The newly reissued landmark debut from the Amityville emo band takes heartbreak, jealousy, and depression to an operatic intensity, but does so with sharp wit, a knowing wink, and oh so many hooks.

Taking Back Sunday: Tell All Your Friends

Tell All Your Friends

If there was ever a visual metaphor for emo’s second wave, it’s a gang of women in tank tops kicking the shit out of a skinny white guy. That iconic image, a flip of David Fincher’s Fight Club from the video for Taking Back Sunday’s “Cute Without the E (Cut From the Team),” broadly symbolizes a wave of early ‘00s bands who’d been downhearted and used pop and post-hardcore to expose their freshly picked scabs. But the video’s scene was also on-the-nose to the point of being camp, marking the divergent path that Taking Back Sunday took from their peers. Their music described all the ways of being an emotional punching bag even as it sent up bleeding-heart stereotypes. The balance between wit and sincerity courses through their newly-remastered, still gripping debut, 2002’s Tell All Your Friends.
Taking Back Sunday’s members came from the kind of suburban towns that have a way of magnifying anxiety, isolation, and paranoia into high-stakes urgency. In 1999, the five-piece formed in Amityville, New York, leading their then-label Victory Records to proclaim that “a city that has been synonymous with nothing but horror since the 1979 release of The Amityville Horror is about to be redefined.” But given the near-universal concerns of their landmark debut Tell All Your Friends—heartbreak, jealousy, and depression, elevated to an operatic intensity—the five-piece could have come from just about any out-of-the-way place in the U.S. The stretch of grey highway depicted on the cover of their debut album Tell All Your Friends is about as region-specific as a McDonald’s.
Their sound, though, had tell-tale antecedents in Long Island’s thriving late-’90s punk scene and post-hardcore across the nation. The hooks of the Get Up Kids, the intensity of Thursday, and the post-rockish flourishes of Cap’n Jazz come together in Taking Back Sunday’s taut, poppy anthems, while also leaving a breadcrumb trail for fans to go deeper into the genre. Guitarist Eddie Reyes had played in bands including the Movielife, and the call-and-response vocals of another former band, Clockwise, inspired Adam Lazzara and John Nolan’s fevered duels.
On Tell All Your Friends, every instrument pushes against each other. Frontman Adam Lazzara—a microphone masochist with the swooping hair of a Funko Pop! figurine—delivers the album’s opening lines as if he’s been waiting his whole life to do it. “So sick so sick of being tired, and oh so tired of being sick.” Later, a chorus-slash-manifesto arrives alongside guitars that hit like an electrical current’s surge. “We won’t stand for hazy eyes anymore.” It’s a sublime bit of chest-puffing nonsense, a stake in the ground that’s twisted until it holds fast.
The psyche of young, white, cis straight men is dissected with startling candor. “Ghost Man on Third” is a brutally vivid chronicle of addiction and suicidal ideation, on which Lazzara wrenchingly repeats the line, “It’s a shame I don’t think that they’ll notice.” Meanwhile, “Bike Scene,” with gorgeous backing vocals from Nolan’s sister Michelle DaRosa, fits in a hundred hooks while it evokes post-heartbreak depression. “The Blue Channel” takes a sleazy riff and soaks it in screams, before Lazzara’s taunting whisper at the song’s close: “Do you know what your girl’s been up to?”
At times like this, author Jessica Hopper’s description of women in emo songs comes to mind. They are, she wrote in a 2003 essay, “denied the dignity of humanization through both the language and narratives [...] only of consequence in romantic settings.” It’s hard to deny this read of Tell All Your Friends’ lyrics. But the band knowingly play into emo’s tropes—by 2002, already well-worn—with a knowing wink. Women are addressed as “sweetie” and “princess,” terms that endow their songs the satirical register of screwball comedy. You can imagine Cary Grant delivering a quip like “Cute Without the E”’s “don’t bother, angel,” through a plume of cigarette smoke. And “You’re So Last Summer”’s unforgettable line—“You could slit my throat/And with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt”—is both achingly real and downright absurd, a humorous quality hammered home by Flava Flav’s bizarre lip-sync to the lines in the song’s video.
In a 2003 Absolute Punk interview, Nolan explained his and Lazzara’s psychodramatic reenactments of a straight couple’s dialogue in their music: “Me and Adam had an idea originally to have some of the lyrics written like a play where one line is the boy and the next line is the girl,” he said. This fluidity, coupled with Lazzara’s slash fic-catalyzing hangouts with other emo frontmen, allows for delightfully queer readings of songs like “You’re So Last Summer,” on which Lazzara belts, “These grass stains on my knees they don’t mean a thing.” (He’s recounting the speech of a woman. But he’s still the one saying it.) Taking Back Sunday’s innate flamboyance, coupled with their songs’ willful slippage of gender binaries, makes them a complicating outlier in a largely straight scene which privileged cis male voices even as their lyrics ultimately upheld its supportive pillars.
Even so, the most compelling relationship cataloged in Tell All Your Friends is the flame war between Taking Back Sunday and Brand New’s Jesse Lacey (2017 reports alleged that Lacey is a sexual abuser and pedophile). A former member of the band, Lacey was allegedly kicked out of Taking Back Sunday after romancing Nolan’s girlfriend, and responded with 2001’s cruelly catchy DUI fantasy, “Seventy Times 7.” The Amityville band turned Lacey’s words against him in the math-y anthem “There’s No ‘I’ in Team,” but everyone involved seemed to revel in the drama; the bands came together to perform a mash-up of the two songs a few months after Tell All Your Friends’ release. Real-life context seemed to undermine any real threat of lyrics like “best friends means I pulled the trigger,” stoking the mythos of both groups. Adding credence to the theory that the rivalry was only skin deep, you could buy the Team Brand New or Team Taking Back Sunday shirt.
Unbeknownst to the band members who made the album while just grazing legal drinking age, Tell All Your Friends was a pivot point for second-wave emo. The genre exploded in late 2004 and into 2005 as Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance became TRL staples and Taking Back Sunday’s second album, 2004’s Where You Want to Be, sold 163,000 copies in its first week, a staggering number even in the CD era. But Tell All Your Friends still stands for being young, being horny, being a troll. It was a high-water mark at a moment just before everything changed.

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Gerald Donald—one-half of Detroit techno legends Drexciya—continues to dive deeper into his Dopplereffekt project, evoking a teeming futuristic landscape cruised over at low altitudes.

