tracks—via Bandcamp and the new label Imagine Nation Music.
I’ve always been curious how an album like The Listening can be so tethered to the time it was created but still feel timeless. But I think it comes down to an ethos, one that Little Brother has maintained since dropping The Listening and The Minstrel Show; since 9th Wonder’s departure in 2007; since their breakup in 2010; throughout Phonte and Pooh’s respective solo careers and their reunion in 2018: no matter what kind of Southern hip-hop was trending or what the general public expected from them, Little Brother and the Justus League never second-guessed their vision.
Finding a small audience on the internet primed Little Brother to go for the jugular with their parody TV network UBN on their Atlantic debut, 2005’s The Minstrel Show. There would be no 5th & Fashion without WJLR call-ins; none of the note-perfect elder R&B satire of Percy Miracles without the sweaty charm of fake producer Roy Lee. Phonte’s unironic expansion into adult contemporary R&B with the Dutch producer Nicolay as the group The Foreign Exchange doesn’t happen without Little Brother’s relationship to the Okayplayer message boards. Pooh’s journey as an A&R and manager might not have begun if label negotiations hadn’t gone south. Without this album, 9th Wonder would’ve never produced for JAY-Z and Destiny’s Child.
All roads lead back to The Listening. Little Brother felt something was missing from the rap ecosystem and returned those minerals to the soil, influencing artists from Kendrick Lamar and Drake to Oddisee and Tanya Morgan. Seeing Doja Cat nerding out while rapping Phonte’s verse from “Speed” on Instagram Live this past December was a gratifying reminder that things go in cycles. Few ideas are new these days, but Little Brother formed a refreshing present from the bones of hip-hop’s past.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their third album, the New Orleans duo master their omnivorous style, which ranges from hectic noise rock to jangling ambience to arena riffage—sometimes within the span of a single song.

Odd Hours

In a culture that praises overnight fame and craves an endless stream of hits, the difficult, awkward path known as The Long Road to Success always loses travelers. Why bother with unpaid gigs, cramped tour vans, sleeping on floors, and saving up for studio time when you can easily polish a song at home and let the internet sort out your fate? There’s no shame in the latter route, but there’s something ineffably sweeter about witnessing a beloved underdog mature and pick up steam in real time. Just ask the rabid fans of Caddywhompus, a band that, nine years into their career, has released their most important album.
Caddywhompus is the New Orleans-based duo of singer/guitarist Chris Rehm and drummer Sean Hart, friends who have known each other since kindergarten in Houston, Texas, and have played music together since middle school. They’ll cite early inspirations like Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Radiohead as soon as they’ll describe formative experiences with A Minor Forest, Don Caballero, and Explosions in the Sky. Grouper, the Caretaker, Vashti Bunyan, Roy Orbison, and Liz Phair sit side by side on their mixtapes. And the music Rehm and Hart write as Caddywhompus reflects their omnivorous musical appetites.
As far back as their 2010 debut LP, Remainder, the pair have mulched the contents of their iPods into a chirping, spazzy noise-rock that’s equally unhinged and pop literate. Rehm’s voice falls into the strange timbre of twerpish falsettos that rattle the bones—like Avey Tare’s yawps tamed by, say, Thom Yorke impersonating Ezra Koenig. The duo’s inclusive sound took on a new wrinkle with 2011’s The Weight EP, when they allowed themselves breathing room between bouts of erratic shredding. Three years later, the impressive Feathering a Nest diverged more frequently from angular riffs and punk tempos into post-rock’s shimmering vistas.
The third Caddywhompus album, Odd Hours, is the refined culmination of its predecessors; this stylistic tour de force rarely rests at the countless pit stops spread across its 40 minutes. Opener “Decent” kicks off with a whirlwind of proggy emo and pop punk. “Salmon Run” at first recalls OK Computer with its boomy drum kit and spacey guitar, before switching straight into fuzzy power chords and sing-along melodies à la Deerhoof. “Appetite” pulls a bait-and-switch, too, with a jittery bounce, like ’90s-era Modest Mouse, and a massive, galloping riff that could have shown up on Battles’ Mirrored. All this breakneck jamming and juggling can overwhelm, but the atmospheric instrumental “Ferment” and the straightforward “In Ways” offer palate cleansers amid the delirium.
It’s hard not to play connect-the-dots with Odd Hours, but the album is more accomplished than a well-curated grab bag of influences. Because Caddywhompus pulls from everywhere all at once, the flurry of their motions blurs into something unique unto itself. In just over a minute, “Waiting Room” moves from heavy riffing to a lazy waltz to 4/4 power-pop and back again—each transition seamless and unfussy as can be. Yet for all of the band’s remarkable skill and presence, little about them is ostentatious or gratuitous. Behind every hairpin turn and difficult time signature is a gush of effusive candor. Odd Hours is too emotional to be math-rock, too energetic to be post-rock, too structured to be art-rock—there’s no neat categorization for a record this ambidextrous.
On each half of Odd Hours, two varied, complete movements rise and fall with casual precision, the lockstep performance of bandmates with almost a decade’s practice behind them. The whole thing couldn’t exist without the duo’s years upon years spent playing flophouses, unlit basements, local block parties, and cold, uncrowded garages, with breaks to record each road-worn song in whichever buddy’s “studio” is cheap and available. It couldn’t exist without the slow work of cultivating a dedicated audience, fans that share their first experience with the band like a badge of honor. It couldn’t exist without the perseverance of two lifelong friends, who would still be playing these songs whether or not anyone bothered to listen.


