Fleetwood Mac’s beautiful and terrifically strange 1979 LP, Tusk, poses the question: What happens when love dissipates, and you have to find a new thing to believe in? What if that thing is work?

Tusk

The autumn of 1979 was, by any reasonable accounting, a challenging time to be alive. The world felt tenuous, transitional: panicked families were fleeing East Germany via hot air balloon, China was restricting couples to one child each, fifty-two Americans were barred inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, pending release of the Shah. It was also the year of Tusk, the album in which Fleetwood Mac, a soft-rock band second only to the Eagles in their embodiment of easy 1970s gloss, completely lost their minds. It was the band’s twelfth album, though only its third with the now-iconic lineup of guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, keyboardist Christine McVie, and singer Stevie Nicks, and it reflected a personal tumult so claustrophobic and intense it felt global in scale—an after-the-fall re-telling of catastrophic heartache and its endless reverberations.
By this time, Fleetwood Mac was widely beloved for its melodic, harmonized jams, which evoked Laurel Canyon, curtains of strung beads, turquoise jewelry, pricey incense, scarves flung over floor lamps, and brandy poured into a nice glass. Despite their smooth, murmuring sound, few of the band’s records pull punches emotionally, but even compared to a cry of pain like “The Chain,” Tusk is singular. It is pocked with heartbreak, resignation, lust, hope, and deep hurt. It poses unanswerable questions. It reckons with the past, and what that past means for a future. It invariably makes some people want to lock their door, excavate half a joint from the recesses of their couch cushions, and spend the next fourteen hours contemplating the Buckingham-Nicks union as one of the great failed loves of the twentieth century.
Just two years earlier, the band had released Rumours, a collection of pert and amiable love songs that sold over ten million copies and spent thirty-one weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart. Rumours is presently among the top ten best-selling albums in American history, and, as of 2009, has shipped more than forty million units worldwide. It was—it remains—an album owned by people who have only ever owned eleven albums.
Commercial success on that scale is, of course, a complicated thing to navigate; for Fleetwood Mac, it was presaged and then aggravated by outrageous amounts of cocaine and an awful lot of intra-band copulation. I don’t mean to be reductive about the group’s emotional dynamic, but I can’t think of another assemblage of five able-minded adults who created and survived such a preposterous tangle of romantic investments and divestments (to wit: Nicks and Buckingham, McVie and McVie, Nicks and Fleetwood, Fleetwood’s wife and former member Bob Weston, McVie and the lighting designer, and Fleetwood and Nicks’ then-married best friend—to cite just the handful of permutations known to the public).
By the time Tusk was released, the two primary relationships sustaining the band (Christine and John’s marriage, and Lindsey and Stevie’s long-standing romance) had fully dissolved, which seemed to qualify Fleetwood Mac, in some perverse way, to go on to become one of our best and bravest chroniclers of love’s horrifying tumult. Being tasked with singing backing vocals for a song written by your ex-lover, about you, months (and eventually years) after the relationship ruptured? Hold that in mind—just how excruciating that must’ve been. Then find a video of Buckingham and Nicks performing “Silver Springs” (a song written by Nicks about Buckingham, withheld from Rumours, and later released, either cruelly or keenly, as the B-side to the single “Go Your Own Way,” a song written by Buckingham about Nicks) and try not to lose your mind completely when, as if to narrate the precise mechanics of their break-up, Nicks announces: “I’ll begin not to love you… Tell myself you never loved me.”
It’s “Silver Springs,” more than any other track in the band’s pre-Tusk discography, that tells the story of how Buckingham and Nicks lost each other, and, ergo, the story of Tusk; performing the song live, they frequently end up locked in a kind of tense combat stance. When Nicks’ cool, steady voice begins to dissolve into something feral and nearly deranged (“Was I just a fool?” she finally hollers) she’ll often take steps toward him. He always meets her gaze, calmly, and with determination. Maybe they’re putting us all on, but there’s something in those moments that makes True Love—the preposterous, fairy-tale kind, the sort that never resolves itself, that can’t be outrun or eschewed, not ever, not after decades, not after a lifetime—seem entirely possible, even to the most hard-boiled cynics. I bring this up because it’s the only explanation I can think of as to how the band kept going, despite what must’ve seemed, to anyone watching, like a cataclysmic implosion. True Love doesn’t care if your relationship ends; it remains, it buoys you.
If Rumours was the band’s break-up record, Tusk covers arguably even more complicated ground: how to transform a romantic partnership into a purely creative one, while remaining mindful of all the perilous ways in which love nurtures art, and vice-versa. That the band did this at all, much less successfully, much less good-naturedly—in promotional photos for Tusk, Nicks is pictured resting her left hand disconcertingly close to a bulge in Buckingham’s blue jeans—is dumbfounding.
The result is a beautiful and terrifically strange album. From the outset, Buckingham was insistent that the band not churn out a sequel to Rumours. His was a defensive, contrarian pose: Let’s deliberately not recreate that colossal commercial and critical success; let's instead do something different, artier, less bulletproof, more experimental, more explicitly influenced by punk and new-wave, and less indebted to pop. Tusk contains twenty songs and is seventy-two minutes long. It retailed for $15.98 (or $52.88, in 2016 dollars). Its terrifically unattractive cover features a grainy, off-center photograph of a disembodied foot getting chomped on by a dog. The title is a euphemism for cock. Its sequencing is plainly insane, seesawing between two equally manic moods: “Everything is totally going to be fine!!!” and “This plane is going down and we’re all going to die!!!”
Tusk took thirteen months to make, and was the first record to amass production costs of over a million dollars. It was called self-indulgent, and it is. Legends abound regarding the details of its composition and recording. Nicks described their space in Studio D as having been adorned with “shrunken heads and leis and Polaroids and velvet pillows and saris and sitars and all kinds of wild and crazy instruments, and the tusks on the console, like living in an African burial ground.” Everyone agrees Buckingham was losing it a little—that he was chasing something (artistic greatness? avant-garde credibility?) and pursuing it wildly, haphazardly, like a crazed housecat stalking a black fly about the living room. Did he really have a drum set installed in his bathroom so he could play while on his toilet? (More reasonable minds have suggested he merely liked the acoustics in there.)
One solid argument against Tusk—though it could also be levied against Rumours—is that it lacks narrative coherence, in part because it features three songwriters (Nicks, Buckingham, and McVie), each working in their own distinct style. Still, while Nicks and McVie contributed some truly lovely tracks—“Sara,” “Beautiful Child,” “Think About Me”—the record clearly belongs to Buckingham, who wrote nearly half its songs, insisted upon its scope, and is its unquestionable spiritual center, the hamster on its wheel. The engineer Ken Caillat described Buckingham as “a maniac” during the sessions. He said it without equivocation. “The first day, I set the studio up as usual. Then he said, ‘Turn every knob 180 degrees from where it is now and see what happens.’ He’d tape microphones to the studio floor and get into a sort of push-up position to sing. Early on, he came in and he’d freaked out in the shower and cut off all his hair with nail scissors. He was stressed.”
At one point, Buckingham insisted that the band rent out Dodgers Stadium, and arranged to have the 112-piece U.S.C. Marching Band back them on the title track (his bandmates went along with this; none of the group’s foundational romantic relationships were intact, but Tusk still couldn’t have been made by people who didn’t trust one another implicitly). “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me who’s on the phone?” Buckingham and Nicks chant, their voices paranoid. Buried somewhere in there is a riff that could have sold a zillion cassingles, had this been 1977. But it wasn’t.
Though Tusk’s most memorable tracks are also its strangest (like “The Ledge,” a manic, pitter-pattering kiss-off in which the band’s signature harmonies are overridden by a guitar that’s been tuned down and turned up), there are a handful of songs that harken back to Rumours’ rich palatability. “Save Me A Place” plays like an extension, at least lyrically, of “Go Your Own Way,” in which Buckingham begrudges his lover’s unwillingness to grab what he’s half-offering her. A lot of Buckingham’s lyrics from the late ‘70s seem to simultaneously admit trepidation and cast him as the aggrieved party; he seems, in an endearing way, oblivious to his own caveats, or how they might dissuade another person. “Guess I want to be alone, and I guess I need to be amazed/Save me a place, I'll come running if you love me today,” he sings on “Save Me A Place.” He later described the song as vulnerable. “None of us had the luxury of distance to get closure… It’s about a feeling that’s been laid off to one side and maybe not been fully dealt with, sadness and a sense of loss.” It captures the wildness of recovery: what happens when love dissipates, and you have to find a new thing to believe in? What if that thing is work?
Buckingham funneled all of his disorientation into these songs. Tusk is, more than anything else, a document of that feeling and that process—of bewilderment turning into ambition writ large. What happens when a complicated, wounded person grows exhausted and unimpressed by the commercial medium he took to naturally, maybe even instinctively, but no longer believes is important or curative? It’s not hard to imagine the voice of Buckingham’s internal foil during these sessions, whispering seedily, naysaying each new melody, pushing for more: “This is fine, but it’s not Art.” I don’t know anyone who cares about making things who hasn’t at some point lobbed the exact same challenge at themselves: Can’t you do better? Hasn’t someone done this before? Haven’t you done this before? You get the sense of a broken-down person trying to rebuild himself. He is diligent about getting the architecture right.
All of which makes “I Know I’m Not Wrong”—the first song the band started recording for Tusk, and the last one to be finished – even more poignant. When Tusk was reissued, in 2015, the expanded release included six (!) different “I Know I’m Not Wrong” demos, all recorded by Buckingham in his home studio. The chorus is a declaration of intention, of confidence: “Don't blame me/Please be strong/I know I'm not wrong.” It’s not a thing a person gets to say very often. But Tusk isn’t a record that gets made more than once.


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 Guy’s self-titled debut, the album that solidified the sound of new jack swing and established Teddy Riley as the most influential R&B producer of the late 1980s.