Cellular Automata

Where does a novice begin with Gerald Donald’s sprawling discography? Since the early ‘90s, he has approached almost every facet of his career with shadowy evasiveness. Outside of his widely celebrated work with James Stinson as Drexciya, Donald has rotated through at least a dozen projects, creating aliases that veer between stone classics like “Formenverwandler” and twisting cyberpunk abstractions. Muddying the waters where credit is concerned, cover art and press releases deliberately lead people astray with imagined backstories and nebulous collaborators.
Tying all this together is a unique and consistent sonic signature, immediately identifiable across decades and as entrancing as it is deceptively simple. Built on a bedrock of snappy electro drum programming, twinkling synth arpeggiations, and ominous cinematic harmonies, Donald’s work in Dopplereffekt, often in collaboration with fellow traveler To Nhan Le Thi, is his most widely known. 1995’s debut Fascist State featured some of the project’s most notorious outings, with songs about sex with a mannequin, pornographic voyeurism and a disconcerting fascination with eugenics. While Dopplereffekt was welcomed at the time by the electroclash scene, the project has since moved further and further from the dance floor. Cellular Automata is their first LP since 2007’s thorny and mesmerizing Calabi Yau Space, and it follows a recent surge of activity that includes festival appearances and standout EPs for Leisure System. If you’ve waded in the waters of Drexciya and are curious for more, Cellular Automata is as good a place as any to dive deeper into the abstract, unsettling corners of Donald’s world.
Not that he uses that name; on this LP, he goes by Rudolf Klorzeiger, though for years he identified as Heinrich Mueller (named after the Nazi Gestapo chief). This self-mythologizing is a big part of what draws people in, but it wouldn’t mean much if the music weren’t up to snuff. Automata doesn’t upend expectations—it could have easily been released one year after Calabi rather than ten—but its nine beatless mood pieces, each approximately the length of a pop song, sound great. The blend of tingling, neon-hued ’80s futurism and sinister drone place it halfway between Tangerine Dream’s film work and the OST’s for anime classics like *Akira *or Ghost in the Shell.
The titles, however, all tell of scientific fact. “Isotropy,” “Pascal’s Recursion,” “Exponential Decay,” and others evoke the world of mathematical principles, theorems, and proofs. It’s up to the listener to decode precisely how the chunky bassline and haunting moans of “Von Neumann Probe” relate to its namesake theory of self-replicating spacecraft, but it certainly sets a striking tone. An early standout is “Gestalt Intelligence.” Following a vaporous synthetic breath, the song pulls a sly 1-2 on listeners when its initial dawning harmonies are suddenly darkened by a menacing lower note. It’s a simple gesture, but a chilling one. As the song builds, more dissonance is introduced, conjuring a malevolent hivemind plotting its insurgency. “Pascal’s Recursion” meanwhile sounds like an abandoned factory come to life, rusty pipes and all.
The album’s only weakness is perhaps its uniformity. The tracks bleed together, evoking a teeming futuristic landscape cruised over at low altitudes. Automata is an unpopulated world, one of cold precision, pregnant pauses and nameless dread. According to a 2014 interview, Dopplereffekt is “representing concepts and abstractions with music data. In other words, physical reality can be represented by musical arrangement and atmosphere.” While an early track celebrated scientists with the rather unsubtle lyrics (“Sitting in a laboratory/Conducting experiments/Analyzing data/I am a scientist”), Automata expresses the type of awe that comes with deeper knowledge of our universe’s magnitude and unfathomable complexity.
Tooling their synthesizers to mirror natural phenomenon, these songs can be seen as attempts to understand our place in the cosmos, a musical response to and interpretation of scientific and mathematical breakthroughs. Each component works as simply as possible to channel as much of life’s mystery as possible, keeping any trace of melodrama at bay. While in the past Dopplereffekt have drawn on some of the 20th century’s darkest moments, perhaps drawing parallels between the Nazi’s ruthless mechanical efficiency and Detroit’s own automation age rise and fall, here they look past the world of human affairs and the effect is profound. This is music to get lost in, and the more one explores Dopplereffekt’s world, the harder it is to remember why you would ever want to find a way out.


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 SWV’s 1992 prodigious debut, a stylish album that added a singular realness to the sound of R&B.

It’s About Time

It’s possible that the only person in the world who didn’t like SWV’s “Weak” was the woman who sang lead on it, Cheryl “Coko” Gamble. She didn’t understand it—in fact, she “hated” the song when its writer-producer Brian Alexander Morgan presented it to her during their first recording session together. So strong was her reaction that she hid in a bathroom and had to be coerced out of it to record the track.
Good thing she got over it. The ’90s slow jam against which all ‘90s slow jams would be judged went on to peak at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1993, dislodging Janet Jackson’s megahit “That’s the Way Love Goes” from its eight-week run at the summit. By that point, R&B’s commercial prowess was apparent—Boyz II Men spent 13 weeks at the top spot the previous year with “End of the Road,” written and produced by the trinity of Babyface, L.A. Reid, and Daryl Simmons. “Weak” clearly didn’t leap out to its singer as the era-defining ballad it would become, but then, nor did SWV immediately scan as the pop stars they would turn into months after the release of their 1992 debut, It’s About Time.
A certain scrappiness was key to their appeal. They were three self-described around-the-way girls from New York who often handled their own wardrobe. They blended classic girl-group harmonies and church singing (Coko was an alum of “hip-hop pastor” and gospel great Hezekiah Walker’s choir). They embodied the ’90s ideal of not trying too hard—there was no indication of crazy, and they were intermittently sexy, but they were full-time cool. When asked in an interview what their secret was, Leanne “Lelee” Lyons shot back, “There’s no secret. We’re real.” Their debut was home to simple, direct bangers that said what they meant and meant what they said. The album exudes a kind of bluntness you’d expect from New Yorkers.
It was Lelee’s idea to start the group with Coko, a friend she knew from her hometown of the Bronx. Before moving there in her teens, Coko lived in Brooklyn, where she got to know Tamara “Taj” Johnson-George (née Johnson). The group that would become SWV went through some format and lineup shake-ups before tapping Taj to audition. They also had a few names before settling on SWV: One of them, TLC (for Taj, Lelee, and Coko), was dropped upon the emergence of another girl group that would become a juggernaut in their own right. Their manager Maureen Singleton came up with SWV—Sisters With Voices—because their harmonic blend was so tight they sounded like actual sisters; Coko initially thought the name was ugly.
With Singleton’s help, they sent out their demo to a host of record labels with birthday cards (who could resist opening?) and bottles of Perrier (they couldn’t afford champagne). RCA bit and they were signed to a multi-album deal, a process that Taj described as “real simple.” Their fast break had been a long time coming. The women of SWV hadn’t lived easy lives. Lelee has described experiences with eviction and homelessness in her youth; she was a mother of two by age 17. Taj’s father died when she was 9, and before her wheelchair-bound mother died when she was 14, she used to carry her up the stairs of her Bed Stuy apartment building. Both have talked about surviving sexual abuse. “If we got out the ghetto, anybody could get out the ghetto,” said Coko.
Looking back at the state of the group upon signing, Coko said, “I don’t think we really realized what we could be,” but RCA’s Skip Miller did. He signed them in 1991, the year before Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411? forever changed the sound of R&B, making it de rigueur to combine soulful singing and boom-bap beats. Miller said that he figured such a fusion was coming and primed his new signees to help lead the charge. He had been looking for a group with “a street feel” and saw SWV as “a female version of male groups like Jodeci and Guy,” he said in Billboard. In an interview with BET, Coko said they considered themselves a “female version of Shai.” In that same interview, Taj spelled out her group’s unique place in the market: “We’re not as glam as En Vogue, and we’re not as really street as TLC. We’re like in the center with our own flavor.”
They situated themselves within soul history, as well. References to R&B classics—direct and inadvertent—are strung throughout It’s About Time. Its bubblegummy second single, which would become the group’s first Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, “I’m So Into You,” shares a title with a 1978 slow jam by Peabo Bryson, and contains lyrical allusions to Rufus and Chaka Khan’s “Sweet Thing,” as well as the Stax standard “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right.” Elsewhere, invocations of Stevie Wonder’s “Knocks Me Off My Feet,” Jackson 5’s “All I Do Is Think of You” (remade by Troop in 1989), and Bloodstone’s “Natural High,” float by like clouds. The album also features writing from new jack swing heavyweight Jeff Redd and Philly soul great Gene McFadden.
As if guided by destiny, SWV found themselves in a sweet spot, conversant with R&B radio’s contemporary trends and a greater soul tradition, while offering flair distinct enough to make them really pop. Theirs was not a reinvention; it was a prodigious riff. Much of the group’s uniqueness can be chalked up to Coko’s candied voice: so guilelessly chirpy as to be surreal, so tender as to recall the heights hit by Ralph Tresvant in the early phase of New Edition’s career (SWV loved New Edition). Coko could put sweet on sweet and have it make sense—her vocal approach on “Weak” works like a teaspoon of sugar that helps the sugar go down. A perpetual source of melisma, she renders short words multisyllabic as a matter of course—“true” at one point unfurls to hit about six syllables; at another, she spreads “gone” out to eight or so.
When asked in an interview why Coko was SWV’s lead singer, despite the clear aptitude of her groupmates, Taj responded, “Listen to her!” Further carving out Coko’s singularity were her signature nails, which extended her wingspan several inches and were prominently featured in the group’s videos. Coko maintained that they were her real nails. They were the product of youthful rebellion as her religious mother, Lady “Clyde” Tibba Gamble, didn’t allow such adornments growing up. Her mother’s influence was evident in her career path: Lady Tibba sang backup for the likes of Lou Rawls and Sylvester during Coko’s youth.
The group’s lyrics also traded in edginess. “I’m So Into You” is among the most joyous songs about cheating ever committed to tape—that would become something of a brand for the group as the first single from their sophomore album, “You’re the One” was similar in subject and exuberance. Additionally, It’s About Time featured not one but two paeans to cunnilingus in the aforementioned “Downtown,” a jeep-knocking slow jam, and “Black Pudd’n,” a boom-bap rap duet between Taj and the song’s writer-producer, Sahpreem King. Between Madonna’s Erotica, which had been released one week prior to It’s About Time, and the “Lick U Up”-containing Fever for da Flavor by H-Town, which would come out the following spring, the period marked a big time for pussy-eating in pop.
“Downtown” finds the girls, who were in their late teens and early 20s when It’s About Time was released, educating their object(s) of lust on how to make sex better for them: “Ya gotta go downtown/That’s the way to my love/Take it round and round/Ooh you can’t stop till you find my love.” “Downtown” is one of three songs on the album in which SWV express their collective desire for hours-long sex (their entry on the Babyface-produced Waiting to Exhale soundtrack was aptly chosen: “All Night Long,” a highlight of that collection). Taj told an interviewer the forwardness of their songs was what the group liked about them. “It’s nothing to be ashamed about,” she added. “We’re just telling the fellas what we want.”
That assertiveness stands in sharp contrast to the submission that SWV express elsewhere—It’s About Time opens with “Anything,” a verse-less songlet that finds the women on simmer and features a repeated hypnotic hook that begins: “Anything you wanna do, I am gonna try to/Boy, my body’s just for you.” That one, like many of the album’s hits, was produced by Brian Alexander Morgan, a singer-songwriter from Wichita, Kansas, who’d recently been dropped by Warner Bros., with whom his act Cachet De Vois had signed. Morgan was inspired by his former labelmate Chanté Moore when he wrote “Weak,” which details the physiological effects of a crush and spells out how useless words are to describe such matters (“Can’t explain why your lovin’ makes me weak,” goes the hook’s last line). He hadn’t written “Weak” or the new jack swing cut “Right Here” with a girl group in mind, but once he met and worked with SWV he was able to tailor his talents to their sound.
It was during the recording of the ebullient “I’m So Into You”—whose bopping keyboard sounds like it could have inspired much of The-Dream and Tricky Stewart’s peak material—that the collaboration really gelled. In an interview with Pitchfork, Morgan said they knew they had a smash on their hands while recording that one. He deliberately avoided programming a swing pattern in its percussion, figuring that R&B was ready to move on from new jack swing. He was right, though his aforementioned “Right Here” and choice album cut “Think You’re Gonna Like It” swung hard and effectively.
Much of It’s About Time has the kind of crunchy snares and nearly subliminal basslines that nonetheless characterized the sound of the day, but the productions are crisp and spacious enough to retain their freshness. There’s not really a slow spot on this collection of hits and shoulda-beens—several album cuts, including the title track, would have worked well on radio. Morgan seeded his productions with unique signatures—the hi-hat on “I’m So Into You” is a sample from the ’60s that the producer declined to specify, while “Weak” has a bending bass line inspired by uptempo hits from Zapp & Roger and Tom Browne’s “Funkin’ 4 Jamaica.”
The album was just the jumping-off point. SWV were nothing if not savvy, and so they were fully invested in the power of the remix at a time when the form was gaining a foothold on the charts. That was apparent in further hits—the smoothed out “Right Here (Human Nature Remix)” (by Allen “Allstar” Gordon and Teddy Riley) that was tacked onto subsequent pressings of It’s About Time offered a glimpse into the future as a near mash-up that combined a rerecorded version of the group’s first single (a minor R&B hit) and Michael Jackson’s Thriller-era “Human Nature.” It also features an early recording of Pharell Williams, who spits the tag “S…Double…U…V” and whose falsetto sails in the background. In 1994, “Anything” was transformed (again by Allstar) into a stomping hip-hop track featuring Wu-Tang Clan members Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Method Man, and U-God (and over a year before Mariah Carey would release the “Fantasy” remix with ODB). Even single versions would have minor tweaks—the “Weak” video version did away with the echo on Coko’s lead vocal and added even sweeter harmonies and more robust ad libs, achieving the impossible: It made a perfect song more perfect.
Coko did eventually find love in her heart for “Weak.” “We will forever work just ’cause of that one song,” she said. So far, that’s been the case. In the ensuing decades, SWV would make more hits, break up, reform, and do a whole lot of reality TV, but they remain a touring act largely based on the phenomenal success of their hit-laden debut. Even taking into account the grown-up subject matter and the many edges that the group members were rough around, there’s an innocence on It’s About Time that would be, by definition, impossible to replicate. We can only return to it and marvel at how three young women had the drive, confidence, talent, and taste to stroll right into the music industry, as though it were some building in New York. The hits, the union of hip-hop and soul, the allegiance to the remix, the street style, and conscious elegance all contribute to their status as a quintessential ‘90s R&B group, but more than anything, it was their ability to make it all look easy–attainable, even. It’s About Time is as much a relic as it is a model for projecting cool, at once very much of its time and timeless.