The latest from the Buffalo rapper is a lean, mean project cut in just two days, eschewing his usual attention to detail for a more ramshackle approach.

Peace “Fly” God

Westside Gunn wants you to consider his music high-end art, as worthy of reverence as the pieces that fill his own seven-figure-valued collection, or the Caravaggio repurposed for one of his album covers. Appropriately, Gunn’s take on slimy-grimy New York boom-bap can feel opulent and luxurious. His best albums are rich and immersive; his street raps are adorned with pristine instrumentation, and he makes frequent references to luxury fashion brands, expensive vehicles, and the artists that appeal to his proclivities.
Peace “Fly” God is a change-up. The project was cut in an intense two-day studio session following the Buffalo rapper’s return from Paris Fashion Week, where he attended the late Virgil Abloh’s Off-White exhibition. The resulting music eschews Gunn’s usual attention to detail for a ferocious burst of off-the-cuff creativity. There are few hooks or overarching themes. Affiliates Estee Nack and Stove God Cooks end up doing much of the heavy lifting on the mic—both are decent foils, but they’re not exactly at the level of Gunn’s Griselda brethren Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher. The tracklist feels hastily assembled as it simply arranges songs by producer. Even the album title uses curious punctuation—“Fly” God as opposed to Flygod–as if scribbled by a clueless engineer on the masters. Yet for all these eccentricities, the ramshackle approach creates a compelling alternative to his more methodically assembled music. Peace “Fly” God will go down as a minor Gunn release, but it provides a welcome detour from the prolific artist’s usual methodology.
Due to his aesthetic consistency, Gunn is sometimes unfairly accused of making the same song over and over again. Peace “Fly” God alters the formula by shedding the beats down to rough soul samples and very little else. So you get a song like “Ritz Barlton,” produced by Don Carrera, who helms the entire first half of the 10-song tape. The warped piano and horns sound like they were mined from an old jazz record that was left out to bake in the afternoon sun. The eight-minute runtime of “Jesus Crack” pushes a beat that leans almost entirely on a repetitive vocal sample to its limits. So stretched is Estee Nack’s elongated verse that he needs a couple of breathers. There is a neat trick at the end of Gunn’s section, however, when he describes playing Grand Puba of 1990s rap group Brand Nubian in his Tesla jeep and a section of their song “Slow Down” comes in, bringing some relief to the otherwise unchanging arrangement.
The best beats unsurprisingly come during the three-track streak of Madlib productions. In keeping with the minimalist nature of the project’s arrangements, this is the Beat Konducta at his leanest and meanest, lining up a string-drenched sample on “Derrick Boleman,” the only hint of percussion coming from a bassline on the original recording. On “Horses on Sunset,” Cooks matches Madlib’s downbeat orchestration with a sad and striking lament: “They said they shot him six times/I said you should have shot him seven, then he could have died/Holy.” The lonely piano chords of “Open Praise” are beautiful, making Gunn sound like a forsaken hero walking down a dark, rain-streaked street.
Gunn makes himself scarce throughout Peace “Fly” God—it’s a good five minutes into the tape before we hear his voice—but when he does materialize, the soon-to-be 40-year-old’s high-intensity howl is as gripping as ever as he raps about all his favorite things. There is the exceptional “Big Ass Bracelet,” where he drops enough brand names to make 2000s Jay-Z sound modest: Hermès furniture, Adidas x Gucci’s collaboration range, MF Doom’s Nike Dunk High shoes. Gunn’s trick, though, is not allowing his expensive taste to alienate listeners. On “Ritz Barlton” he describes a sexual encounter at a halfway house that made him feel like he had a suite in a luxury hotel. And though there are fewer pusherman raps than usual, Gunn is still comfortable in that lane. On “Derrick Boleman,” he describes the smell of cocaine filling his loft while Cooks lays out his 44 bricks in honor of former NBA All-Star Derrick Coleman’s number. Gunn may have presence in the art and fashion worlds these days, but Peace “Fly” God still invites us to believe in his on-record persona: a hustler with fantasies of living life like a modern day Gatsby.