Guy

When Timmy Gatling picked up the phone, it sounded like there was a party happening. “Timmy, you gotta come over here right now—you gotta hear this song,” Teddy Riley said, over a booming drum track and chattering voices. Gatling hung up and walked 15 minutes through Harlem to Riley’s apartment in Building 225 of the St. Nicholas housing project. When he entered the living room that Riley’s mother allowed them to use as a recording studio, there was indeed a party. Riley liked to keep the windows open, blasting his new tracks out to the whole neighborhood—and tonight, Harlem was witnessing the birth of an R&B masterpiece.
The beat playing on a loop—the beginnings of what would become “Groove Me,” the breakout single by Riley and Gatling’s new band, Guy—had the party going crazy. Gatling workshopped the lyrics and melody with Aaron Hall, Guy’s electric lead singer. Hall stepped into the apartment’s bathroom, where blanket curtains soundproofed a makeshift vocal booth installed in the shower, and knocked out a take. Weeks later the group would attempt to re-record the track in a professional studio, but nothing matched the raw energy of the vocals that Hall recorded at the party that night.
Released in the summer of 1988, Guy’s self-titled debut redefined R&B music for the hip-hop generation. With club hits like “Groove Me” and “I Like,” Guy is best known for its melodic, uptempo synth-funk, and for positioning Teddy Riley as the wunderkind producer at the center of the new jack swing craze. Despite the name, Guy was not the work of one guy but of three guys, all in their early 20s: Riley, the resourceful producer; Timmy Gatling, the passionate songwriter; and Aaron Hall, the golden voice.
Childhood friends Riley and Gatling got their first taste of fame in 1984 as members of Kids at Work, a New Edition-inspired teen pop trio signed to CBS. Unlike New Edition, though, the Kids wrote all their own songs and played their own instruments—Teddy on keys and Timmy on bass. They grew up listening to a diverse mix of soul, funk, go-go, gospel, and hip-hop, but the Kids at Work project aimed for safe, radio-friendly R&B. The group’s single “Singing Hey Yea” got major spins on New York City’s R&B stations, rising as high as No. 64 on Billboard’s Hot Rap/R&B Singles chart. The Kids released one LP, but the label dropped them after their manager, Gene Griffin, got locked up on drug charges.
Reeling from the disappointment, Teddy graduated from high school and dove head first into the city’s hip-hop scene, helping a former classmate, Doug E. Fresh, produce his gold-selling 1985 single “The Show.” Rap music was transitioning from its sparse electro sound to the looser, funkier, sample-based beats that would define late-’80s hip-hop. Riley’s early work for artists like Kool Moe Dee and Heavy D split the difference, mixing slinky synth basslines and intricate drum programming with whimsical keyboard interpolations and punchy James Brown samples. In 1987, the Harlem R&B singer Keith Sweat, impressed by Riley’s hip-hop work, asked the producer to collaborate. Their first cut—a dramatic burst of orchestral hits and skittering drum machines called “I Want Her”—rose all the way to No. 1 on the Hot Rap/R&B Singles chart, whetting the public’s appetite for uptempo club tracks that mixed harder hip-hop production sensibilities with smooth R&B melody. Riley coached Sweat through the sultry, nasal delivery that would become his signature and worked on every track from his subsequent hit album, Make It Last Forever. But though he was central to its creation, Riley was paid only $1,500 for his work and received an underwhelming “co-producer” credit on four songs.
Meanwhile, Gatling took a day job selling women’s shoes at the Brooklyn department store Abraham & Straus. There he met Aaron Hall, a pastor’s son and rising local gospel star. Compared to Timmy’s sweet, boyish singing voice, Aaron’s sounded like a powerful beam from heaven. His vocals cut effortlessly through 20-person choirs and rollicking church organ swells, projecting strength and passion while injecting new rhythms and outrageous runs into staid praise standards. He’d recently appeared on the debut album by Brooklyn pastor Hezekiah Walker, but he had ambitions beyond the gospel scene. Hall and Gatling quit their retail jobs and started writing sexy, secular love songs, including early versions of several Guy tracks.
When Gatling approached his old friend Riley to ask for help producing the new songs, he cut right to the chase: “I got this lead singer, man, I’m telling you, he sounds exactly like Charlie Wilson.” Hall’s vocal resemblance to the iconic Gap Band frontman was central to the project that Gatling had in mind. “That was our whole concept,” he remembered in a 2021 interview with Halftime Chat. “Take the old, and make it new.” Led by Wilson’s gospel-influenced vocals, the Gap Band were a touchstone for the ’80s electro-funk sound. To younger people more attuned to the scrappy, hard-hitting style of hip-hop, their music had begun to seem out-of-touch—but alongside groups like Zapp and Cameo, they provided the funk foundation for something new to be built. Blown away by Hall’s talent, Riley joined the group as its third member. Gatling christened the new trio Guy, after a fresh local clothing store named Guy LTD.
They spent the next few months writing and recording in Riley’s apartment in Saint Nick, landing a deal with Andre Harrell’s new rap and R&B label, Uptown, and reconnecting with Gene Griffin, their old manager, who’d recently come home after serving two years in prison. Burned by his experience working with Keith Sweat, Riley knew he wanted to approach things differently this time. “I need protection,” he remembered thinking, reflecting on the birth of Guy in a 2017 lecture for Red Bull Music Academy. “I need Gene Griffin, who’s gonna make sure nobody’s taking from me.” Harrell remembered Griffin’s intimidating aura: “He had gangsta rep all over him when he got to town.”
Gene Griffin may have protected Guy from outside threats, but he also demanded control. As Guy prepared to release their first album, their forty-something manager named himself a writer and producer on every track, though he’d had little to no hand in the music, and slid a thick new management contract in front of each member. Gatling, the true author of nearly every song on the album, refused to sign. Griffin kicked him out of the group, replacing him with Aaron’s brother, Damion Hall. But it was too late to remove Gatling’s vocals—he sang lead on two songs—and too late to re-shoot the album cover, where the original trio posed together. This was still Gatling’s album, but in the liner notes, Griffin listed the members of Guy in this order: himself, Teddy, Aaron, Damion.
Released in June 1988, Guy became a hit in clubs and caught the attention of young music fans. “Groove Me” became one of the summer’s breakout R&B hits, peaking at No. 4 on the Hot Black Singles chart in August; “Teddy’s Jam” hit its top five shortly after. The group’s sound started to cross over to pop radio, too, thanks to Riley’s production work on hits by Bobby Brown (“My Prerogative”) and Johnny Kemp (“Just Got Paid”), as well as Guy’s biggest hit, “I Like.” Guy went gold by the end of 1988, and platinum within a year.
Everyone seemed to agree that something new was happening in R&B music—edgier, younger, and with more hip-hop influence than people were used to hearing on stations dominated by smooth, smiling voices like Freddie Jackson and Stephanie Mills. But this new thing didn’t yet have a name. SPIN magazine called it “B-boy pop.” Others tried “synth-funk,” “hip-hop soul,” or “swingbeat.” Riley himself remembered calling it “sophisticated bubblegum music—because it was young.” That September, The Village Voice ran a profile on Teddy Riley and Guy, and the writer, Barry Michael Cooper, made his own suggestion: “I call it the New Jack Swing.”
The “swing” was a reference to the fast, shuffling rhythms in Riley’s drum programming, while the term “new jack” was NYC slang, meaning a fresh-faced rookie—as in 1986, when Grandmaster Caz rapped, “I’m not a new jack clown, a clone who ain’t down.” Being called a “new jack” was not exactly a compliment, but the name embodied the youthfulness of the movement, and it stuck, partly because Riley adopted it, headlining The New Jack Swing Tour with Guy in 1989 and creating the hit “New Jack Swing” with his brother Markell Riley’s group Wreckx-N-Effect the same year.
“Groove Me” is a perfect introduction to new jack swing because it makes its connection to hip-hop overt. Teddy punched in James Brown’s voice (“funky!”) throughout the track, which echoed Eric B. & Rakim’s 1986 rap hit “Eric B. Is President,” as well as the organ riff from “The Champ,” a b-boy park jam classic from the 1970s that became part of hip-hop’s breakbeat canon. It was the one of the first popular R&B songs to make use of sampling in this uniquely hip-hop way, fusing the genres together for the next 30 years.
But unlike most hip-hop in the late ’80s, Riley’s drums were not sampled breakbeat loops. He pulled his own sounds from Alesis and Korg drum machines, then constructed the patterns on his Akai MPC60, adding extra oomph by padding them with bass sounds and compression. “I like for my snares to hit people in the head like, ‘Yo what is that?’” Riley said at the RBMA lecture. The famous “swing” in Riley’s sound is actually a complex, interlocking combination of ever-changing polyrhythmic syncopation, a faster take on the loose groove embedded in the funk and go-go music of his youth. Rather than programming a loop, he played everything live-to-tape on the MPC pads to achieve a subtle, unpredictable feel in his rhythms.
In 1988, Riley’s keyboard of choice was the Roland D-50, which he used to wash the album in a sea of synth strings, horns, organs, and orchestral hits that add radiant melody and rhythmic counterparts to the booming drum tracks. On “Teddy’s Jam”—the rare instrumental song to become an R&B hit—Riley floats on top of the kinetic rhythm track with three different synth hooks, inspired by his years of re-playing the electro-pop classic “Axel F” from Beverly Hills Cop. The only vocals in the song are Aaron Hall riffing on the phrase “Teddy, jam for me,” and Riley cleverly cuts in another slice of “The Champ” at the exact moment that Hall says “jam,” melding “champ” and “jam” into one indistinguishable rhythmic exclamation. Riley sings lead on one song, the fun, freaky “Spend the Night,” but it’s clear his strength lies in production.
While 80 percent of Guy is dance music, the album’s two slow jams are where Hall truly shines. “Piece of My Love” pulls you in with an easy synth bass groove and a romantic declaration: “I do love you!” It’s not until the first verse that you might realize this sweet ballad is actually a sardonic tribute to the side chick, playing up the passionate devotion for comedic effect:
Baby, you can’t have all of me
’Cause I’m not totally free
I can’t tell you everything that’s going on…baby
There’s a few things in my past
That should not be explained
I'm asking you, baby
Be with me for a little while
Please hush—no questions asked
Less cynical is “Goodbye Love,” a stripped-down slow jam about leaving a partner to go on tour. It begins with Hall and background vocalist Tammy Lucas trading tender pleas to stay together, and by the end of the song, Hall is breaking down, crying, “I’m out of my mind/Just help me to regain my sanity, baby!” In contrast to his contemporaries—singers like Al B. Sure! and Bobby Brown, who were frequently criticized for their lightweight vocals—Hall proved that expansive, gospel-influenced runs could still be modern, not just a technique of a prior generation of stars like Charlie Wilson and Stevie Wonder. In moments like this, you can hear the rhapsodic blueprint used by ’90s R&B singers like R. Kelly, K-Ci Hailey, and Sisqo.
Timmy Gatling’s role in Guy has largely been obscured over the years—the result of getting kicked out of the group before the album release—but his wholesome songwriting is core to their appeal. He was engaged to his future wife during the making of the album, and his romantic yearnings power songs like “I Like” and “You Can Call Me Crazy.” On the closer “My Business,” Gatling gently criticizes the suffocating micromanagement he experienced in the group. “Sometimes I like to stay all by myself, quiet and relaxed,” he sings softly. “But the phone, the phone always seems to ring off the hook.”
The only song that Gatling didn’t have a hand in writing—the overwrought “’Round and ’Round (Merry Go ’Round of Love)”—is also the album’s low point. It’s the most rhythmically straight track, reaching for a stomping anthem like Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” but getting weighed down by a clunky relationship metaphor and a cheesy interpolation of the popular carnival tune “Entry of the Gladiators.” According to Gatling, it’s the only Guy song that manager Gene Griffin was involved in creatively. Luckily, the rest of the album feels more like modern interpretation than tired imitation.
Guy went on to release a second platinum album, The Future, in 1990. After the group broke up, Riley filed suit against Griffin, alleging millions in stolen publishing revenue. Buoyed by his reputation as the architect of new jack swing, which by the early ’90s had become absorbed into the fabric of pop music, Riley continued to be an in-demand hitmaker, producing Michael Jackson’s Dangerous and founding a second successful R&B group, Blackstreet. Timmy Gatling continued his career as a songwriter for artists like Bell Biv Devoe and Mary J. Blige, while Aaron Hall notched a few hits of his own as a solo artist. In 2000, Guy reunited—without Timmy—for a final album, III, that lacked the vitality of their early work.
Between 1988 and the release of Dangerous in 1991, new jack swing was the sound of R&B, while its robust snares, syncopated bass drums, and rap-influenced samples sprung up in the music of nearly every pop artist hoping to score a funky radio hit. Though by the mid-’90s it was falling out of fashion, overshadowed by the rise of smooth G-funk and hip-hop’s increasing distaste for drum machines, the genre’s influence lives on through nearly all the synthesized, R&B-inflected dance-pop that followed, including the Swedish pop sound of the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, the global K-pop explosion, and retro R&B stylists like Bruno Mars and Ty Dolla $ign. Amid all the slicker, newer jack swing that would follow, the scrappy, DIY texture of Guy still stands out. Guy didn’t use studio musicians, outside producers, or session writers—every song on the album was made on Riley’s keyboards and drum machines, every lyric and melody was written by Timmy and Aaron, and every song was recorded in that apartment in the Saint Nick projects. Three brilliant young men, moving as one, synthesizing their world into something new.