Teebs' 2010 debut Ardour had a way of flooding your ears with lush sonic environments. On his new E S T A R A, he aims for a more concise approach.

E S T A R A

In case you were wondering, Ardour still sounds immersively gorgeous three and a half years later. Teebs' debut had a way of flooding your ears with greenery, lush environments seeping out of speakers and making it feel like the ambient temperature was 68 degrees no matter where you were. As low-intensity and mellow as it was, the warped instrumenation and crackling undercurrents of static and accelerated-aging decay seemed immediately tactile, doing for your ears what a look up into sunlight filtered through a canopy of leaves does for your eyes. After the fatigue of the most endless-seeming winter in ages, a followup feels sorely needed.
And yet it seems like something's been lost in the intervening years, considering how concise and relatively unadventurous E S T A R A has turned out to be. Unadventurous in this case doesn't necessarily mean derivative, least of all derivative of himself; the departure from the sprawling warmth of Ardour into more straightforward beats is at least transitional. And it's not necessarily boring, either—it's appealingly pretty music that's still a bit too attention-getting to recede into the background. But this is one of those cases where little manages to stick after repeated listens: slow builds, subtle shifts and clever juxtapositions reward close listening, but it doesn't do much to actually pull listeners in.
Meeting the music more than halfway isn't that strenuous, thankfully, and the early advance singles are enough to get a sense of the album's strong points. Jonti collaboration “Holiday” has the neat trick of smearing and smothering its notes to the point that there's little distinction between where the melodic progressions end and the sustained drones begin, thickly layered walls of percussive melody and melodic percussion concocting a blurry haze for bird chirps and sun-bleached vocals to stream through. “View Point” is more upfront in its structure—a beat that sounds like a muted, underwater tabla, offset with distorted ringing-bell chords that oscillate between sharp chimes and dissipating waves—and, with its parallel senses of deep rhythm and medidative drone, does a lot to advance Teebs' strengths as someone who can put together a dance track with the nuance and delicacy of an ambient composition.
There are other moments of arresting beauty, like the bossa-tinged beat on Prefuse 73 collab “NY pt. 2” that pairs airy woodblock and heavy-elastic kicks with crystalline acoustic guitar notes, or the sustain-drenched keys that make “Piano Days”/”Piano Months” feel like Overlook Hotel muzak if the ghosts were more Miyazaki than Kubrick. But there are just as many songs that slip through your ears. “Shoouss Lullaby” is little more than windchimes over foot-dragging bass rumbles that eventually drag themselves out of bed to join a woozy-headed beat, and “SOTM” runs off the jittery momentum of a gathering-steam burble of rapidfire click-boom-cymbal percussion. But even at opposite ends of the energy-level spectrum, they're both too gauzy and vague to resonate much further than the last moment of fading reverb.
E S T A R A is almost hypnotic in its tendency to make each individual track blur itself into an indistinct piece of a loosely memorable whole, one with little impression actually retained even if it jumps from mood to mood. Melancholy, bucolic relaxation, and agitated giddiness all run through this record, but its emotionally calming effect comes at the expense of anything truly revelatory or exciting. It's only when the clarinet of Jaga Jazzist's Lars Horntveth wafts its way into an almost snarky song- and album-ending moment at the conclusion of “Wavxxes”. There the sustained momentum finally all winds down in a flurry of missed notes and stray chuckles— the humanity finally piercing the surface. The mood is broken, the past 40 minutes vanish into the ether, and the loose sense of having just experiencing something fairly pleasant is all that's really left. Still, that elusive moment's worth trying to recapture with each listen.


Gabrielle Herbst studied composition at Bard with new-music heavyweights like Zeena Parkins and Marina Rosenfeld, and she also has an unabashed love of pop. The vocals on her intriguing debut evoke both the pointillist harmonies of '60s girl groups and the contrapuntal clockworks of Meredith Monk.