The California-based producer, instrumental to the rise of emo-rap, offers a solid showcase of his talent that maps a constellation of strange and unforgettable artists.

AMITY

To start with, the Saetia sweatshirt. On the cover of  Amity, Nedarb Nagrom is wearing the mythic proto-screamo band’s merch, and their logo is dead center. Someone on their Instagram account posted a screenshot of his cover, saying, “I wonder if he has ever heard of us.” It’s a reasonable ask of a young producer about a band 20 years defunct that rarely played shows to more than 50 people. But for Nedarb, it’s no surprise.
Like Saetia, he’s a foundational act in a style that only had a name after he helped create it: late-2010s emo-rap. But Amity isn’t even an emo-rap album. Emotionally and sonically, it’s all over the place, cohesive insofar that it maps a constellation of strange and unforgettable artists. In fact, Saetia’s lead singer now produces tough Philly techno, and that same spirit is present here, too: guest after guest—and there are a lot of them—these are the new DIY lifers.
“Home on Time,” featuring Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, is a fitting opener. Over the past five years, he and Nedarb have worked together in the inventive collectives THRAXXHOUSE, GOTHBOICLIQUE, and their latest, Misery Club, but this is actually the first song with just the two of them. It’s like they finally got a moment to catch their breath. The song is patient in sound—a hollow, dribbling synth—and its sweet, sad message: “I don’t mean to rush her, but I need to go… I never get home on time.”
A few years ago, Nedarb lived in Pasadena with Lil Peep, GBC member Horse Head, and the singer Brennan Savage. His one-time podcast, “Ned’s Place,” occasionally took place in their house, and it now serves as a bittersweet archive of the mundane roundtables that formed when the guys weren’t making music. In 2014, it was Horse Head’s “Numb,” on which Nedarb sampled the Canadian emo band Silverstein, that arguably first cracked open emo-rap. Today, Horse Head and Brennan Savage do the heavy lifting in that style on the five songs that begin Amity, singing about love and angels in the night.
Then on track six, things go sideways. The producer tag, “Yo Ned, turn that light down a little bit,” which once seemed almost defeatist, starts to land decidedly freaky. The first rapper on “Triflin’,” Lil House Phone, is a longtime collaborator, but the left-of-hyphy sound here ushers in a different kind of debauchery. The Atlanta rapper Father sneaks in the very not-sad, “Shawty get crushed and ate up like Lays,” and the album becomes a kaleidoscope of styles.
Each new guest appearance contributes another distinct vocal texture. Bootychaaain and La Goony Chonga, from Gwallah Gang, both show up, and a drawling Black Kray, one of the first artists to use a Nedarb beat, is as unknowable as ever on “Babygangsoldiers.” Newcomer Big Baby Scumbag shouts about Boosie, and Little Pain, the saddest of rappers, compares himself to Casper. Zubin’s vibrato makes an essential appearance, and so does KirbLaGoop’s alarming squeak. Somehow, Alice Glass fits into this, with an ear-piercing wail on “Eat Me Alive Interlude.” Girl Pusher, the ferocious L.A. dance band, remix that “Interlude” for Amity’s final track, with Nedarb fully handing over the reins.
Even the most commercially successful producer albums have validated eccentrics with a few spots in the lineup. On Amity, the oddballs make up the whole team, with Nedarb their bullheaded coach. For many of these artists, he was one of the first people to spot something different in them, and here he relentlessly pushes them for more, adeptly shifting styles and tempos to suit. The effect is of simultaneous humility and confidence. Recently, Nedarb tweeted that he was now charging $5,000 for a beat. Someone pointed out that that’s Atlanta veteran Zaytoven’s rate, and Nedarb simply replied, “And?”


Nashville-based singer Natalie Prass has created an album of relationships troubled by misunderstandings, of earnest lovers caught in the claws of the unmerciful. Matthew E. White's Spacebomb band lends her songs a string-and-horn-heavy instrumentation, giving her smoldering perspective on passionate romance some pomp and circumstance.