The timeless score to David Lynch’s television show doesn't need any visuals to achieve the same sense of unsettling beauty.

Twin Peaks OST

As fans of the early-’90s television series and film well know, “Twin Peaks” is a staging ground for conflict between two supernatural locations (or “lodges,” or something). In a famously wigged-out dream sequence, at the the close of the show’s third episode, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper hears an early clue suggesting the nature of this mysterious peril: “One chants out between two worlds: ‘Fire walk with me.’” But by then, the show's soundtrack has already revealed that this town in rural Washington is being manipulated by competing forces. The contest between them is demonstrated every few minutes, thanks to a sweetly naive motif ("Twin Peaks Theme") that can quickly give way to an unsettlingly morbid riff ("Laura Palmer's Theme"). One goes heavy on the piano’s white keys; the other meditates over some black ones.
As the show’s mix of humor and tragedy unfolds, these two compositions guide a viewer’s ability to perceive which mood is holding greater sway. A pleasant moment may end with a startling musical suggestion of horror. Or two characters locked in mutual grief may suddenly find something to laugh about. Situated like the narrative itself between the two worlds pulling on the town of Twin Peaks, the music of the show is eternally with the characters—and the viewers.
Series co-creator David Lynch has always displayed a musician’s facility for nimble, suggestive sound arrangements, going back to his first feature film, Eraserhead. But the potency of his soundtracks hit a new level after the director crossed paths with composer Angelo Badalamenti in the 1980s. Badalamenti contributed original compositions to Lynch’s Blue Velvet and played piano during the performance of the titular pop song. For the first season of “Twin Peaks,” he wrote all the music, with Lynch providing lyrics to tunes sung by Julee Cruise.
In addition to the two mood-setting triumphs that anchor the first season soundtrack to “Twin Peaks,” Badalamenti also came up with brilliant evocations of the show’s various dramatic modes. The bluesy “Freshly Squeezed” defines the show’s approach to seduction. “Dance of the Dream Man” captures the finger-snapping swing of its surreality. Some of the tracks serve multiple purposes, like “Audrey’s Dance,” which starts out as an accessory to chic sleuthing, then stretches out into a dreamy organ drone punctuated by blasts of saxophone and a lascivious clarinet. In these performances, the composer’s keyboard is frequently the star, though jazz drummer Grady Tate’s rhythms are another consistent highlight. Without his subtle, driving percussion, Badalamenti’s mixture of vintage pop and jazz sonics—at once familiar and plenty strange—might not have come off nearly so well.
A great score doesn’t have to play well as an album on its own terms. But this one does. Its tunes are so appealing, Lynch sometimes rips them from their status as commentary on the show’s action and places this music directly into the narrative world. Badalamenti’s pieces show up in jukeboxes that the characters use and in performances by local musicians at the town’s watering holes. When Agent Cooper tries to remember a portion of that crucial dream, he snaps his fingers to the rhythm of the music that originally accompanied the images in his head.
If the characters get to listen to the music all the time, why not fans of the show? During the first wave of “Twin Peaks” mania, its opening theme won a Grammy, while the soundtrack album charted on Billboard. The new edition—licensed by Warner Bros. to the boutique Death Waltz label—features a new vinyl remaster by Tal Miller. Compared to the first CD edition of the album, this version gives greater definition to all the parts of a collage-style piece like “The Bookhouse Boys” (which blends in a bit of “Dance of the Dream Man”).
Elsewhere, the vinyl remaster is more subtly useful than it is revelatory. Which is as it should be, since this music has never sounded thin or in need of help. The vinyl packaging promises a forthcoming reissue of the soundtrack to the movie—Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me—that followed the show’s cancellation by ABC. Equally needed are new editions of the show’s second-season soundtrack, as well as Julee Cruise’s album Floating Into the Night (which overlaps with the first-season album a bit, and also contains material from the show that didn’t make this set). But since the “Twin Peaks” revival is still in its early stages, ahead of Showtime’s planned third season in 2017, there's still plenty of time to obsess over those recordings, down the road. For now, the first soundtrack's deft combination of romance and menace provides a stunning reminder of everything Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost dreamed up the first time around.


The long-teased sequel to his cult-classic mixtape is a highlight in the Chicago rapper’s career, bringing the first-wave drill he helped popularize screaming into the future.

Almighty So 2

At just 28, Chief Keef has churned out dozens of projects in nearly as many different styles. His influence can be felt from rap’s top rung like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert to the toasted digital landscapes of new-age acolytes like Xaviersobased and Devstacks. He’s one of the pioneers of the Chicago drill sound, and while there have been peaks and valleys—being a volume shooter often comes at the expense of a spotless track record—he’s never lost the thrilling “Lex Luger and Brick Squad dipped in the Chicago River” quality he’s been honing since the “Faneto” days. Even when he’d miss, the boldness of his experiments kept heads intrigued.
One of those peaks was 2013’s Almighty So, a mixtape where Keef and a slew of producers melded drill with the chirpy cloud-rap-adjacent aesthetic that would soon populate SoundCloud. Street rappers weren’t spitting over production like Yung Lan’s “Ape Shit” or Abe Beats’ “Young Rambos” back then, and that adventurousness, coupled with bars comparing guns to dildos, turned Almighty So into a cult classic among fans and slightly younger contemporaries. Between arrests, label disputes, and being blacklisted from shows in his home city (until recently), Keef’s been through a lot on and off the mic over the last decade. Through it all, a sequel to Almighty So, first announced in 2018, has lingered in the margins. Despite Keef’s reservations about being hooked on drugs during that era, it garnered the kind of mythic status usually reserved for alt-rap team-ups and AAA albums that never were. But Almighty So 2 is real, as vibrant and busy and flippant as anything Keef’s ever made, a capstone that brings the first-wave drill he helped popularize screaming into the future.
What stands out most about Almighty So 2 is just how different it is compared to the original. As opposed to hiring a dozen producers, Keef employs himself on all but one of 16 tracks. So 1 is airy and saturated, the audio equivalent of watching a neon sign flicker and short out. So 2 crashes in like the Kool-Aid man, leaving a trail of sticky footprints. It also borrows and mutates elements from other Keef extravaganzas: The Trap-A-Holics tributes dotted across this year’s Mike WiLL Made-It collab Dirty Nachos seem to have influenced the drops for fake radio station 4NEM Radio that pop up here; Ghanaian-Liberian comedian Michael Blackson, whose interludes powered much of 2013’s Bang Part 2, is back and desperately trying to make his DJ Drama-esque ad-libs funny. But these would just be nostalgic touches without Keef and his co-producers’ enveloping beats. On “Jesus Skit,” Blackson’s cloying bit about Black entertainers getting reparations is drowned out by Keef, Slowburnz, and MBZ’s production, their hellish keyboard stabs and Gatling-gun drums transitioning smoothly into Keef and longtime collaborator Lil Gnar’s verses on “Jesus.” It’s an update on an older formula that is fuller and more ambitious.
Keef’s ear has always been geared toward the dramatic, and Almighty So 2 gives his gothic raps a new grandeur. His best songs have a certain rawness to them, but here, the mixes are crisper, more professional-sounding. Leveling up in the studio can sometimes mean sanding off the edges, but every one of these songs is diamond-sharp. “Almighty (Intro)” takes a sample of the oft-used Carl Orff composition “O Fortuna” and chops it up while snare drums flurry underneath, building tension as a voice levels affirmations and insults for over a minute (“Your mama could have you all over again, you still couldn’t be me”). Then Keef comes in and the drums gallop while he drops bizarre flexes (“She put my nut in her cup and she chased her Patrón”) and points out how his come-up was ordained: “I was born in ’95, I been ready since ’91…Sense a cougar headin’ for that ass? Boy, you better run.” It checks every box for a great rap intro and puts Keef in pole position to floor it.
So 2 is this big all the way through. Keef stays restless, indulging wild thoughts and building them out to feature-length productions. “Drifting Away” is a marvel of Zaytoven-esque pianos, 808 thumps, glitching synths, and digital flutes that shimmer and stomp behind Keef’s money talk and jabs at Kanye West’s claims of innovating drill music. Ironically, it sounds far removed from drill, like it would’ve slotted as neatly on Uzi’s Eternal Atake or any one of TisaKorean’s last few albums. That’s the magic of Chief Keef—even when he’s sticking to the script, he can make the unexpected happen. Tierra Whack might not have been the first rapper to come to mind for a Keef collab, but she catches a vicious double-time flow over the back half of “Banded Up” that perfectly compliments Keef’s half-time yelps. Would you ever expect Keef to say “I start wearing yellow diamonds, it look like I peed myself” and comparing enemies to the old mascot for Honeycombs cereal over angelic choir vocals on “Treat Myself”? Or to work Bobby Womack and Wilson Pickett samples into a roaring vintage drill track on “1,2,3”? Or to fit triplet drum rolls over spiraling piano keys on “Neph Nem”? The fact that they all feel left-field and like no-brainers is a testament to Keef’s sustained ability to surprise after 15 years.
With that confidence comes a new investment in his legacy. Keef’s still focused on present and future success, but he spends just as much of Almighty So 2 considering his arduous journey to the top. Regret and longing aren’t new to him, but at the end of his first verse on “Jesus,” he briefly works through the perspective shift that came with his move from Chicago to California. The streets of his mind are less active but he remembers every run-up. “Prince Charming” is one of several songs packed with the kind of memories treasured most by those who make it out: advice from his grandmother, the bologna that used to be on his plate, situations that made his “front yard look like a GTA car meet.”
Chief Keef put out his first mixtape at 14, recorded his breakout song “I Don’t Like” two years later while on house arrest, and found himself at the center of a label bidding war before he was a legal adult. Think about where he’s come since then. While he’s had his fair share of blunders and petulant ignorance, Almighty So 2 has more consideration for what it means to be one of the most influential rapper-producers of his generation. There’s a sense that with a larger canvas, he’s being more careful with his words and more deliberate about creating the largest rendition of himself possible. This colors every moment on So 2, from threesomes in his home movie theater to the regret of being too gone off lean to enjoy his spoils. “I could live in the jungle and come out with a hyena hat,” he says plainly on “Believe,” like he’s savoring having the rap game in his hands. After carving your own lane, seeing it transform three times over, and living to talk about it before you turn 30, what better way is there to celebrate?