Sympathy

What if the voice weren’t the original instrument? What if it all began with breath? That’s one question at the heart of Gabrielle Herbst’s debut album as GABI, in which the singer and composer takes gorgeous, gossamer songs—songs that feel all but a cappella, even when they rest upon a spongy cushion of chamber instruments—and blows them out until they pull apart. Sympathy is a vision of music as free-flowing as air.
Pop records written with this kind of academic rigor are rare. Herbst studied composition at Bard with new-music heavyweights like Zeena Parkins and Marina Rosenfeld; later, she was an artist-in-residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, and she has written a short opera. At the same time, she’s identified as someone who "loves listening to loud, simple, unabashed, healing pop music."
Sympathy gets its meadowy textures from violin and viola, undistorted electric guitar, steadying piano, and vibraphone; loosely woven background vocals evoke both the pointillist harmonies of '60s girl groups and the contrapuntal clockworks of Meredith Monk. But it’s not always so dulcet. Major- and minor-key passages pivot into dissonant drones and unstable frequencies. The album resembles the quieter moments of Julia Holter’s Ekstasis and Loud City Song, and it also brings to mind Julianna Barwick’s Nepenthe. But Herbst’s adventurous arrangements and occasionally white-knuckled sonics set it apart from Barwick’s more genial sound, and Herbst is less influenced by the pop standards and densely imagistic narratives that drive Holter’s music.
Ultimately, Herbst’s voice is the main attraction. It is the first sound you hear, in fact, a clear soprano wreathed in natural reverb: "I wait for you." Embodied with the language of romantic yearning, her voice provides the through-line that holds the record together, whether foregrounded in soaring cadenzas or multi-tracked into dazzling, kaleidoscopic arrays.
Thematically, Sympathy follows an arc so faint it might as well be traced in sand, one that takes us from desire to fullness, from "I wait for you" to "Hallelujah." Her images are both hyper-specific and deeply symbolic, overdetermined by centuries of song: wilting willows, stardust, a golden fleece. The haunting "Love Song" offers only nonsense syllables punctuated by a few concrete phrases: "blue zero," "electricity," "I am yours." It feels like a snapshot of the mind/body divide: blood pumping through the veins, current zapping through the central nervous system, the occasional flash of language.
Herbst’s lyrics frequently take the shape of mantras or koans, but she seems aware that language has its expressive limitations. The text of "Home" is just five words long ("Stay with him/ I’m home") and the closing "Hymn" even shorter: "Hallelujah! Blood and water." But words on the page are hardly the point. The magic is in the way she embodies them—in the idea of breath incarnate. In repetition, they take on the weight of ritual, and as she extemporizes, she frees the voice from the shackles of speech. The bulk of "Home" is an extended, wordless cadenza that loops in the air like a bird, only to finally alight on the phrase, "I’m home."
"I have recently been trying to build rhythms by imitating the way that light reflects on walls or leaves reflect on the ground," Herbst told an interviewer in 2012; "constant fluctuation, random but with a sense of purpose and believability. I seek to make organic rhythms with an internal logic even if that logic is not obvious or straightforward." In Sympathy, that takes the form of tidal forces: phrases imperceptibly speeding and slowing, and glassy depths turning roiled and opaque. "Over to the sea!" she cries in "Fleece", and in "Falling", she points to "phosphorescence floating… love as debris." In "Da Void", she addresses the sea and her lover as one being: "Your eyes/ Your tides/ Breathing/ You still/ Water I want to hear you breathing." Strings swell, and a fingerpicked guitar sends ripples across the surface. It’s so beautiful it’s almost frightening, a sneakily sweet treatise upon the sublime. There’s nothing to do but sigh.


The fabled noise-rock outfit paint an ugly world on their second post-reunion release, but they have never sounded freer or more purposeful.

Immaculada High

The fabled Austin noise rock band Cherubs have always had a close relationship, imagined or otherwise, to hard drugs. Their 1994 release Heroin Man earned them a permanent cult following with the same people that worshipped The Jesus Lizard, Butthole Surfers, and Cows. Their new label, Relapse, cheerfully characterizes them as drug music for drug people. The video for “18 the Number,” a track off their new album Immaculada High, is a choppy, mutated trip down memory lane, and won’t help dispel that well-worn association. But flying high or not, Cherubs has never sounded more lucid or purposeful.
Perhaps this has something to do with their 20-year hiatus, or the reasons behind it. Heroin Man is famously a record for and about Dave DeLuna, a close friend of the band who died of a heroin overdose. Its cover depicts a man facedown in a bathtub. The band broke up following a pre-show brawl in San Diego the night before its release. Despite its place in the noise-rock canon, moving on from Heroin Man was probably necessary for survival, for the art and for the artists.
Immaculada High, the band’s fourth studio album and fifth overall, is a larger leap from the band’s early years than their last reunion effort, 2 YNFYNYTY. Kevin Whitley’s syrup-thick guitar is as punishingly beautiful as ever, and his lyrics, sacrilege as it may be for the genre, verge on audible, thanks to production from Erik Wofford (My Morning Jacket, Explosions in the Sky). And even if Whitley’s words aren’t about the epidemic of drug overdoses that swept their once-sleepy Austin hometown in the mid-’90s, they’re still inherently fatalistic. Across 11 tracks, Cherubs paints an ugly world—pigs in filth, hissing insects and serpents—to convey the anxiety of inevitable death: not just their own, but of all of humanity. “This recording feels like the soundtrack to a movie about Mother Nature exacting dark revenge on the nasty homo sapiens,” reads the band’s only comment thus far on the album.
“I like being doomed with you/Life is better slipping through your fingers,” a resigned Whitley wails on “Full Regalia.” On the opener, “Turista,” Whitley looks at himself as if detached from his own body: “Give it a home/But barely a home.” “We’re just passing through!” he yells. As with the double meaning in the song title—either a tourist or the type of diarrhea that afflicts some of them—this can be read two ways: a realization of his own mortality, or, as read in the context of the rest of the album, a eulogy for a dying planet.
The record’s lead single, the crawling, crumbling “Sooey Pig,” is a tug-of-war between the prettier side that Cherubs hinted at on 2 YNFYNYTY and the wall-of-noise past they can’t escape. Sub-two-minute shredders like “18 the Number” and “Pacemaker,” both underscored by Prager pummeling his tom-toms, reveal that Cherubs is just as content to make noise as ever, and that growing older doesn’t mean getting softer. Immaculada High is simultaneously the band’s most accessible and its most bombastic release.
In Immaculada High’s closer, “Nobodies,” Whitley croons for nearly two minutes: “Up, up they float,” he sings. He could be singing about the tense legacy of Heroin Man, or merely our inevitable shuffle off this mortal coil. Whatever the reason, he has never sounded more free. Those are the spoils of moving on.


The Notwist's first full-length since 2008's The Devil, You + Me is their first for Sub Pop. On it, the German electronic band's identity feels increasingly cloudy.