Natalie Prass

Natalie Prass is not history ripped from a black-and-white photo, but a real, living person. She crafts slow-burning soul music indebted to singers like Dolly Parton, Dusty Springfield, and Jenny Lewis (with whom she toured as a backing vocalist), and she makes her home in Nashville, where she settled after stints in Cleveland, Virginia Beach, and Boston’s Berklee College of Music. (She dropped out after only a year because she thought the city was too big.) In Richmond, Va., she found her people at Spacebomb Records, the label run by retro revivalist and high school friend Matthew E. White. He and producer Trey Pollard hooked her up with the Spacebomb house band, and helped craft her debut album, Natalie Prass, around luxuriant string-and-horn-heavy instrumentation to give her smoldering perspective on passionate romance some pomp and circumstance.
When the album opens, Prass is telling us she doesn’t feel much, which would sound more like a joke if her voice didn't sound so somber. Natalie Prass is an album of relationships troubled by misunderstandings, of earnest lovers caught in the claws of the unmerciful. She sounds lighter than air as she sings lyrics devastating in their economy, addressing someone who "plucked me from the vine" on "Bird of Prey" and later telling someone else (or the same person?) "I just want to know you violently" on "Violently". The latter reminds me of Sharon Van Etten’s "Your Love Is Killing Me"—the songs even share a similar lyric about having their legs broken so they won’t walk to someone all wrong for them. (Yikes!)
But Prass sounds positively uplifted as the band swells over her lovesick harmonies, forgoing any tortured abnegation. There’s idealism in her voice that’s tempered by heartbreak without falling prey to cynicism—like the bitterness has been skimmed off the top, leaving an evergreen sweetness. In an interview with Grantland, Prass said the record was completed in early 2012. "Violently" dates as far back as 2009, when she was still in college. What’s remarkable is how the songwriting coheres into one vision, even as Prass herself must’ve changed over the years. Recently, Run the Jewels participated in Rookie’s "Ask a Grown Man" video series, where they doled out advice on life and love to teenage girls. During one question, Killer Mike said that love should feel good—that it shouldn’t hurt. Fine advice for hormonal romantics just starting out, but anyone with an ounce of life experience knows it doesn’t work that way.
Natalie Prass is officially the work of nearly three-dozen musicians, most of whom played horns or strings for Spacebomb’s house band. (Prass has called the record "a community.") The arrangements were handled by White and Pollard, and they’re crucial. Without those horns and strings, the repeated refrain of "our love is a long goodbye" toward the end of "My Baby Don’t Understand Me" wouldn’t percolate to a rolling boil before exploding in that final, devastating delivery. Still, it would be unwise to think that any old singer-songwriter would work with this band behind them. What makes Natalie Prass is her confident delivery amidst so many unconfident feelings—the way she nimbly skips over the verses on "Bird of Prey", or walks along the groove on "Why Don’t You Believe in Me". She sounds comfortable and in charge, wielding her massive band like a wizard’s scepter.
Prass is most impressive working within the biggest instrumentation, where her emotional precision acts as a counterweight for all the textural grandiosity. The songs where the drums don’t do the driving, like "Christy" or "It Is You", raise the question of what the album would sound like were she a more bombastic singer, capable of blowing out speakers. Prass herself seems aware of her limitations. "I don’t think I’m the most talented musician or the best singer, but I work really, really hard," she told Pitchfork. "And sometimes these random things happen, and it makes you keep going." As mantras go, "I’m not the best but I work really hard" isn’t the type to get turned into a Tumblr macro, but the result makes Natalie Prass a warm, intimate debut album that leaves space for darker contemplation—those stray thoughts that light you up at the end of the night.


The Breeders’ new album features their iconic Last Splash lineup. It is smoothly confident with many moments of bliss, even as the lyrics evoke isolation, frustration, and scuzz.