The Manchester quartet is still stuck as an imitation act, but their love for 2000s-era singer-songwriter pop—and their star potential—comes through.

Who Am I?

With their steely, eyelinered gaze and leather jackets, Pale Waves look like the kind of band that knows how it wants to be seen. Though their output is fairly new—they’ve released two albums, 2018’s My Mind Makes Noises and their latest, Who Am I?—they’ve been around for the better half of a decade, founded in 2014 when vocalist Heather Baron-Gracie and drummer Ciara Doran met at university in Manchester. They gained international attention three years later, when the 1975 frontman Matty Healy took the band under his wing, signing them to his label, Dirty Hit, directing a music video, and occasionally serving as producer. “The songs were there, so my involvement in writing was only editing,” Healy told NME in 2017. “I always have a fear of being overbearing. I know what it’s like to want to be prided on your own merits.”
But the bubbly synths, 1980s-style guitar riffs, and syrupy vocal melodies on My Mind Makes Noises frequently sounded like a less experienced 1975 anyway. On Who Am I?, Pale Waves forgo ’80s revival entirely to take cues from Baron-Gracie’s avowed hero Avril Lavigne and shared elements of 2000s singer-songwriters like Michelle Branch or Kelly Clarkson: effervescent electric hooks, strummy acoustic backup, and demure harmonies. Although Pale Waves is still stuck as an imitation act, their love for this strand of pop-rock certainly comes through, resulting in some of the most pleasantly sugared Britpop since the 2010s-era Mumford & Sons invasion.
Aside from the moody cover art, an instantly recognizable homage to Let Go, Lavigne’s influence is most obvious on “Change,” whose guitar-led catharsis is the musical and thematic little sister to “Complicated.” Baron-Gracie’s cries of, “Now you act like I’m nobody/But you still want to go down on me” is an edgier echo of, “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?” It’s easy to imagine “Change” falling flat in its imitation, but Pale Waves manage to make a song nearly as good as the original. The rebellious sunshine of “You Don’t Own Me” will make you wish you were skipping school, and “Wish U Were Here,” a lonelier “Kiss Me” filled with comparable yearning, indicate that Pale Waves know exactly what it takes to power a resurgence of ’00s guitar pop. They prioritize characteristic big-but-innocent emotions like love and loss, clever lyrics worth scratching into your notebook, and guitar melodies as sweetly weepy as you imagine your crush to be.
But at times, Who Am I? starts to feel sleepy, suffering from a lack of personality. The line between Pale Waves’ own positive qualities and those they’ve borrowed from their inspirations is wire-thin, and though they clearly know what makes a good guitar-pop song, they haven’t figured out how to make a better one. Baron-Gracie’s singing suffers from too much air, and she wheezes at the end of nearly every sung phrase, a habit that’s only charming on occasion. A pared-down song like the eponymous ballad “Who Am I?” puts Pale Waves’ songwriting and skill to the test, but winds up sounding more like a demo than the closing track of their second studio album.
But this band isn’t without its charms, or the potential for Avril-level recognition that Baron-Gracie is so inspired by. Her vocal limitations, although very present, are distinctive. She cultivates an inspirationally ostentatious goth look and writes lyrics about gay love with tender simplicity (one of the album’s best songs, “She’s My Religion,” is a reverential ode to a partner’s flaws; Baron-Gracie’s girlfriend stars in the music video). She’s primed to become the lesbian rock star young gay girls like me have dreamed of since childhood, the kind that just didn’t really exist in the mainstream until recently. The dewy-eyed sound of Who Am I? appeals to a younger generation, confirming that modern Britpop doesn’t always equate to aggressive young men—it can be gentle goths with their friends, writing songs for kids hoping to figure out who they are. All Pale Waves have to do now is figure out the answer to that question themselves.

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Where so many artists give their work the sonic equivalent of a fake tan when they try to "warm" it up with analog sounds, the Russian singer and producer Kedr Livanskiy captures the charm of listening to dance music that’s been taped off a late-night radio broadcast.

January Sun

The first thing you hear on January Sun, the debut EP by Russian singer/electronic producer Kedr Livanskiy (real name Yana Kedrina) is a Nintendo-like synth figure fading away, an envelope filter squeezing the life out of it. A rudimentary combination of beats emerges, one of which sounds like the sped-up bossa nova preset on an inexpensive junk keyboard meant for kids ages 3 and up; the other a prototypical hi-hat figure that has "I’ve just started experimenting with house music" written all over it. As dreamy-but-crude synth pads, hand claps, and Kedrina's vocals all join in, it's easy to mistake the song ("Razrushitelniy Krug") as an unremarkable piece of lo-fi house music, made by someone without a developed sense for how to arrange an instrumental backdrop.
But she quickly proves that not to be the case. Her production touch is too delicate to consign this EP to the same bin as other music current music that arrives already dated because it reeks of Instagram. Where so many artists give their work the sonic equivalent of a fake tan when they try to "warm" it up, Kedrina captures the charm of listening to dance music that’s been taped off a late-night radio broadcast. As such, her nods to the past appear to stem from romance rather than cynical fascination with kitsch.
"Winds of May," for example, begins with a wash of queasy synth melodrama, the likes of which Boards Of Canada turned into a career 20 years ago. Like many tracks on this EP, it sounds like it’s being played on a sluggish tape deck, but here there’s an occasional pitch-up effect, as if you were listening to a tape that sat in a basement for years and skitters forward every time one of its reels makes a full turn. On "Sgoraet" (The Burning Down) and the title track, Kedrina dons her David Gahan hat and captures the flashy brooding of Black Celebration/Music for the Masses-era Depeche Mode. Of course, Depeche Mode’s stock in trade was to turn personal angst into stadium-sized gestures that mimicked the collective hysteria of political rallies. Kedrina turns that vibe on its ear by catching a tiny bit of it in a bottle and setting it loose on a dingy, half-empty dancefloor.
A close look at the lyrics reveals further layers of interpretation and displacement. The EP title appears on the album cover in Russian, while the song titles alternate between Russian and English. Kedrina's vocals alternate between the two languages as well, but are all listed in English. And even when she does sing in English, her delivery verges on formless much like those wordless ethereal female vocals that became Orbital’s trademark. So even when you’re reading the James Joyce verses that she quotes on "Winds of May"—"Winds of May, that dance on the sea / Dancing a ring-around in glee / From furrow to furrow, while overhead / The foam flies up to be garlanded"—her phrasing creates a sense of distance that isn’t attributable to language barrier alone.
January Sun closes with an acappella version of "Razrushitelniy Krug"/Destructive Cycle (alternately listed as "Cyclic Strength of Destruction")that, even coming as it does after a bunch of songs with spartan arrangements heavy with primitive reverbs, feels like a curveball. With her voice echoing as if across a valley, Kedrina frees the EP from the confines of her home-recording setup, or the provincial Russian club where one can easily imagine her spinning records on an off night. On their own, her vocals take on a stately elegance, and her unbound Russian verses carry and drift. As a coda to her first musical statement, it is both striking and subtle. Whatever direction Kedrina chooses to move in with Kedr Livanskiy from here, the agility she shows on January Sun suggests that we should be watching her.
Correction: The original version of this review referred to producer/singer Yana Kedrina as "Kedr Livanskiy." Kedr Livanskiy is the name of the project.


Stretching out keys, piano, and pedal steel in wide-open space, the ambient country trio’s new album underlines the vast scale of evolutionary time.