Close to the Glass

The Notwist do a good job of shrinking into the shadows, making it feel like they could stop doing all this and drift away without any kind of announcement or farewell note. On hooking up with Sub Pop for their first full-length album since The Devil, You + Me in 2008, the label made such a big deal that it felt positively un-Notwistian. This is a band that operates without fanfare, favoring the periphery over the spotlight. Even their brightest moment—the elevation in stature following the release of the gorgeous Neon Golden in 2002—led to more than half a decade of inactivity prior to its follow-up. The Notwist may feel like they know how to disappear completely, but there's a weight of expectation when news of resumed activities comes through, a sense that a return to the bittersweet sentiment of "Chemicals" or "Pick Up the Phone" could be careering around the bend.
At their peak this is a band that can make disparate feelings feel positively orderly, with singer Markus Acher's approach emotional yet strangely distant, resembling someone trying to open up but keeping a handful of key thoughts to themselves. In theory the Notwist should be a big mess, with nascent thrashings in hardcore circles, attempts at bridging technology and indie-rock long before Thom Yorke tripped over a sampler, and Acher's non-voice floating along on top of it all. Instead, like all bands who've had at least one Neon Golden moment in their careers, they have a way of making it seem remarkably uncomplicated, establishing this as a space they inhabit alone despite the legions of laptop-tapping acts with an ear for pop melody, some of whom seeped deeper into the public consciousness than the Notwist will presumably ever do at this point.
Initially things seemed promising for Close to the Glass. Releasing the title track with its detuned beats underpinned by familiarly fussy electronics and Acher subsumed somewhere in the middle of it all was a smart move, resembling the kind of dubbed-out pop structures Margaret Fielder was practicing with her band Laika circa their excellent Silver Apples of the Moon. Better still was the release of "Kong", which comes stamped through with a forthright guitar clang, irresistible organ drone, and Acher hitting some wavering high notes not dissimilar to J Mascis' falsetto. It's this album’s equivalent of "Day 7" from Shrink—finding the spot where their brainiac approach merges perfectly with their fondness for abandon, resulting in a catchy moment that's a far better realization of their anthemic tendencies than similar efforts from The Devil, You + Me.
There's a sense of confidence installed by placing "Close to the Glass" and "Kong" early in the tracklisting, although what follows never gets back there. The drop in quality isn't sharp—instead it's like watching a group of people kicking around a ball that's slowly deflating. There's an acoustic campfire misfire ("Casino"), Nick Drake wistfulness ("Steppin' In"), an attempt at Kevin Shields' glide-guitar sound that feels like it was regurgitated from a dusty old rehearsal tape from the mid-90s ("7-Hour-Drive"), and a go-nowhere instrumental that quickly crosses the line from Eno-esque beauty to boredom ("Lineri"). It would be a little cruel to hold up the title of "From One Wrong Place to the Next" as symbolic of where the second half of Close to the Glass ends up; instead, there is no sense of place at all, just a series of loose strands that never reach a point of cohesion.
A version of Shrink was released on Stereolab's Duophonic label when it initially surfaced, and it's easy to trace links between the approach and trajectory of both bands—both fascinated by the meeting point between pop and technology, both keen to maintain an emotional distance from their audience, both quietly working away with little regard for reception. Arguably Stereolab's later career produced more uneven results than their earlier work, and it feels like the Notwist are in that phase now, where change comes off as forced and unnecessary, and the bigger picture of the band's identity becomes increasingly cloudy. There was always a tendency to divert into different styles on their prior albums (at least from 12 onward), but always with a feel of continuity underpinning it all, as if each path they took was firmly routing off the same road. Here, their razor-sharp sense of direction feels strangely blunted.


As you read this, there are likely a number of people in your midst summoning up all the backlash powers ...

Turn On the Bright Lights

As you read this, there are likely a number of people in your midst summoning up all the backlash powers their mortal frames can bear, those who believe the boys from Interpol to be the latest shock troops in the battle of PR style over artistic substance. And who can blame them? After the veritable shitstorm of publicity drummed up by a certain New York City band-- one that had the audacity to not be the denim-clad messiahs of rock and roll we'd been promised-- directing a little skepticism toward NYC's buzzmongers is probably healthy. Plus, at a glance, Interpol's snazzy suits and expensive haircuts seem symptomatic of a carefully spun image designed purely to separate money from wallets. It's okay to be suspicious.
But back up. These guys are on Matador, not RCA. The hypester division of Matador is a guy in a closet (and he's only part-time); the 'spin' budget for Interpol wouldn't even be a down-payment on Julian Casablancas' designer leather jacket. The fact that these guys see press at all can only be attributed to their die-hard contingent of fans (I'm only recently converted), and was earned purely through legwork and a handful of underpublicised EPs. And now that they've won our attention, after three years of toiling in obscurity, it's mere icing that their debut full-length delivers upon what the whispers only hinted at.
Interpol's debut full-length is wrought with emotional disconnection and faded glory, epic sweep and intimate catharsis. Inevitably, the hype exceeds return (that's why it's hype-- and, to be fair, Interpol has largely flown under the radar compared to most other NYC acts), but there's no getting around that Turn On the Bright Lights is an incredibly powerful and affecting album. Loss, regret, and a minor key brilliantly permeate jangling guitars and rhythmic and tonal shifts-- and although it's no Closer or OK Computer, it's not unthinkable that this band might aspire to such heights.
Speaking of Closer, Interpol can't seem to shake being likened to Factory prodigies Joy Division. The cause, however, isn't necessarily evident. Indeed, Daniel Kessler's sublime, angular downstrokes follow the smooth confidence of Carlos Dengler's basslines, and Paul Banks sings with Ian Curtis' downcast delivery and dramatic flair. The difference, however, lies in the music itself: what Joy Division played was sparse and jagged-- punk with a melancholy, but often minimalist bent. Interpol, meanwhile, are punk in ethic alone; their music bears few of that genre's signatures, with the band instead immersing themselves in a grander, more theatrical atmosphere with lush production that counters their frustrated bombast.
"I will surprise you sometimes/ I'll come around/ When you're down," Banks gently affirms over echo-drenched guitar simplicity and rolling bass, as "Untitled" hovers on artificial strings to open Bright Lights. The words are plaintive yet assertive, in agreement with the unsteady warble of the background, and they set the tone for an album that is equally paradoxical-- often bleak, but surprisingly uplifting. Each of the album's eleven tracks evoke raw, unsettling need suffused with delicate serenity. It can be difficult to absorb this much emotional relentlessness, as Banks unflinchingly confronts you with it at all times, but it's precisely this challenge that makes this record so staggering.
The visceral punch of the thematic content is backed at every turn by melody among serrated riffs and amorphous percussion. Discussing the highs and lows of Bright Lights would just be splitting hairs, given its consistency, but a few tracks stand inches above the others. Of the two songs to be carried over from their self-titled EP, "NYC"'s conflicted show of conditional love for the streets of Interpol's hometown is still one of the most brilliant cuts present. And as tight as the EP was, Interpol show how much more they're capable of with "Obstacle 1" and "The New," the range between which is striking. "Obstacle 1" is as close to Joy Division as Interpol gets, coupling harsh, restrained outbursts of aggression with disturbing imagery as Banks clearly gasps, "You'll go stabbing yourself in the neck." The tense lead guitar is a counterpoint, giving these explosive bursts added depth, just as Ian Curtis' emotional collapses were made more poignant by the fragile guitar that cradled them. By the time the album reaches "The New," the anger has dissipated, leaving only the calm sound of sober acceptance.
The tragedy of music press is that when the buzz spirals out of control, people are apt to question a great band's validity, whereas if the band went largely unknown and was 'discovered' independently, so to speak, folks would be less likely to reject the praise out of hand. Whether that will happen with Interpol remains to be seen, but as a member of the press, it's my duty to tell you, from one music fan to another, what I personally think of an album, and in this case, it's that Turn On the Bright Lights has been one of the most strikingly passionate records I've heard this year. That other people I've spoken with have the opportunity to experience it, and that they feel similarly about it, can only be a good thing.


On her second album, the Welsh electronic musician leans into both her loops and her lyrics, seeking something spiritual in the act of repetition.

Inner Song

Few artists are as adept at fusing electronic music’s warmth and coldness as Kelly Lee Owens. What makes Owens’ work so distinctive is her equal proficiency as a songwriter and producer; her vocals are as confident and captivating as her beats. Inner Song, her second album, boasts a variety of styles, floating between tight pop structures and extended club grooves. What ties the record together is her unusual ability to join the physical with the emotional.
Straight-up techno bangers, like “Night” and “Melt!,” juxtapose the ethereal calmness of Owens’ voice with the commanding presence of a throbbing bassline. Dancefloor tracks like “Jeanette” are more intense than on Owens’ first record, with driving synths over hard, unfailing kick drums. She occasionally approaches R&B territory: “Re-Wild” is slow and pulsating, as waves of her voice cascade over a grinding beat. “On” weaves an introspective style somewhere between dream pop and trip-hop into a long and vibrating rhythm, without a seam to be seen. Even on the tracks that veer toward more conventional pop structure, pockets of experimentation still exist—on “L.I.N.E.” her voice trails off and fades away, leaving nothing behind but a simple synth sequence.
Owens’ self-titled debut album played with sounds that felt spiritual, almost new age, like the tablas on “S.O.” and sitar drone on “8.” On Inner Song, that meditative quality comes less from instrumental texture and more from the actual form of the songs. Though she drifts across tempos and dabbles with a variety of drum patterns, loops—both instrumental and lyrical—provide the record’s through line. On “Wake-Up,” life’s circular patterns are made explicit: “Wake up/Repeat again/Again.” Owens writes with clarity and simplicity, using her own voice as something like a synthesizer, processing a phrase and then repeating it as she sings subtle variations in timbre and tone. Her lyrics are, in their own quiet way, a celebration of the pleasures of solitude and self-love.
The unexpected opening track, a wordless cover of Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” offers a sort of formal thesis statement. Owens’ interpretation emphasizes the Steve Reich-like qualities of Jonny Greenwood’s guitar line, stretching it into an undulating synthesizer pattern. Forgoing vocals, she distills the song’s harmonic essence, stripping it down to emphasize a single part of the whole, evoking a state of trance-like contemplation until a jittery breakbeat crashes through.
The framework of Owens’ sound may be familiar now, but plenty still  surprises—particularly an appearance from fellow Welshman John Cale on “Corner of My Sky.” Like so many of her songs, the track swirls a handful of chilly synthesizers as it imperceptibly rises toward a fully embodied emotional climax that reaches for the sublime. Cale’s fragile, weathered voice lends a different texture from that of the album’s other tracks, though its underlying production is similar in tone. Toward the end of the song, Cale sings in Welsh, and it feels almost as if Owens is speaking through him to conjure the landscape of their homeland. Throughout, Cale’s words spin in mantra-like loops, becoming one with the programmed sounds that surround them.
For Owens, loops—both electronic and lyrical—are a grounding presence, like a chant uttered in a meditative state: a simple phrase or pattern that functions as a conduit to another world. With Inner Song, Owens seeks to take the listener to a place of healing, finding solace in the shelter of a repeated chord progression.