All Nerve

The “comeback album” can arrive with a suite of expectations attached many of which tend to boil down to one question: Will the artist revive their signature sound, the one most likely to trigger a dopamine rush of recaptured youth in the listener?
All Nerve, the new album from alt-pop icons the Breeders comes packaged with a particularly weighty version of that narrative. It’s the band’s fifth full-length and first since 2008’s Mountain Battles, but perhaps more importantly, it’s the first album in 25 years to feature—in addition to Kim Deal on vocals, guitar, and keyboards, and her sister Kelley on guitar—bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim MacPherson. This iteration was last found on Last Splash, the band’s 1993 album that reeled off one of the alt-pop era’s most deliriously off-kilter singles with the groovy, gummy “Cannonball” and contained a ton of other chestnuts—the gorgeous extinguished-soul ballad “Do You Love Me Now?,” the sweat-drenched summer ode “Saints,” the cheeky religion rebuke “Divine Hammer.” Last Splash was a hooky jab at the self-importance that sometimes threatened to overtake alt-rock in its earliest days, a middle finger caked in funnel-cake sugar.
It’s a lot to live up to, and many bands would crumble under the pressure—or at least try too hard to recapture past glories. But the Breeders avoid this trap: While its title is a double entendre that implies both courage and open-wound neuroses, All Nerve is smoothly confident. The four Breeders have individually and together slashed idiosyncratic paths through pop; on All Nerve, they collectively dig into that ideal, with each member playing to their strengths—the Deal sisters trading off harmonies and licks while Kim yelps abstract poetics, Wiggs holding down the low end so the sisters can leap ever higher, MacPherson keeping the beat urgent even when the BPM lets up a bit.
This approach results in many moments of bliss, even as the lyrics evoke isolation, frustration, and scuzz. The title track describes a longing that’s curdled from its own heat, with whispered-secret harmonies revealing the primal need only hinted at by Kim’s plaintive verses. The chorus’ happy-fun-ball explosion is the inevitable result of that paradoxical angst, with Deal’s “I won’t stop!” acting as the spark that lights her bandmates’ dynamite stick. The chugging centerpiece “Spacewoman” is starlit yet weary, its analog-synth flutters whooshing through Kim’s descriptions of spotlight-borne alienation (“When you look up/At your big light show/Do you ever wanna turn around and go/Hitting every green light on the long way home”) to create a waking-dream effect. And “MetaGoth”  is a grand showcase for Wiggs’ ice-queen vocal—the music outlines a trip too close to the edge of the abyss before shards of feedback rise up to blot out the riffs.
Those looking for Last Splash Pt. 2 might be disappointed by All Nerve. It’s not as instantly grabbable as its quarter-century-old predecessor, both in terms of its alt-pop banger quotient and the moods it sustains. After “Spacewoman,” the album nearly falls into itself—the open-road murder ballad “Walking With a Killer” and the stagger-swaying “Howl at the Summit” are almost too vibe-oriented, making the implosive opening of “Archangel’s Thunderbird” all the more urgent. More often than not, All Nerve is a satisfying listen because it lets the Breeders dig into their reasons for being drawn back into each other’s orbit—including the left-of-center hooks, the withering poetics, and the shared prickliness toward meeting outside expectations.


On the final installment of their Trifecta series, the Detroit rap trio delivers quotable after quotable. It’s cocksure and playful, like a high school lunchroom cipher.

Trifecta 3: the Finale

At this point, ShittyBoyz are a well-oiled sports car with LEDs on the chassis and Supreme stickers embossed on the spoiler. Since they first gained traction through their single “No Hook 3” in 2018, emcees BabyTron, StanWill, and TrDee have honed their sly take on Michigan street rap into a reliable formula. Over a high-octane blend of dance, hyphy, and hardcore rap that couldn’t come from anywhere but the Motor City, they shoot off rounds of impish insults and flexes. (If their songs were any more Detroit, every album would come with a bottle of Everfresh.) It’s an approach that’s catapulted BabyTron into mainstream rap conversations, but StanWill and TrDee haven’t slowed down either, thanks to a prolific run of solo albums and wacky videos. Independently, they are already among Detroit’s most consistent rappers, but on their latest album, Trifecta 3: the Finale, they continue stunting as a unit, digging further into their world of deadpan zaniness.
ShittyBoyz records largely stick to an established blueprint, mostly because each member of the trio has more freedom to experiment on their solo projects. BabyTron’s last album, 6, featured some of his most thoughtful and slowest-paced songs yet. Though StanWill and TrDee don’t deviate much from their go-to themes, the beats they gravitate toward feature strange, beguiling samples, even by their standards (On this year’s Early Mornings, Late Nights, TrDee’s baritone enchantingly clashes against the bright twinkling sample). In that sense, every ShittyBoyz album is like an Avengers team-up: They’re not here to complicate or challenge the lore, but they’re also not going to phone it in. Instead, they hit every trick and alley-oop with just enough nonchalance to elicit oohs and aahs from the crowd.
And by now, that three-man weave is so effortless, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement. On each of Trifecta 3’s 20 songs, they pull quotable after quotable out of the ether. Whether it’s hyperspecific sport references (“Flyin’ in a ’Hawk, I feel just like Dejounte Murray” from “Perfect 3”) or borderline dad jokes (“You not plugged in like a loose charger” from “Ball Players”), the bars range from quotidian profundities to genuine gut busters. BabyTron remains the star, a product of his unmatched charisma and cutting barbs (the way he sneers “You’re a pedophile” after TrDee’s R. Kelly joke on “Sh!tty Pack” almost made me fall out of my chair.) But all three of them sound best when they play off of each other in coordinated lyrical attacks. On the early album highlight “Tronald & Stanley,” Tron and Stan trade off after every bar, their references to DD Osama and scam-proof credit cards landing with the cocksure energy of a high school lunchroom cipher. “Game 7” pushes this dynamic to the extreme, with all three rappers sharing space in the same verse. They’re like different strands on a DNA triple helix, complementing each other’s themes and rhyme schemes in a brotherly bond.
Trifecta 3’s stable of producers, which includes the usual suspects, like EnrgyBeats, byekyle, Danny G, and RJ Lamont, keeps things just as lively and familiar. Some of the beats, like “Boomshakalacka” and “Triumphs & Trophies,” are powered by the fanfare of horns, warbling 808s, and mid-song beat changes, which the trio raps over seamlessly. Others default to the retrofitted freestyle dance music (“Fun & Games”) and the future-goth aesthetic (“50 Boyz,” “Forever Litt”) present in many Michigan street rap songs, with slinky pianos and thudding percussion as if they were outsourced from the video game Castlevania. There are no misfires on the beat front, but the lack of exploration is more apparent here than it is in the raps. They don’t possess the ridiculous fun of past standouts, like the theme song medley on “Video Games” from Trifecta 2, or the tongue-in-cheek flip of Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand” that powers “Payday” on the first Trifecta. This record is no less energetic, but it is more straitlaced in comparison to its wilder siblings.
That’s the glaring issue with the otherwise solid Trifecta 3: The bars and the beats never operate on the same manic level. It’s all fluid, funny, and engaging, but there’s no song that grabs your skull and shakes it for loose change, no standout bar or memorable beat switch that will light social media on fire. ShittyBoyz do meet their standard for street rap mayhem, and you can’t knock these songs for jogging in place, especially when their whole thing is about appearing relaxed and rich enough to buy an NBA franchise with scam money. But if this is the clear end of a chapter in their discography, it’s hard not to wonder where else their madcap antics can go from here.