Birds & Beasts

SUSS evoke the blistering days and chilly nights of an American desert. Their take on “ambient country,” a term they apparently coined, is elegant, luxurious, and teeming with technology—less like actually living in the Mojave than watching a time-lapse of the sky dappling its mesas and buttes. The New York trio leans hard into these imagined environs: A 2022 self-titled album featured songs titled “Gallup, NM” and “Needles, CA,” communities along Route 66 that the group’s members knew mostly from the vantage of the tour van. If the cowboy shtick sounds like cosplay, it disguises an equally prominent Downtown sensibility: SUSS, once a quartet with synth wizard Gary Leib before his unexpected death in 2021, weave their sound with a legacy of improvisation that has as much to do with the genre experiments of the Kitchen and the ’90s Knitting Factory as, say, the Grand Ole Opry. The potentially straw-thin gimmickry of “ambient country” is a vessel for urban yearnings, daydreams of pastoral life conjured up in the confinement of the metropolis.
It helps that the band, which now comprises pedal steel player Jonathan Gregg and multi-instrumentalists Bob Holmes and Pat Irwin (onetime guitarist for the B-52’s), emerged during the final years of the last decade, both an efflorescent period for ambient music and a moment when country was becoming more palatable to a wider variety of listeners. SUSS highlight a big-sky sweep that informed the former genre throughout its history: Pedal steel set a tone on Brian Eno’s scene-defining 1983 record Apollo, resurfaced on the KLF’s 1990 game-changer Chill Out, and took centerstage on Bruce Kaphan’s underknown 2001 record Slider, a focal point for the seemingly walleyed convergence of new age and Americana. SUSS’s 2018 debut, Ghost Box, may not have forged an original style, but it drew a bright red circle around ambient aesthetics that had always hidden in plain sight. Sometimes, putting a name to the unnameable is what innovation is all about.
Their new album, Birds & Beasts, takes the time-lapse metaphor to its extreme. The record seems to deal in eons, in the slow progression of ecology—the movements of fauna and the death and rebirth of flora. One can feel millennia pass in this record. The songs are wordless, aside from some muffled speech samples, so the only clues to their themes are SUSS’ highly suggestive song titles—“Migration,” for example, or “Overstory,” which brings to mind a verdant, thick canopy in a part of the world that has since become dusty and arid. (Not to mention novelist Richard Powers’ 2018 lament for the death of trees.) Many of the tunes are based around sighing keys, piano, and pedal steel, but “Restless” and “Flight” forefront finger-picked guitar rhythms, the sound of a small animal scurrying across a huge landscape.
The interplay between wide, somber space and the staccato optimism of enduring life makes for the most thoughtfully structured record of SUSS’s career. Birds & Beasts doesn’t necessarily surprise, but it crystallizes this band’s essence, particularly as they find their footing after the shocking loss of Leib. These seven tracks are full of delicate balances, so immaculately produced that supple details assume their own life—the way that the guitar melody barely floats on the surface of “Restless,” for example, or how Gregg’s pedal steel seems to shift its direction in the middle of the song, as though the band just reversed the current of a river.
The only cut to feature their late bandmate is “Migration,” which has kicked around in the SUSS songbook for years before ending up as this album’s closer. The most maximal composition in an understated set, “Migration”—like “Restless” and “Flight”—is sewn by thin stitches of guitar, diaphanous parts that keep this patchwork whole. Meanwhile, Holmes’ harmonica offers a sense of yearning, a train whistle heard in a one-horse town.
Such connotations bring with them all of the postmodern weight and irony accrued since America developed a vocabulary for describing the culture (one-horse!) of its sprawling heartland. Ditto the song’s buried vocal loops, most of them inaudible, although we can hear a male voice say, “Finally, they believed that they had the answers,” a self-serious exclamation that fizzles out like a distant radio signal. We begin the album with an image of the migratory patterns of the titular birds and beasts, and end thinking about humanity as it zooms forth so quickly that the world-expanding achievements of yesteryear become quaint, bits of modern archaeology familiar enough that they have become part of our species’ natural habitat.
SUSS revel in slippery distinctions between the manmade and the organic, the way that a synthesizer can sound indistinguishable from an acoustic instrument in the right hands. Their latest, though, puts human achievement in context—our entire civilization, this searching, glacial music seems to tell us, is merely a blip at the tail end of a slow evolution. Or, in other words: Birds & Beasts offers the revelation of a cross-country road trip, when the towns fall away and the land becomes grander, when people begin to feel as small as they actually are.


Where the Virginia duo’s previous records fused rap, techno, and other aggressive forms, its new album lumbers into a terrifying new realm of noise.

Hard Industrial B.O.P.

Prison Religion are masters of agitation. The Virginia-based duo of Warren Jones and Parker Black has spent the last few years grinding established tropes of noise, rap, and dance music to shreds. Though they have occasionally flirted with established song structures, the most chilling moments in their catalog let their tracks spiral into chaotic collages of noisy abstractions and misshapen rhythms. Even when they stop screaming, their instrumentals are terrifying on their own.
Hard Industrial B.O.P., their new project on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label, pushes Prison Religion further into this uncharted territory, foregrounding the brittle noise and teeth-rattling sound design that has always been an unsettling undercurrent in their music. On some of the duo’s earliest work together, like 2016’s Cage W Mirrored Bars, their queasy reflections of hardcore and rap inhabited the same universe that spawned noise-pop experimenters Black Dresses and New York boundary-pushers like Kill Alters or Machine Girl. But Hard Industrial B.O.P. feels like the next step in an ongoing evolution of their sound, pushing them further into seasick noise and cochlea-shredding distortion.
From opener “Bite” it’s clear that they’re drifting into the outer realms of electronic experimentation. It begins with an unsettling synth drone that sounds like a snippet of a Tangerine Dream film score playing from a pay-phone receiver and only gets more menacing from there, piling on distorted mumbling, distant screaming, and piercing, atonal textures. Tracks like “Banshee, Pale Fire, Landing” lock into legible rhythms (and you might make out a lyric or two if you listen closely), but even these moments are overwhelming and strange, scuffed with bristly electronics and ominous drones. Aided in part by collagist producer S280F (aka Lilith Treglia), Black and Jones conjure up sounds gloomier and more hair-raising than much of their prior catalog. Hard Industrial B.O.P. offers little respite.
All this chaos is by design. Prison Religion have said that they imagine the record as a provocation akin to the hard bop that challenged the jazz of the 1950s. Their music demonstrates a conscious desire to upend established forms. While previous records attempted to bridge the disparate worlds of experimental rap, hardcore techno, and other aggressive forms, tracks like “Survival, Leave me alone” are pointedly more gnarled and crushing than anything they’ve released to date. Here, Prison Religion sound interested mainly in letting out all the negativity they’ve been holding in, without worrying about anything like a memorable melody. Something this horrifying is hard to forget anyway.
Jones and Black have occasionally approached their music—heavy as it is—with a sense of humor. They called a 2018 release O FUCC IM ON THE WRONG PLANET and named a song after Nibiru, a fictional planet that some conspiracy theorists believe is on a cataclysmic path to destroy Earth. But Hard Industrial B.O.P. is more straightforwardly grim, serious, and, consequently, impactful. They have said that they felt that they were duty-bound to make a record that reflected the tumultuous time in the world that birthed it. “In this era, how can we look to space?” they write, bemoaning the seemingly inescapable oppression inherent in modern life. In response, they simply scream, aiming a cosmic cry at an unfeeling universe.


On their 1992 sophomore record, UK shoegazers Ride managed one thing My Blood Valentine never accomplished after Loveless: facing the crippling expectations and making a tremendous follow-up record.

Going Blank Again

If the intent of reissuing Ride's first two LPs was to change the group's reputation of being the perennial runner-ups of the shoegaze era-- the human foil to the divine My Bloody Valentine, a great band rather than a legendary one-- then this campaign has been a miserable failure. Mostly because the truth wins out: "The Story of Going Blank Again" contains the following quotes from the members of Ride: "It's a steady work process, which is a great way to do an album," "It was fun, it was a team effort," "I think it was the closest together as a band we ever were. There was no tension, no conflict. Everything just seemed to work."
Ride didn't bankrupt Creation Records; in fact, they partied with Alan McGee. They never advanced the image of being hermetic visionaries; they had to force themselves to stop socializing with other bands. They never disappeared for years on end and would later release some universally reviled trad-rock albums that doubled as applications to open for Oasis, or in the case of Andy Bell, to be in Oasis. But on Going Blank Again, Ride managed one thing MBV never accomplished after Loveless and probably never will: facing the crippling expectations and making a tremendous follow-up record.
It might not change the narrative surrounding Ride, but hopefully it does raise the question of why Going Blank Again is assumed to be the contrarian's choice for the band's true masterpiece. Some of it is pretty understandable: Going Blank Again is a noticeably lighter affair and lacks the monolithic heft of its predecessor, which is readily apparent from their respective album art. I mean, compare the two covers, which one looks like the classic to you?  Perhaps more crucially, Going Blank Again was without a movement, the UK looking to move past shoegaze towards something more personality-driven, though it wasn't clear quite what yet.
Strange thing is, Ride could be included in that. Many lesser bands followed in Ride's wake, and "Leave Them All Behind" is as close as a mission statement that you're gonna get from a band whose lyrics are mostly nonsense. Bell and Mark Gardener's guitars somehow got even louder and it can initially register as Nowhere Plus, but it also sets the tone in how Going Blank Again would distinguish itself. "Seagull" started Nowhere with a peal of feedback and six minutes of trebly squall that only revealed its layers when played at tinnitus-inducing levels. Blessed with Alan Moulder's crystalline production, the salutation of "Leave Them All Behind" is a reverberating Hammond organ and an extremely punchy drum break from Loz Colbert, which acknowledge the two encroaching threads of influence of the band: the first of the Who, reflecting Ride's increasing stadium-readiness, the latter acknowledging the influx of hip-hop and funk breakbeats into UK rock.
It might be meant as the valedictory speech of shoegaze, but it isn't actually shoegaze at all, not in the sense where the genre's main goal was to obliterate or obscure. Every single element of "Leave Them All Behind" is voluminous, but not just in sheer loudness: It's overwhelming, not oppressive, and the sonic expanse is even more mindblowing with this remastering job. Bell and Gardener's barnstorming guitars, Steve Queralt's girder-thick bassline, and Colbert's Moon-sized drum fills all could fill canyons individually, yet never once does it sound like something other than four guys in a room, which explains why Ride was pretty much the only band of their ilk that was as good live as they were on record. That said, the inclusion of the Live at Brixton DVD is mostly notable for its stupendously dated visuals.
The band adamantly demanded "Leave It All Behind" be the lead single, and it reached No. 9 in Britain, their first Top 10 hit. This would seemingly bode well for Going Blank Again's fortunes considering the next single was the giddy, nonsensical "Twisterella". Drawing from the same sugar-spun power-pop of labelmates Teenage Fanclub as well as the cuts from The Stone Roses equally influenced by acid and ecstasy, it was rightfully described by the band as their "ace card." Yet it was a baffling flop on the charts and Ride released no more singles from there on out.
Shame, too, as Going Blank Again should have been able to take advantage of its depth and diversity, its main trump over Nowhere. You get Television-styled guitar interplay and Bell and Gardener's most tossed-off lyrics on "Not Fazed". "Chrome Waves" shot for "Unfinished Sympathy", but landed somewhere closer to Seal's "Crazy" and was all the better for it. "Leave Them All Behind" has an equally colossal bookend in "OX4", though the addition of four bonus tracks from the Leave Them All Behind and Twisterella EPs are hardly an unwelcome appendage (particularly "Grasshopper"). And there are the goofy pop songs like "Twisterella" which arguably worked against Going Blank Again's legacy, and even the band will admit the flower-child spoof of "Making Judy Smile" isn't its best work.
Because the typical selling point of shoegaze-- there's classic pop under all that noise!-- doesn't quite explain what Ride excelled at. Speaking on the origin of "Mouse Trap", Bell observed, "occasionally you discover a chord sequence that you'd be quite happy to play for two hours non-stop." There's about eight or so of those on Going Blank Again. Even with Ride's aim to integrate more true pop songwriting, much of Going Blank Again wisely follows the wake of the immortal "Vapour Trail", which rode out a single gorgeous progression for nearly its entirety, its only flaw stopping at four minutes instead of eight. More and more, I think the true impact of hip-hop on Ride wasn't evident in Colbert's drum fills so much as their seeing chord progressions as rhythmic beds as much as melodic ones, the way a rapper might treat a breakbeat. As such, Ride proved to be a band that operated in largesse more than finesse: simply building on these perfect chord changes for five minutes at a time with stretched out vocal harmonies, a brief shift of a couple of bars into a minor key, erratic tempo changes toward the thrilling end of "Cool Your Boots", bent soloing on "Leave Them All Behind", a 12-string riff breaking up the middle of "Mouse Trap". The pleasures of Going Blank Again are cumulative, and if you simply love the sound of guitars-- clean ones, distorted ones, overdriven Leslie amps, Les Pauls, Rickenbackers, whatever-- this is about as indulgent as it gets.
Perhaps the timing is just convenient, but Going Blank Again feels more similar to the recently reissued version of Sugar's Copper Blue than anything that's strictly identifiable as shoegaze.  It's certainly reckoning with the aftermath of Loveless and an awareness of Nevermind, if not necessarily its influence. But they're both records that feel welcome 20 years later, because while their more famed peers have influenced hundreds of pale imitators, these more approachable records feel strangely undervalued. Because really, what was the last new band to bear the influence of Sugar or Ride? Not even in strict sonic similarity, since it's hard to imagine the brassy acoustic guitars you hear on "Chrome Waves" ever coming back into vogue. But more in how there's an unfortunate void of very loud, very catchy, and very polished guitar bands that aren't ashamed of commercial ambitions.  You can learn a lot from Going Blank Again: Come up with four chords worth repeating for four minutes, hum a pretty melody, overdub the guitars, overdub them again, and make the drums even louder. It's not the stuff of legends, but we need great records, too.