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After 17 years, Wolfgang Voigt returns to his GAS moniker with a new album of unsettling and symphonic ambient music that has become deeper, richer, and more luxurious.

Narkopop

In the year 2000, Wolfgang Voigt released Pop, his fourth album of ambient music under the name GAS. At the time, it wasn’t entirely clear that there needed to be a fifth. It’s not that Voigt had run out of ideas. The three prior GAS full-lengths Voigt had released since 1996 had focused mostly on drone-laden synth washes, dark and swirling samples of Wagnerian strings, and a deep, insistent, and often disconcertingly fast 4/4 kick drum that did nothing to signify “relaxation.” Pop’s sonic universe—a natural world rendered in an eerily synthetic manner—was actually the outlier of his discography at that time, a sharp left turn after four years of steady, incremental progression. The fact that GAS seemingly ended on such a strong and radically different note lent the record the feeling of punctuation: It seemed as though there could be nothing else on the other side of the Pop’s hard stop.
But here we are 17 years later, and Voigt has returned with a fifth GAS full-length, Narkopop. Like so many musical projects that seem to end on a high note, GAS has only grown in stature in its absence. In the years since Pop, GAS has become an ambient touchstone, and Voigt has become one of a small handful modern artists—see Fennesz, Oval, Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker—who put a personal stamp on the music as distinctive as Brian Eno’s. Though Voigt has kept busy releasing various solo and collaborative projects and running Kompakt (the label he owns with Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape), GAS never quite left the frame, and Voigt seems to recognize its iconic stature, given the release of two box sets and a the well-received GAS shows he’s put on over the last decade. Perhaps there was, after all, a sense of unfinished business. Narkopop doesn’t precisely pick up where things left off (there’s nothing here that sounds like Pop’s alternative Earth), but it does add another chapter to the story, with deeper, richer, and more luxurious sound that feel appropriate given GAS’ place in the ambient firmament.
Narkopop’s textural range approaches 1998’s Königsforst, as it mixes pure drone, symphonic grandeur, and industrial clang, but it goes even further into the realm of evocative film music. Angelo Badalamenti’s score to Mulholland Drive seems to be a particular inspiration, and the tense crawl of Narkopop’s opening track (as with almost all GAS tracks, these are distinguished only with numbers) almost has to be a direct reference to the film’s main theme. Narkopop is also the most “live”-feeling of the GAS records—not because it seems like the result of improvisation but because, no matter where you are hearing it, you imagine these tracks playing in a vast room, or maybe an airplane hangar. Cavernous reverb is a constant, and the tracks are layered with the kind of hiss and electronic noise that bring to mind the frighteningly high noise floor of a massive sound system waiting to explode. Where the kick drum appears, it becomes a tool for sketching out the dimensions of the imaginary space. “Narkopop 5”’s rhythm is alarmingly martial, like it comes from a sinister marching band circling around the interior edges of a warehouse. “Narkopop 9” adds an extra octave to the lower end, giving the anchor beat a deep physicality to contrast with the deeply romantic string melodies. And sometimes the space is inverted, but it takes you on a trip just the same: The bass pulse on the more muted “Narkopop 2” brings to mind not walls but a rib cage, suggesting an interior journey.
There’s no major reinvention here, but the sheer scale of Narkopop feels bigger and richer than what came before. GAS’ origins can be traced to the raw dub techno coming out of Berlin in the early and mid-’90s. Basic Channel were taking dance music and stripping it bare, to where a bass drum and a bit of echo might be all that’s left of a given track. Voigt rebuilt dub techno from the ground up, filling in the empty spaces with drones and classical touches but keeping the tension of the pulse. If early GAS felt homemade, a snapshot of where bedroom production was in the ’90s, this record sounds expensive, the product of someone with the time and resources to get every sound just so. It takes the basic grainy GAS approach and blows up the crude raw materials to a sparkling 70mm, an epic ready to be projected onto the wall of a canyon.
But despite its grand gestures, the great triumph of GAS is that the feelings the project evokes are hard to name. The music of Narkopop can be meditative, but there’s always something unsettling lingering beneath—it’s about shaking something loose rather than easing us into serenity. The arrangements imply “drama,” but it’s all of a nonspecific type, a blurry scene those details are just out of reach. So while a given track might feel ominous or uplifting, it always stops just short of manipulation. The music carves out a space that always leaves plenty of room for the music’s most important component, the one that, in this artistic sphere, ultimately determines what it all means: the listener.


On their remarkable third album, the New Orleans band pushes their sound to both its bleakest and its sweetest brinks. Pop, disco, and house all melt into their raucous, revolutionary glam punk.