Though less consciously ambitious than their previous two albums, the California power pop band’s latest is a pure refinement of their sound and feel.

40 oz. to Fresno

Surviving as a punk band is tough. Even the most beloved bands are subject to a special kind of mundane burnout where, quite understandably, they figure getting together to make an album and tour just isn’t worth navigating the time off from work. After 14 years and six albums together, Joyce Manor have so far escaped that fate. On “You’re Not Famous Anymore,” a track from their new record 40 oz. to Fresno, frontman Barry Johnson seems to address someone who didn’t. “You’re working in a grocery store,” frontman Barry Johnson points out. “No meet and greet, no UK tour, now you’re not famous anymore.”
There may be a hint of gloating there. Joyce Manor are decidedly still indie famous, as far as indie punk bands go; they recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of their debut album with two nights at the sizable Hollywood Palladium. They’ve achieved a cult longevity unlike some of the bands they once shared bills with. The reward is lower stakes, releasing their music to a plateau of long-time fans rather than expecting too many new ones. As a result, 40 oz. to Fresno is less consciously ambitious than the band’s last two albums. While 2016’s Cody embraced glossy ’90s alt-rock, and 2018’s Million Dollars To Kill Me let them jump ship into ’80s power-pop, 40 oz. to Fresno’s readiest comparison point is simply Joyce Manor itself. They’ve figured out the outer limits of Joyce Manor; now it’s about perfecting what’s within them.
That gives them the freedom to focus less on the big picture and zero in on the songs. “Dance With Me” and “Don’t Try” feature two of their catchiest choruses ever; the former jangly and Pixies-esque, and the latter a driving outburst of pop-punk. Meanwhile, lead single “Gotta Let It Go” tries something they haven’t really done before: sounding absolutely enormous. Its weighty production works beautifully to prop up the fired-up-but-nowhere-to-go vibe of the song. The album is over before you really know it’s begun, and it isn’t cohesive or groundbreaking enough for that to feel as satisfying as on previous albums. But the songs are studiously, almost mathematically propellant, creating a rush of exhilaration that feels equally earned.
Johnson’s witty and sardonic songwriting is mostly the same as ever. He plays the role of someone who would be romantic if he wasn’t so misanthropic—or the other way around. The narrator is always reaching for connection, then waving it away like a stubborn kid. “It’s not a confession if I was just messing,” he asserts on “Gotta Let It Go.” On “NBTSA,” he wants to confess a secret, then a line later spits: “I don’t know why I want you to know.” Many of the experiences he narrates are lit with the glow of reckless youth—falling in love in a park, fucking in the back seat of a car. But there’s also a new streak to the subject matter that betrays the fact Johnson is in his mid-30s now. There’s the disillusionment of “You’re Not Famous Anymore,” while a similar world-weariness shows up in “Gotta Let It Go”—the thing that must be let go of alternates between a relationship and the narrator’s own youth.
But there’s a little bit of lopsided optimism in “Dance With Me.” Johnson addresses the rag-tag crowd that Joyce Manor make music for—“You’ve never been an addict, you’ve just got a little habit that you couldn’t cope without”—culminating in a kind of fuck-it theme song. Towards the end of it, he asks: “Could it be that the room’s empty and I’m just tearing out my heart for the sound guy?” The possibility of fading into obscurity is on his mind. But 40 oz. to Fresno doesn’t seem to be an attempt to counteract that, as much as to get the most out of Joyce Manor as a vehicle while people are still listening. This is the Joyce Manor album for Joyce Manor fans—a loving, uncynical refinement of the band’s best.