Future Mercury Prize contenders continue to make it difficult for us to take UK hypes very seriously.

Man Alive

There's a recurring gag on "The Simpsons" based around Homer's gluttony leading to all manner of culinary curiosities: sometimes the results work, as with his patented Space-Age Out-of-This-World Moon Waffles (caramel, waffle batter, a stick of butter, liquid smoke); more often than not, he finds out the hard way that a combination of, say, Tom Collins mix, cloves, and a frozen pie crust is no substitute for a decent breakfast. Like that disaster, Everything Everything's debut LP, Man Alive, is proof that enthusiastic experimentation can't save your end product when the underlying elements are so incompatible and unappetizing.
Even before you consider their name, song titles like "My Kz, Ur Bf", "Qwerty Finger", and "Photoshop Handsome" imply EE are a product of media overload and social-networking culture-- the self-absorbed musical equivalent of having 12 browsers open at the same time. To apparently a lot of people this is a good thing. (Sample prerelease hype: EE sound like the Futureheads and Animal Collective.) But stuffing everything humanly possible into your songs can be overwhelming, if not identity-sapping. The first 10 or so seconds of this record is pretty much the only span with any negative space-- and even that resembles the obelisk-staring intro of Coldplay's "Square One". From there on, Man Alive is jacked up with bizarre key changes, superfluous time-signature switches, electro noodling, and half-rap lyrics delivered in run-on melodies, and you ultimately think, "hey, what would happen if Dismemberment Plan got a crash course in Pro Tools and a record deal with Fueled By Ramen?" Everything Everything aren't afraid to answer those tough questions.
All jokes aside, it actually is an interesting gambit to find a continuum within all of those coordinates in terms of bands interacting with personal computing-- after all, D-Plan had a frontman who was essentially a poptimist blogger before we knew what to call it. But even crediting Everything Everything's unclassifiable combination of itchy art-rock, pop-locking electro, and straight-up Brit indie to musical omnivorism, there's a problem that is impossible to get around: If anyone's got a more irritating voice than Jonathan Everything, they probably also have a harp and a few good stories to tell. It's not the constant falsetto that's the problem-- Passion Pit and the Darkness had that, but they also owned their own ridiculousness (not to mention songwriting chops). Jonathan Everything merely inflicts wispy, intrusive papercuts on your eardrums. Hearing it for the first time is akin to seeing a roach-- unpleasant and unexpected, but then you start to worry about where you'll find the next one. And Man Alive is absolutely infested.
And yet, I'd still recommend at least a cursory shot at "My Kz, Ur Bf", because even if it's a particularly annoying song and you can't quite pick out whether Everything is seeking to get caught in flagrante with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, it does have something of a pleasant whiff of 90s alternative radio. Granted, it comes on way too strong and is a complete mess, but it's certainly *their mess. *Credit Everything Everything for finding their own niche, but it's one that's been unoccupied for good reason.


The Sacramento rapper’s six-song EP brings his themes of psychological trauma to the foreground, suggesting alternate readings of his previous work.

Spiritual Conversations EP

“No Choice,” the third song from Mozzy’s new EP, Spiritual Conversations, opens: “You don’t wanna live like this, let it sink in.” The line is a callback to the title track from Bladadah, one of the Sacramento rapper’s handful of breakout moments: “It’s deeper than a punchline or trying to sound lyrical/You don’t wanna live like this, my life difficult.” Mozzy’s music, typified by last year’s excellent 1 Up Top Ahk, has long meshed menace with a moral center, where the violence is unapologetic but not unexamined. Spiritual and psychological trauma seem to guide his songwriting, but they appear most frequently as subtext, or as codas on extended narratives. Spiritual Conversations brings those concerns to the foreground. While none of these six songs would be out of place on any other Mozzy record, hearing them arranged here, one after another, serves not only as an interesting aside in his catalog but a suggestion for alternate readings of his previous works.
Mozzy was raised in Sacramento’s Oak Park district, the grandson of a Black Panther, and surrounded by Bloods. He’s been rapping since he was a preteen in the late ’90s, but in the past four years has begun to amass a formidable following, tentacling from Northern California down the coast and through the rap internet. (Earlier this year, he was tapped to appear on the Black Panther soundtrack after Kendrick Lamar quoted him in a Grammys acceptance speech.) He drops music at a remarkable pace, but unlike many of his digital-native contemporaries, he organizes nearly all of his music into traditionally formatted LPs and EPs, which has its benefits but makes it less inviting for die-hards to pick and choose and rearrange songs to build narrative and counter-narratives about the artist’s work. Spiritual Conversations is a compelling listen simply for the fact that it seems to be in conversation with Mozzy’s larger catalog.
The songs themselves are emotionally balanced and lushly produced. On “In My Prayers,” the rap success is a little hollow—it “don’t excite” his mom and does even less to sway the judge. Mozzy’s a dexterous writer, and at times the real-world concerns melt down—giving way to tightly wound word games—then crystallize again at the end of the riddle: “We do the Dolce Gabbana down to the drawers/Google the goon, bodies/They poppin’ up on the blogs.” Think a W. Bush-era Cam’ron with no taste for paparazzi. But instead of moving on to the next fragment, he lets the killing breathe, rapping, “Murder be justifiable when it’s probable cause/But that don’t make up for the losses/Not at all.” It’s a concise reading of a worldview that allows for incredible violence but doesn’t deny the trauma that comes with it.
Spiritual Conversations is best condensed in the hook of “Who I Am”: “They could never live how I live/This shit trife, but it is what it is.” For as deeply as he burrows into the mechanics of murder plots or the soul-wrenching guilt in their aftermath, he tends to write and rap from a place of control, as if he’s a therapist recapping his patient’s manic account. The EP is not an ideal point of entry into Mozzy’s catalog, but as the spotlight brightens and he looks to flesh out his public persona, it’s a more than a worthwhile addendum.


Rebranding himself as a kind of everyman Mark Ronson, the EDM superstar steps out from behind the booth with an album of 1980s-inspired boogie.

Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1

It’s been a decade since Calvin Harris released his debut album, I Created Disco, establishing himself as the Scottish fish-‘n’-chip-shop version of LCD Soundsystem—just the first of many guises in his highly lucrative career as a dance-party-starter. Highlights have included a Rihanna partnership, a DJ residency at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand, where his visage covered several floors of the hotel, and a prime position atop a wave of all-conquering EDM while simultaneously modeling Armani Y-fronts. He became to the clubbing world what Jason Statham is to Hollywood blockbusters: chameleon enough to turn his hand to the latest franchise (in Harris’ case, drop-laden rave anthems, sexy deep house numbers, etc.), and happy to carry the action from the background. But by the laws of party-pill physics, what goes up must come down. So what happens when the host gets a hunch that the lights are about to come on, leaving the dancefloor empty?
All business, he hedges his bets on his fifth album, making savvily risk-averse decisions. Having proven his mettle as the one-man Brill Building of doof-doof hits, he’s forgone investing wads of energy into radio-ready house smashes. Instead, he provides post-disco mood lighting for a guestlist of pop and R&B singers and rap MCs already stalking the charts on their own merits: Future, Migos, Katy Perry, and Ariana Grande, to name a few. Bearing a ludicrous title whose sketchbook-like connotations are at odds with the music's supreme polish, Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 invites them under one roof for a sundown-to-sunrise evening of 1980s-inspired boogie.
At its most successful, the album has already proven itself a sturdy soundtrack to the summer of 2017, via a series of singles in which Harris fully soaks up the laid-back vibes of his adopted home of Los Angeles. The reggae-tinged “Feels” is a tropical jammer ripe for a Malibu barbecue, whereas the piano-gliding “Slide” sets the scene for a breezy sunset drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, and the G-Funk-leaning “Rollin” takes the after-party to the skating rink. At its worst, it amounts to expensively made elevator music—a simpler cousin to Daft Punk’s more efficiently crafted Random Access Memories. The Nicki Minaj-featuring “Skrt on Me,” for example, employs a dancehall rhythm so phoned-in it sounds like QVC background music, while the yacht-rock guitars of “Prayers Up” might leave you wondering whether you’re still on hold to housekeeping.
Similar to that Daft Punk LP, this record represents Harris’ own assertion of “real” musicianship, as the superstar DJ attempts to rebrand himself as an everyman Mark Ronson. Just as Daft Punk emphasized live instrumentation and vintage technology, Harris has been posting videos of himself darting between synths, guitars, and computers in the studio. Since his debut album, Harris has produced, written, and performed all of his tracks himself, but never before has he quite so insistently reminded us of that fact. In the video for “Feels,” he stands lanky behind Pharrell, sporting a newly grown muso beard and slapping his Ibanez 1200. Squint, and he could be Jesse Hughes taking a calypso breather from Eagles of Death Metal.
Still, it’s not as a front-and-center pop star but as the backroom executive where Harris continues to excel. While perfunctory guest vocalists engulfed 18 Months and Motion, this time his A&R skills are more adventurous. Take “Rollin,” for instance. Future’s Auto-Tuned robotics shouldn’t careen so effortlessly into the up-and-coming 19-year-old Khalid’s emotional croon, but somehow they make perfect bedfellows. As further proof that he has his tastemaking ear to the ground, Harris puts breakthrough R&B princess Kehlani’s buttery vocals to great use on the downtempo “Faking It,” balancing Lil Yachty’s teenage rap flow with an air of sophistication. Looking beyond the biggest names, the relatively unknown singer Jessie Reyez, who closes out the record in smoky fashion on the seductive “Hard to Love,” is a welcome find.
Harris wears his newfound sense of relaxation well. Back in February, he teased his forthcoming music by tweeting, “Not feel good music. Feel INCREDIBLE music.” A man of his word, he’s dutifully crafted some dumb-but-fun tunes. Take the Katy Perry-featuring “Feels.” The closest the album comes to a standout hit, it revolves around a silly refrain (“Don’t be afraid to catch feels”) that's so meaningless it may as well be about fishing for sunshine emojis. But Harris has always understood the finer points of mindlessness. Clubbing, after all, is about hedonism, escape, feeling invincible with a cocktail in your hand. Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 is a breezy distraction from an emcee stalling while he plans his next party trick. Neither reinventing pop nor changing the course of dance music, it’s a vacation of an album that doubles as the producer’s own stopgap until his next wave comes along.