Endure

In a big enough mosh pit, the world jostles loose. You enter the pit as one person, and you leave as someone else. The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz described this transformation as a portal in his 2009 book Cruising Utopia. “I remember the sexually ambiguous punk clubs of my youth where horny drunk punk boys rehearsed their identities, aggressively dancing with one another and later lurching out, intoxicated, to the parking lot together,” he wrote. “For many of them, the mosh pit was not simply a closet; it was a utopian subcultural rehearsal space.” In the squall of the music, reality starts to split and curl. Through communal, friendly violence, punks build muscle memory of what it’s like to feel unhinged and cared for at the same time. The thrash of bodies clears a channel, however fleeting, into a more survivable life.
Special Interest drill down into that same molten core. Across three ferocious albums, the New Orleans band traces the line where the thirst for a new world meets the rage that torches the old one. Lit up and led by searingly charismatic singer Alli Logout, they call out the stakes of the era as they see them, excoriating gentrifiers, cops, warmongers, and trust-fund art-school kids with keenly tuned sneers. Songs about bracing for revolution brush up against songs about great sex on great drugs. Running on the tireless engine of Ruth Mascelli’s clattering drum machine, they follow in a legacy of queer perturbations from the ’80s and ’90s that include Coil, Frankie Knuckles, and the B-52’s—all of whom, in their own way, worked with the same mix of political dissatisfaction, biting humor, and erotic fantasy. On their third album, Endure, Special Interest push their sound to both its bleakest and its sweetest brinks. Pop, disco, and house all melt into their reliably raucous glam punk, and questions of communal caretaking press against a grief-riddled apocalyptic outlook. This time around, their thorns drip with honey.
Across Endure, Special Interest embellish the cornerstones they established on 2018’s Spiralling and 2020’s The Passion Of with gestures that wouldn’t sound out of place on ’90s radio. The after-dark sounds of house and techno started spilling onto commercial daytime airwaves toward the end of the last millennium, many of them drifting onto the Top 40 from overseas in the pan-flash genre called Eurodance. Logout stretches into certain vocal timbres and minor-key intervals that echo the perfect, ephemeral dance pop of a group like La Bouche, while behind their voice, delicate piano lines fringe the band’s hard-driving foundation. These shifts clear more air around Special Interest’s sound. While certain moments still feel immediate and unignorable, others seem to waft out from a club’s open back door, beckoning passersby to come take a closer look.
The album’s most compelling songs use both strategies in tandem. They invite you to wander in of your own accord, then enclose you inside a fever pitch. On the rollicking dance track “(Herman’s) House,” Special Interest forge an incandescent call to anger out of a surging hook. The song shares its name with a 2012 documentary about the imaginative collaboration between artist Jackie Sumell and activist Herman Wallace, a member of the Black Panther Party who spent 41 years in solitary confinement after serving a life sentence for a murder he denied committing. From his tiny cell, Wallace described his dream house to Sumell, who rendered it via computer graphics and as a tabletop model. In 2013, Wallace finally stepped out of prison, then died of cancer three days later. Sumell made plans to build the house he described to her as a youth community center in New Orleans, but property developers bought the proposed land out from under her.
The story ends bitterly, but Special Interest find solace in the idea of projecting utopia out from hell. “Build it out like Herman’s house,” Logout screams at the chorus over Nathan Cassiani’s jaw-clenched bassline. “We’ll all be Basquiats for five minutes or Hermans for life/So when I say build I mean dream, because that’s all we got promised,” they command in a spoken-word breakdown just before the final refrain. In a recent Quietus interview, Logout illuminated the juxtaposition between the Black queer artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and Wallace: “It’s two different sides of what being Black in America is. You’re either fully idolized and destroyed, or you’re thrown in a cage.”
Special Interest began writing Endure in the middle of 2020, in the wake of uprisings against police killings that stirred cities around the world. Across the insistent drumbeat spikes of “Concerning Peace,” the band bemoans the whittling down of those revolutionary impulses into a neoliberal mold of nonviolent personal enrichment: “Liberal erasure of militant uprising is a tool of corporate interest and a failure of imagination,” goes a call-out line reminiscent of the interjections on System of a Down’s “Prison Song.” Over Maria Elena’s frothing, sidelong guitar chords, the band’s voices come together for the chant-along chorus, where they collectively quote the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael: “We are not concerned with peace/Peace is not of our concern.” Power disguises its own violence as the natural order of things; to call for violence in retaliation clarifies the terms of a smiling oppressor. “No one will ever rest in peace/When their value is less than property,” Logout seethes, pillorying commentators who expressed more concern over broken store windows than the lives of Black people killed by police.
Endure howls against a capitalist regime that feeds on the neglect and death of sidelined and exploited human beings, both in the U.S. and globally. This system is fragmented enough to work in the shadows; long threads connect military activity in the Middle East and the gas that seeps out of the pump at the 7-Eleven, but they’re obscured enough that whoever’s gripping the handle won’t typically feel them. On “Kurdish Radio,” Special Interest draw an explicit line between oil lurking under the sands of contested territory and the lives lived in American cities. “Is love like Arab oil?/Do we take take take till it’s depleted?” Logout sings. Later in the song, they overlay crude oil with blood staining the streets of New Orleans, as if to suggest that connecting local struggle to a global network makes for a start. At the climax of “Concerning Peace,” Logout calls out the names of metropolises across the world, tethering them together as sites of both historic disinvestment and revolutionary potential.
Amid calls to destroy every kind of cage, Special Interest stay attuned to what might sprout from the ashes. The music video for “Midnight Legend,” a sweetly melodic dance track whose single version features a verse from Mykki Blanco, follows a group of clubgoers through a messy night out. They flip off a handsy bouncer, ingest a few too many drugs, argue with exasperated bartenders, and get kicked out of the bathroom in the middle of a gay threesome. This club houses little of the utopia the dancefloor can sometimes tease; all night, it plays host to low-grade, aggravating conflict. Then the dancers spill out into the morning light. As passersby hustle their way to work, three of the clubgoers sync up for an impromptu dance routine. The people who have just woken up scowl at those who have been up all night. But the dancers look at each other and beam. Their movements reassure each other that they have each other’s backs even if no one else does. Under the new sun, they practice another world inside the cracks of this one.
The album rolls to a close with the slow-burning “LA Blues,” a song that sheds its skin multiple times over the course of its eight minutes. It starts with a handful of neighborhood scenes and a repeated falsetto taunt: “If you don’t like it you can fuck right off/Them boys in blue don’t come around on this block.” In the third verse, Logout’s gaze turns inward. They ruminate on the end of a relationship, approaching a state of tenderness but quickly diverting it with a sarcastic “boo hoo,” then looping back to the bitterly laughing chorus. But as the song rolls on, as the one-two step of the drumbeat and the guitar’s sour roar refuse to slow or pause, Logout dives deeper. The song boils into a dirge; Logout interrogates God in the wake of an immeasurable loss, their voice strained and cracking. As they hold their grief in its fullness, the song changes again, turning anthem-like, and Logout parts the curtains on a formerly hidden outlook. “The end of the world is just a destination/I had to grow to love/Yes and now I know I’m not unworthy of love,” they conclude, their voice warm and open, defenses scattered on the ground. If this world is barrelling toward a cliff, if there’s an unavoidable terminus square in our path, maybe we should try to love like we did at the beginning.


Though it’s undermined by its inertia and lack of focus, Offset’s solo debut offers glimpses of the rapper as a compelling storyteller and bluesman.

Father of 4

Before Quavo was a huncho, he was a doubter. “How long you think we gonna last?” the Migos member asked a journalist in 2014. The question feels quaint in a world where politicians dab and Beyoncé raps about Pateks and Lamborghinis. But that lasting whiplash, that nagging proximity to life before fame, is the essential Migos experience. Their tagline, “YRN,” is a boast, a thanksgiving, and a punchline all at once: Young, wealthy, and black? In America? Shit, I’d have my doubts too.
Their two blockbuster albums, 2017’s Culture and 2018’s Culture II, downplayed that sense of culture shock by framing the group’s rise as a long-awaited coronation. But for Offset, the jet lag hasn’t worn off. Tinged with paranoia, shame, and anxiety, his debut solo album Father of 4 depicts the murkier side of the group’s ascent. Though it’s ultimately undermined by its inertia and lack of focus, the record offers glimpses of Offset as a compelling storyteller and bluesman.
In public and private, Offset has had the rockiest ride of all the Migos. From his untimely jail bids to his stormy courtship, marriage, and separation from Cardi B, he’s felt the white-hot intensity of the spotlight and the coldness of its absence. This turbulence has come to define his style, the tortured menace to Quavo’s glossy cool and Takeoff’s stoned zen. Rapped in choppy barks, his flexes shine and cast shadows, invoking losses alongside the gains. “I bring that pain and that rough side that some people are scared to go on,” he’s summarized. Dovetailing with his admiration of Cardi, who excels at navigating fame, this newfound confidence has emboldened him to open up.
Father of 4 is, at best, a proof of concept. Offset is so naturally guarded and private that he approaches his life nervously and obliquely. The title track, an apology to his four children by four women, is elusive and compressed. As he mentions his kids by name, he’s so audibly uncomfortable it feels like he’s on death row. He uses Auto-Tune to make his voice wobble and fizzle and ends up somewhere between a yelp and a moan. His apology to his daughter Kalea is so concise it’s vivid. “In the pen when she pushed you out,” he says of her birth. This split-screen storytelling, always emphasizing distance and closeness, allows him to trade linear narrative for a montage. He toggles between images so abruptly that you feel the spaces between them.
That jerkiness is Offset’s default mode. Songs like “Red Room” and “How Did I Get Here” have the unsettling discontinuity of the memory elevator in Inception. The deeper he goes, the more his memories bleed into each other. “How I’m supposed to take it?/Niggas dyin ‘round the same time I had a baby,” Offset raps. When done right, that juxtaposition of success and pain adds ballast to his flexes, as on his Cardi tribute “Don’t Lose Me.” Alluding to Cardi’s storied self-reliance, he recalls his early appreciation of her wrist. “First time I seen the Patek glisten/They did not believe the vision,” he coos with satisfaction. He sounds so dismayed at his loss you get the sense that he too was a nonbeliever.
When Offset isn’t as focused, the record feels directionless. “North Star” shifts from aimless verses about Offset’s life on the north side of Atlanta to a painfully goofy Cee-Lo feature about being the North Star. “Legacy” sounds like a Without Warning outtake and has a distracting amount of filler. “I’m from the jungle, I’m an animal,” Offset raps as if he’s explaining a failed round of charades. The familiarity of many of the rhyme schemes and hooks sinks otherwise interesting verses. Offset tends to build songs line by line, which is great for finding the unique sounds and images that Migos thrives on (“Raindrops/Drop tops”), but not as conducive to the introspection that the record strives for. For every line about passing on money to his kids or fixing his broken family, there’s three that slip into overdone clichés: hopping out the Lamb, chugging lean, flashing the Piguet. Offset takes the stage alone, but he still moves like Migos.
It doesn’t help that the production is static too. While Marquee producers Metro Boomin and Southside provide the bulk of the beats, they feel reined in. Instead of the eerie guitar loops, wild synth fills, and organ arpeggios of their past work, the default here is bass-heavy tracks with muted chords and lone snare strikes. This gives Offset plenty of space to scrawl in his looping verses, but he generally sounds far too comfortable. The Quavo-featuring “On Fleek” is so on-brand it hurts. “Clout” squanders the optics of Cardi and Offset collaborating post-breakup for generic jabs at attention-seekers.
Father of 4 ultimately works as a solo outing because Offset is such a force of nature, but it’s too often cautious where it could be candid, or dull where it should be sharp. Still, the record is a progression for Offset and for Migos. Fueling the group’s trademark excess is a serious distrust of the carceral state and celebrity, a tension that can only intensify as they climb the charts recounting the lives they left behind. When that dissonance is given proper context, their rags to riches tales feel like vibrant portraits more than gilded myths.