The sophomore album from the electronic pop duo offers a biting, withering take on pop music, full of crisp humor while still finding real moments of tenderness.

What Now

The Durham, N.C. electropop duo Sylvan Esso debuted in 2013 with a single called “Hey Mami”—a humid snapshot of catcallers that hooted right along with them. Amelia Meath’s hiccupping trill, as light and sugary as corner shop wine, flew over producer Nick Sanborn’s languid, slightly arrhythmic beats—a surprising product from members of the Appalachian roots trio Mountain Man (Meath) and the freak-folk jammers Megafaun (Sanborn). It took a few spins to suss out its satire and parody; when the track appeared on their self-titled debut the following year, it paired well with far sillier bouts of humor, down to a song that remixed the playground chant of “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” into a displaced screed about technology (“H.S.K.T.”)
On What Now, Sylvan Esso’s second album, their driest quip waits patiently in the wings. “Radio,” a scathing survey of pop music songwriting, flings such acid as “Don’t you look good sucking American dick?” over their most broadly palatable synth hook yet, the sort of sound Katy Perry strove for on her similarly dyspeptic “Chained to the Rhythm.” Meath and Sanborn aren’t any less Technicolor or any more subtle here in drawling their disdain for FM radio-friendly songs that must be “three-point-three-oh” minutes—so you can picture their smirks when a glance at iTunes reveals that this track also runs almost exactly at 3:30.
Crisp humor is a time-honored constant in folk storytelling—Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan knew their way around a bitchy barb. On What Now, much like on Sylvan Esso’s debut, folk exists only in the narrative sense; Meath studies everyday scenes through a loupe, pausing between the punchlines to relay stark, occasionally morbid scenes of intimacy. However, there’s a thick sepia filter now with bigger set pieces propping up a more wide-lens anxiety. While Sylvan Esso offered peppy dioramas of untended coffee mugs and postcoital bruises, its successor scrutinizes more familiar pop imagery with a self-aware twist. Meath coos about birds chirping in the trees, but their songs are as clanging and mechanical as car alarms (“Signal”); dancers whirl to mask their desperation, sweat drenching their sequins (“Kick Jump Twist”).
Sanborn’s production is so boisterous, he hardly relaxes inside his beats. They bounce along with eccentric found sounds and Moog tics, occasionally evoking the sense of an errant tab opened somewhere on a browser. At moments, it seems like a defense of their oft-maligned genre, a fun rebuke of the stereotype that pop music is shallow. Their acerbic pop is both a product of the FM-friendly formula and a wry subversion of it.
When Meath and Sanborn ease into a slower lane, they find a sweetness that isn’t entirely likable. There is a bitterness to their Southern bless-your-heart feel, swaddling sharp observations in mannered dance-pop. The most haunting track on the album, “Die Young,” hones in on a burgeoning affair: Meath sings with soft curiosity about how she’s finally prepared to yoke her life to another’s. The lyrics themselves are a bit too histrionic to induce sympathy—“I was gonna die young/Now I gotta wait for you, honey”—but there’s no trace of irony; she is fully sincere to the melodrama over new love atop a pleasingly tinny house-lite pulse from Sanborn. (Reportedly, Meath and Sanborn have done the research, falling for each other after recording the debut.) It’s a moment that almost seems to answer the album’s title: the path forward may be calmer yet ever-curious, with plenty of amusement still to be found within.


Uniting musicians from Kinshasa, Montreal, and Seattle, Pierre Kwenders’ second album, produced by Shabazz Palaces’ Tendai Maraire, is a wildly inventive, globe-spanning triumph.