With each track set around 100 BPM, this compilation from London’s Wisdom Teeth label allows the artists to stretch out and yield surprisingly dynamic results.

To Illustrate

Most genres of dance music loosely correspond to specific tempo ranges. House thumps away at around 120 beats per minute; techno presses the accelerator to 130; drum’n’bass carves its tornado-like path anywhere between 160 and 180. These buckets are, in part, a practical consideration, facilitating the DJ’s beatmatching. But there’s also an expressive dimension to such divisions, and as the lines around subgenres have gradually dissolved, certain tempos have emerged as both organizing principles and creative playgrounds. When dubstep splintered in the late 2000s, some artists began singing the praises of 130 BPM as an umbrella covering bass music, UK funky, broken techno, and similarly rugged, syncopated, quick-stepping styles. Other DJs pledge fealty to 160 BPM as the sweet spot where drum’n’bass and footwork overlap. To Illustrate, a new collaborative album via Wisdom Teeth, turns its lens to the other end of the spectrum: 100 BPM, an ostensibly poky zone that yields surprisingly dynamic results.
London’s Wisdom Teeth got its start in 2014 as an outlet for a muscular strain of bass music that came along in dubstep’s wake; its early releases had a severe, spiky aesthetic similar to that of Bristol’s Livity Sound (with whom Wisdom Teeth occasionally shared personnel). But over time, co-founders Facta and K-LONE have opened up the label’s scope to encompass a more varied set of sounds rooted in ambient and home-listening electronica. No matter the tempo, a Wisdom Teeth release tends to be distinguished by its colorful palette and percussive, almost pointillist sensibility. That holds true for To Illustrate as well. The album’s 10 tracks are awash in lush synths and digitally rendered mallet instruments, while its drum sounds are as finely detailed as an intaglio print—a lattice of rimshots, woodblocks, cowbells, and dry, boxy snares. Metallic pings and laser zaps add a futuristic sheen, while tight spirals of dub delay lend a buoyant feeling, like air bubbles rising from a diver’s mouthpiece.
Ten or 15 years ago, a collection of tunes at this tempo might have been geared toward slow-motion disco or house—the sorts of shuffling four-to-the-floor beats that Theo Parrish used to turn out, followed by Kassem Mosse and the Workshop crew. These days, reggaeton’s patterns are the primary point of reference, and they animate almost every track on the comp. Miami producer Nick León’s “Separation Anxiety” is a stern, lurching club banger driven by staggered kicks, staccato accents, and bear-trap snares. Manchester producer Henzo’s “Whirlpool Vanish” has a similarly minimalist sensibility; its buzzing synth bass and herky-jerky movements recall the resolutely digital style of dancehall favored around the turn of the millennium by producers like Sly Dunbar, Lenky Marsden, and Ward 21, and subsequently anthologized on the Mo Wax compilation Now Thing. But even the dreamier, more laid-back cuts, like Facta & K-LONE’s R&B-leaning “Kiss Me, Can’t Sleep” or Bristol duo Glances’ cosmically inclined “Sun Dapple,” tend to follow dembow’s syncopated pulse. That DJ Python—whose Worldwide Unlimited label counts Henzo among its roster—is nowhere to be found here only serves to show just how influential the New York producer’s idea of “deep reggaeton” has been.
While most of To Illustrate’s artists hail from the UK, Facta and K-LONE also look further afield for like-minded souls. Nagoya’s abentis, whose previous work has been influenced by the log-drum sound of South African amapiano, arrays verdant marimba patterns and steady woodpecker taps into fanciful forest music; the Seoul duo Salamanda extend the style they developed on their 2022 album for Mexico City/New York label Human Pitch into a rich, subaquatic funk in which spring-loaded syncopations unleash the kind of energy you might expect from a tightly wound drum’n’bass tune. If the compilation’s title is meant to suggest didactic aims, one lesson is just how much nuance can be wrung from this tempo. With more room between downbeats, there’s more space to stretch out; time becomes elastic, and synths and drums alike can be bent into svelte little curlicues. To Illustrate also proves how easily even the most unassuming idea—like, say, “Let’s slow things down”—can travel around the world, taking root in unexpected ways.


Remix album features contributions from Alan Braxe, Erol Alkan, Josh Homme, and Final Fantasy, among others.

Death From Above 1979: Romance Bloody Romance

Romance Bloody Romance

Worst release of 2005. Beyond awful. Listen, I know a lot of people out these parts didn't dig DFA79's mini-metalisms on You're A Woman, I'm A Machine-- too hard, too soft, too boring, not boring enough, vaguely misogynistic, etc. You wrote these things to me and I have all your emails in a file somewhere.
But understand a simple, if not mathematical fact about this two-piece bass-and-drum duo: By necessity their songs have little to them. They're efficient bursts of less-is-more rock that ride riffs hard then cut out right before they stale. I'd have thought at least one motherfucker tapped for this turkey-shot remix project would have figured that out. Instead we get Justice on some reverso Advantage shit, making "Blood on Your Hands" sound like the theme to Super Pitfall, and that game's the fucking worst.
Hey, let's talk Bloc Party's Silent Alarm Remixed, from which we might pretend Romance Bloody Romance took some Ps and Qs. SAR, remember, featured a different producer doing up a different track from the Bloc's debut. Then it came sequenced just like Silent Alarm, and a few of us (me) actually liked it better than the original LP-- more variety, less helicopters, etc. SAR at least made sense, since every Bloc track physically had a bunch of possible reconfigurations. Romance, meanwhile, has four telling remixes of "Black History Month" (the band's worst song), three of "Romantic Rights", an OK new song and a cover of former Peel favorite La Peste's "Better Off Dead". Inexplicably, nobody behind the papers realized after the second or third dude asked to remix "Black History Month" that maybe, maybe, DFA79's songs aren't suited for the full-on remix treatment-- they don't need it either.
Listen, I respect the renewed interest in tripping up rock-kid disco homophobia (still rampant) with these Phoned-in remix blitzes of late. Vice Records, seems, is fighting the good fight. But the Braxe/Falke and Dählback joints here are so flimsy, that vocoder'd out Makuziak futuro-disco bullshit so obnoxiously tongue-in-cheek, I can't imagine anybody really psyched to hit up his neighb Fixed or Making Time party to try out his new Diesel hightops on the dancefloor. Final Fantasy's string arrangements for "Black History" have their charm, sure, but only Trash's Erol Alkan turns in the album's non-bomb, a simple edit of "Romantic Rights" that overlays percussion tracks for an intro and flips the vocal track a disorienting half-step early. Which is saying something: If the game is to make rock tracks playable in clubs, why fuck with them more than you have to? What's so bad about disco edits?


Despite a stripped-down setup of just acoustic guitar and drums, this Bay Area duo hits with a full-band force. Visiter, their Frenchkiss debut, has garnered comparisons to Animal Collective and new-primitivist bands like High Places and Yeasayer.

Visiter

To understand where San Francisco's Dodos are coming from, just check the weekend itinerary from their most recent visit to L.A. On a Friday, they did a campus show for USC students; but when a miscommunication foiled their next day's plan to play at the Smell-- the venue at the epicenter of the local scene-- they ended up joining a bill with Thee Oh Sees and the Crystal Antlers at a birthday party at the Silverlake Lounge, an intimate, cozy space where you can't see a thing if you're more than five feet from the stage. It's within those coordinates (campus-quad pop, art-punk, and communal, lo-fi folk) that their Frenchkiss debut Visiter exists; an acoustic-and-percussion duo at their core, Dodos manage to hit with a full-band force that's even more pronounced in their astounding live sets.
On Visiter, Dodos guitarist Meric Long alternates between fingerpicking and breakneck strumming while playing in confounding alternate tunings. Logan Kroeber's clattering, locomotive percussion (which includes shoes outfitted with tambourines) is every bit a lead instrument as Long's guitar, and a big reason the band's music has garnered comparisons to the less abstract moments of Animal Collective and the output of other new-primitivist bands like High Places and Yeasayer.
The first quarter of Visiter marries those impulses with fantastic results. The banjo playing and female harmonies on opener "Walking" echo Michigan-era Sufjan, but the connection ends at Long's stridently confident vocal delivery. That song immediately segues into the maniacal "Red & Purple", a bewilderingly worded love song accompanied by a toy piano and fuzzy bass. And after the brief "Eyelids" comes "Fools", which has been bouncing around the web in some form for months, and is fast becoming the Dodos' signature tune-- although it may soon be eclipsed by the rollicking, Feelies-esque "Jodi".
From that point on, Visiter alternates between longer, more improvisatory material and near-interludes, which can leave a slightly spotty impression on its first few listens. With more exposure, the record reveals the celebratory acoustics of Led Zeppelin III or a more song-oriented take on tourmates Akron/Family. Playing with infectious fervor, Long runs through tricky blues-boxing and molten slide riffs on the galloping "Paint the Rust" and the second half of the epic "Joe's Waltz".
Visiter's second half is anchored by "The Season" and "God?", two massive shapeshifters that help define the record. Long and Kroeber here don't seem wedded to power duo minimalism-- and it's intriguing to wonder how they could incorporate their backgrounds in metal, African Ewe drumming, and gamelan beyond a sense of rhythmic intensity. These possibilities could also make more streamlined, Magnetic Fields-like numbers "Winter" and "Undeclared" seem vanilla by comparison to some, but by making room for both, Visiter ends up being one of the most welcoming (and welcome) records of 2008 so far.


Blending weighty subject matter and loose, meandering grooves, the Charleston-based artist’s latest album moves like a raindrop down a windowpane—jagged, natural, and unpredictable.

Onwards!