Pierre Kwenders: MAKANDA at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time

The distance between Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Montreal, Quebec: 6,386 miles. Between Montreal and Seattle: 2,287 miles. Together that’s over a quarter of the planet that’s circumscribed by Pierre Kwenders’ second album. With roots in several nations, lyrics in four languages, a firm grasp of African musical tradition, and a sumptuous vision of the future, MAKANDA at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time is one of the most wide-ranging musical expressions of 2017. Yet the wonder is not in how panoramic it sounds but in how comfortably it encompasses its span.
Kwenders’ music begins as an update of Congolese rumba, aka rumba Lingala, an Africanized variation of Cuban son that arose in DRC and its neighbor, Republic of the Congo, in the 1940s. Of course, son is a Cubanized variation of old Central African rhythms that were transported westward across the Atlantic hundreds of years earlier, during the Spanish slave trade. The ethnomusicology behind this stuff is fascinating, revealing bloodlines that trace the very DNA of rhythm. But the music of MAKANDA hits with more of-the-moment urgency than a family tree can impart.
Kwenders was born in Kinshasa and moved with his family to Montreal when he was a teenager. His first taste of performance came in the city’s Congolese-Catholic choir, followed by years of youthful exploration alongside intrepid Quebecois hip-hop, electronic, and Afropop producers. He released his first EP, Whisky & Tea, in 2013, and his first album, Le Dernier Empereur Bantou—“The Last Bantu Emperor,” a reference to the Bantu Empire that flourished in Central Africa for centuries before colonization—the following year. Even then he was subsuming distance and crunching genres to establish a kind of musical ubiquity.
Around that time, another restlessly inventive member of the African diaspora, Tendai Maraire of Shabazz Palaces, was drawn into Kwenders’ orbit, and the two began sharing tracks and ideas about Africa’s growing clout in global popular culture. Kwenders suggested that Maraire, born in Seattle of Zimbabwean parents and raised on a diet of hip-hop and mbira, the traditional African thumb piano, produce a song or two for his next record; Maraire wanted to helm production for the entire project. In 2016 Kwenders visited Seattle for three recording sessions in Maraire’s studio, working with a cast of local talent, some of African heritage, like trumpeter Owuor Arunga and guitarist Hussein “H-Bomb” Kalonji; some Shabazz-related, like Ishmael Butler, Cat Harris-White, and Darrius Willrich; some from Seattle’s deep pool of working musicians, like upright bassist Evan Flory-Barnes and composer/violinist Andrew Joslyn.
So many players and so much backstory somehow add up to a remarkably cohesive, distinctive sound. Credit Kwenders for the inspiration and Maraire for helping refine it: MAKANDA is built of layers of electronic and hand percussion, humming synths, wah-wah guitar (Kalonji is on almost every track), and Kwenders’ amicable, unhurried vocals, sung-rapped in Lingala, Tshiluba, English, and French, the official language of both DRC and Montreal. Per translation, Kwenders sings mostly of love and its capacity to transcend, liberate, empower. His poetic eye seems fixed on whatever feeling, setting, or celebration is coming next.
Maraire’s production rounds the edges of almost every sound here, and he employs copious reverb as a sort of sonic area rug that pulls the disparate components together. This is luscious, liquid music, a billowing stream that fills the contours of mental space. There’s dissonance, too: “Woods of Solitude” contains drony, metallic feedback of the sort you might hear from Konono No. 1. That chiming mbira and bristling MPC beat on “Makanda” are a familiar, Shabazz-like foil for Butler’s elegant flow, and “Welele” bumps on percolating hand percussion and slinky funk guitar.
Among songs that flow one into the next, the centerpiece of the album comes midway, with “Rendezvous” and “Sexus Plexus Nexus.” The first is a meditation on a groove, building incrementally over hand shakers and Kalonji’s highlife-esque guitar. Kwenders sings about unfettered freedom, namechecking Paris, Kinshasa, and Moonshine, his monthly dance party in Montreal. Trumpet and saxophone saunter into the scene, vocal melodies overlap, and a curious, flutey synth floats through. It’s a gorgeous musical moment, and a generous one, extended over five-and-a-half minutes.
“Rendezvous” curves right into “Sexus,” the album’s lead single and one of the year’s standout jams. All the album’s musical elements come together with Kwenders’ most hook-forward writing to build a song that comprises an entire worldview. Even as it references Henry Miller, “Sexus” is a communion of pan-African and North American soul music, interwoven with strings and sax and reverbed vocals, reaching across continents and decades and also ideal for roller skating to next Saturday night. That’s the marvel of MAKANDA: Kwenders’ version of globalization feels perfectly at home everywhere, all the time.