If you laid out the waveforms of a song onto paper, Khari Lucas once explained during a regional television interview, it might look like a contour map. This is what inspired the Charleston-based musician’s artist name, Contour, and it’s the sort of visual thinking you might expect from a musician who started out producing beats, as Lucas did. Onwards!, his second full-length as Contour, is the kind of music you make when you’re used to manipulating sound shapes on a laptop screen—loose, drifting, free, with many tracks resembling sampled two-bar loops. It’s difficult to tell, without production credits, which sounds are generated by live instruments and which are sampled, and the hazy nexus where one melts into the other is the spot where Lucas’ music lives.
It’s clear that Lucas considers his music as part of a larger project, linking him to a long lineage of Black artists: As a radio host for dublab’s Footprints in the Dark, he compiles two hours of music from a single Black musician each month, as a way to make what he calls his “research practice” public. The choice of archivist’s language feels pointed: Lucas is deeply invested in notions of Black musical inheritance and history. Throughout Onwards!, sampled voices repeatedly bob to the surface to lament, scold, or reflect. These samples all come from films made by the L.A. Rebellion, a group of filmmakers of color that came together in the late 1960s to highlight the lived conditions of Black Americans, leading to independent-cinema landmarks like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.
If this history sounds weighty, then it’s a testament to Lucas’ skill that Onwards! still moves like a raindrop down a windowpane—jagged, effortless, natural, unpredictable. The songs are atmospheric and purposefully blobby in shape, while Lucas’ supple singing voice has an improvisatory sense of play, tagging the track with offbeat, searching melodies like a muted trumpet. He has a penchant for locking onto a phrase—“I’m like 10 minutes from bankrupt,” from “Hearing Voices”—and testing out its many resonances, repeating it until every meaning—bitter, frightened, ironic, hopeless, matter-of-fact—has been exhausted. “The price of life I know I can’t afford/The tourniquet is always falling off ” he sings on “Skin Closure,” shaping the phrase into such a lovely, lilting shape it’s easy to miss its bleakness.
Despite the focus on mood-setting and atmosphere, you sense Lucas’ firm hand guiding every decision, pushing the music along its meandering path: the subtle creep of the bass that enters on “Trench Prayer,” or the loping cross-stick snare that opens up air pockets in the groove on “Hearing Voices.”  In the close-stacked vocal harmonies of “You’d Do Well to Pack Light” that lag ever-so-slightly behind the beat, you hear a close study of Voodoo, and the distant spirit of the Soulquarians insinuates itself into the mix, both in jazzy, freeform bursts of texture and in the impulse to work away drowsily at a groove until it blooms open.
Like anyone who has ever been asked what genre he works in, Lucas demurs (“Genres are for listeners, not for artists”). But in an interview with NTS, he cited Stevie Wonder, Grouper, and Brazilian music, all of which actually do a pretty good job of preparing you for the easeful float in his music. Onwards! will also strike many listeners as distinctly "post-Blonde," both in its porous genre borders and its stream-of-consciousness airiness. There are surface similarities, as well, between the calm hurt in Lucas’ voice and Frank Ocean’s, the same glassy heat and wounded dignity.
But Lucas’ music is darker, more dour and downcast than Ocean’s, more earthbound. On a song poignantly called “N**** Won’t Reach Mars,” Lucas sings, “Space is not the place,” gently rejecting Sun Ra’s iconic Afrofuturist exhortation and casting Mars as just one more place people of color will not be welcome: “What they want with us on the red rock?... I’d rather plant my feet wherе I can feel the rain.” This is a complicated emotional gesture he repeats throughout Onwards!, one that gains power and resonance the more you notice it being deployed: on the one hand, rejection and negation; on the other, a feint toward affirmation, a glance toward possibility.
On the smoky and spellbinding “Babe Brother,” he sings about the weight of patriarchal oppression—“Many wives carry the burden of/All the suffering.” It’s a lot for anyone to tackle single-handedly, but Lucas smartly avoids big statements, here and everywhere else. The rest of the song, as with the rest of Onwards!, lives where the rest of us do—wandering in clouds of uncertainty, contending with cold jets of doubt (“Can my vow, vow to return it all/Can it solve this?”) and savoring fleeting bursts of resolve (“Taking stock of the heart I got/Share it freely”.) There is no lesson, because Lucas is no teacher, just a citizen, lost as the rest of us.


The Texas rapper's new album is a brightly colored spectacle that showcases all the Lone Star state has to offer.

Lonestar Luchador

The influence of Latinos in hip-hop culture is especially potent in Texas; it’s hard to say what Houston rap would sound like without the lowrider and slab culture Mexican-Americans helped pioneer. Bay City rapper That Mexican OT—the “OT” stands for “Outta Texas”—wears his Tejano heritage on his sleeve. Defining his sound as “grito ranchero,” he blends samples of regional Mexican folk music with the thick 808s of Southern rap while delivering blustery rhymes with an unmistakable twang.
On his new album Lonestar Luchador, OT doubles down on state pride, filling his starting roster with fellow Texans. The exuberant BigXthaPlug guests on “Hit List,” while Maxo Kream goes bar-for-bar with him on “Opp 2.” Veteran Paul Wall pulls up for “Johnny Dang,” a tribute to the iconic Houston jeweler of the same name, a Vietnamese immigrant who became a grill designer to the chopped-up stars. The album is most evocative when it embraces Tex-Mex fusion, particularly on the corrido “Barrio”: Over the nostalgic strums of a six-string guitarrón, OT transforms into a passionate bandleader, crooning at the moon.
Though the loose lucha libre concept is mostly played for laughs in the form of recurring commentary from Dallas comedian Ralph Barbosa, you get the comparison: OT’s quick and nimble flow mimics the high-wire maneuvers of athletes like El Hijo del Vikingo and Komander. And much like a luchador might switch up their mask, OT switches between different personas. On “Skelz,” he rattles off the type of whimsical flexes that would be right at home in a Screwed-Up freestyle cypher—“I need a Burberry blender to make a protein shake”—and then goes full chopped-and-screwed on “OMG.” Tracks like “Breannan” channel the bluesy toxicity of Louisiana crooners like Kevin Gates, as OT violently fantasizes about revenge after heartbreak. But he’s capable of more than Southern charm: On “Cowboy in New York,” he adopts the rapid chopper flow of an East Coast battle rapper, spitting pure venom over a menacing piano line.
That Mexican OT is a consummate entertainer: Sometimes he’s a down-and-dirty villain who cheats to win, other times he’s a comical babyface and a boisterous drunk. On “Cowboy Killer,” he’s in pure crowd-work mode, transforming into a cartoon gunslinger alongside a jaunty saloon piano. All the while, he underscores how syncretic Texas music has always been, infusing traditions from both sides of the border with his own idiosyncrasies. The result is a brightly colored spectacle, a freestyle brawl of rap styles and regional flavors.


The Detroit rapper’s standout debut is among the year’s most engaging rap albums so far, packed with disarming metaphors, humor, and introspection.

Dope Game Stupid

In his book Pimp: The Story of My Life, author Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck recalls a conversation with an acquaintance about how the mind is like a movie screen. If so, Detroit rapper Bruiser Wolf’s mind is playing clips from Black Dynamite and that Suga Free pen-and-nickel freestyle. Little is known about Wolf, but Dope Game Stupid—his debut album via Danny Brown’s newly minted Bruiser Brigade Records—turns his life details and a never-ending stream of metaphors into some of the most engaging raps of the year so far.
Wolf’s voice, a helium-toned yawp that sits somewhere between scatting and a breathless jogger attempting to talk, is as distinct as rap voices get. Comparisons to rappers Suga Free and E-40 have been made in the past; and while the influence is clear, Wolf’s flows are more animated and urgent, jumping suddenly like popcorn kernels. “But it is one thing that I learned from E-40/Somebody in the clique gotta be legit,” he says winkingly on “Whip Test.” There’s no shortage of war stories and candid moments on Dope Game Stupid and, much like his label boss, compact metaphors and similes are Wolf’s weapon of choice.
His clever turns of phrase move from the banal (“I’m touching green like I’m accepting calls,” from “Syndicate”) to genuinely profound (“When you live in the streets, you gotta eat with the fork in the road,” from “Whip Test”). When he’s in this zone, Wolf sustains a handful of gut-busters on nearly every song. On “Use Me (I’m Dope),” he gives a lucky partner “the Johnson two times like baby powder.” The third verse of “I’m a Instrument” sees him comparing drugs and guns to every section of an orchestra, from bass and trumpet to the harmonica. His bars repeat themselves on occasion—he relies on the well-worn analogy of piano keys as bricks of coke too many times—but there are no real groaners in the bunch. At his best, he sounds like a Rudy Ray Moore character beamed into the 21st century after binge-watching The Wire and a few hours of RapTok posts.
For all the humor packed into Dope Game Stupid, Wolf is still capable of slamming the brakes to reflect. The peeks into his life throughout the album are illuminating: he compares his gun aim to the “bullets” an unnamed friend would throw, as a quarterback at Texas Tech; he consistently praises the good fortune of (mostly) leaving the street life behind. Songs like “Middle Men” and the heartbreaking closer “Momma Was a Dope Fiend” abandon jokes entirely, embracing somber scene-setting. On the former, Wolf and Detroit stalwart Fat Ray swap stories of botched drug deals and lament the black hole of street life in the Motor City: “Hood money good money where I’m from/Detroit City, everybody sell somethin’.”
“Momma Was a Dope Fiend” drops all pretense and gives Wolf nearly three minutes to sketch out how his mother’s long battle with addiction affected his life and haunted the periphery of his career in the streets: “I cried a thousand tears for every track on her arm,” he admits. It’s raw and grim to the point of nausea, pushed even further by Wolf’s commitment to the same yelp he used to make jokes about the Netflix movie Bird Box one song ago. Even with some jarring transitions, Dope Game Stupid maintains a sturdy atmosphere. Producer Raphy—who handled every beat except for “Dope Fiend,” produced by Knxwledge—provides a batch of pristine loops that crackle with dust and melancholy. The stately beats complement Wolf’s over-the-top persona on some songs and clash with it on others, amplifying the pathos of a performer refusing to break character even as he’s breaking down on the inside.
It may be tempting to label Dope Game Stupid, with its emphasis on Capital B Bars and its co-sign from a neoclassical rap heavyweight, as the antithesis to the melodic street rap movement currently taking Detroit by storm. But Bruiser Wolf has as much in common with 42 Dugg and Kasher Quon as he does with fellow Bruiser Brigade members ZelooperZ and J.U.S. The city is being crushed by opioids and economic plight and remains one of America’s most rabid COVID-19 hotspots. Detroit rappers are used to pushing on through the hardship; Bruiser Wolf just so happens to shoulder his pain with a crooked smile.

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