The Los Angeles trio steps fully into their role as pop stars and mentors, offering gentle instructions for falling in love, dusting yourself off, and joyfully living your truth.

MUNA

When they were still signed to a major, MUNA felt conflicted. As guitarist and producer Naomi McPherson put it to the New York Times recently, “At RCA, we were like, ‘We’re staying true to ourselves, we’re going to make interesting, indie-pop music, we’re not here to make hits.’” Guitarist Josette Maskin has described the disconnect of working with a label that didn’t always know “exactly what to do” with a queer band making proudly, outwardly queer music. But after RCA dropped the group and Phoebe Bridgers signed them to her Saddest Factory imprint, they’re making not only the most interesting music of their career, but also the most unabashedly pop. On their self-titled third album, MUNA step fully into their role as pop stars and mentors, offering gentle instructions for falling in love, dusting yourself off, and joyfully living your truth.
The trio’s trajectory from alt-pop to gleaming songs inspired by 2000s radio pop comes without sacrificing any of their identity. In their new videos, they pay homage to the Y2K queer satire But I’m a Cheerleader, go line-dancing, and wear drag. Lead singer and songwriter Katie Gavin recently told Pitchfork, “There have been moments where it feels like we’re almost doing a drag performance of being pop stars.” In their camp paparazzi chase video for “What I Want,” that’s exactly what they do, donning the skin-tight sequins, side-swept bangs, and tank tops of early-aughts tabloid icons. Yet there’s a distinct lack of irony to the full-hearted pop performance they give on MUNA.
This new era debuted in the form of summer-crush song “Silk Chiffon,” a collaboration with a pink-haired Bridgers whose breezy hook—“Life’s so fun, life’s so fun”—captures a joy so fleeting it can scarcely be believed. Another resplendent single, “Home by Now,” adopts the perennial real-estate tagline to indulge in post-breakup ruminations about what could have been. The hard-hitting, hedonistic “What I Want” is what lead singer Gavin has described as “an adult coming out.” Amid defiant lyrics about downing shots and dancing freely in a gay bar, the song’s explosive desire leaves room to mourn the time you wasted before you knew what you were missing: “I’ve spent way too-too-too many years/Not knowing what/What I wanted…I’m gonna make up for it all at once.”
MUNA shine in this no-holds-barred mode, with boot-stomping percussion and hooks that stick like last night’s glitter. The opening four tracks—with their propulsive beats and repeated lyrical allusions to driving, roller skating, and running—have an irresistible forward motion, culminating in the band’s most ambitious song to date, “Runner’s High.” It wouldn’t sound out of place in a playlist alongside Charli XCX’s Crash or Rina Sawayama’s SAWAYAMA, with its full-throttle drums, strobe-lit choruses, and distant echoes of UK garage nostalgia. Elsewhere, there’s a hyperreal gloss to the unapologetically horny “No Idea” (co-written with Mitski) and a deeply satisfying singalong moment with the backing vocals that fill “Solid.”
It’s not all so full-on. MUNA also indulges in soft-touch country pop—inspired by Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour—and more downbeat, delicate moods, with mixed results. On “Loose Garment,” the album’s strongest ballad, Gavin offers one of the poignant similes that are her calling card: “Used to wear my sadness like a choker, yeah, it had me by the throat/Tonight I feel I’m draped in it, like a loose garment.” She has mastered the technique of turning a single image in her hands so it reflects light from many angles, but the tender country-rock song “Handle Me” lacks a similar level of complexity, and by the time we arrive at the sparse closing track “Shooting Star”—which compares a new crush to a meteor streaking across the sky—the technique begins to feel repetitive. Now that MUNA have nailed this kind of classical pop songcraft, one wonders what they could achieve if they experimented further with structure and form.
That MUNA had to leave a major label before making their most radio-friendly album isn’t necessarily a paradox. Much of the most thrilling recent pop music, like PinkPantheress’ breakthrough TikTok hits, Little Simz’s confessional orchestral rap, or Sawayama’s theatrical pop collages, comes from the margins. MUNA’s celebratory, affirming music benefits from having the space to be true to themselves—space that many artists don’t find under the institutional gaze of a major label. Lyrically and implicitly, MUNA celebrates the freedom to break free of the ways that others see you. “I’m not some kind of minor trope/[...] That’s so derivative,” Gavin sigh-sings on “Kind of Girl.” MUNA no longer feel the need to hold back, nor answer to anyone’s vision but their own.


The songs on This is the Kit's new album, Bashed Out, sound like songwriter Kate Stable's first recordings nearly a decade ago. This time, though, the music is bolder and more purposeful, with a broader, richer palette of sounds.

Bashed Out

This Is the Kit wasn’t the most popular name to appear on Folk Off, the 2006 state-of-freak-folk compilation that pitted US artists (Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective) against their UK counterparts (Vashti Bunyan, Tunng). At the time Kit captain Kate Stables hadn’t even released a debut single, let alone a full album, but that made her an ideal inclusion: a less established artist who could benefit from proximity to more popular names while demonstrating the depth and breadth of the scene. Built around a deftly picked guitar theme and showcasing her earthy vocals, "2 Wooden Spoons" held its own against Stables’ contemporaries. But nearly a decade later—when folk has fully embedded itself in the indie mainstream such that we’ve dropped the "freak" appendage altogether—the song carries very few of the signifiers that might anchor it to that long-past trend.
Stables wears her eccentricities comfortably, whether she's bending an old word into new shapes or displaying a curious sense of professional timing. Sunday Best, the label that released Folk Off, quickly issued her debut 7'', with a full-length debut, Krulle Bol, released a year later. Wriggle Out the Restless followed in 2010, and the folksy austerity of her music caught the ear of Aaron Dessner, who not only signed her to his Brassland label but secured an opening slot for This Is the Kit when the National played New York in 2011. Four years later, Stables is releasing her third album, Bashed Out, which Dessner inevitably produced. This is Slow Music: patiently and carefully handcrafted, as though the process were just as important as the result, and released on her own whim rather than by industry dictate.
These new songs don’t sound terribly different from Stables’ first recordings nearly a decade ago, but the music is bolder and more purposeful, with a broader, richer palette of sounds. Dessner works in a minimalist vein, placing a handful of instruments at various levels in the mix but never locking them into place. A barely audible bassline rocks softly against Stables’ plaintive guitar theme on opener "Misunderstanding". "Silver John" blossoms into a swell of synths (courtesy of Thomas Bartlett a.k.a. Doveman) and builds to a chorus of odd siren vocal calls. There’s a parallax quality to the music, an immersive sense of depth that makes the songs sound larger with each listen.
Even as he expands her range and emphasizes her idiosyncrasies, Dessner wisely stays out of Stables’ way, and she emerges easily as the dominant force on Bashed Out. Her guitar work is nimble but not fussy, and she conjures a sense of nameless menace on closer "Cold and Got Colder". On "Spores All Settling" her banjo playing is almost pointedly rudimentary, emphasizing the present moment rather than the perfect performance. She’s a complex and compelling personality, spiking her folksy whimsy (there’s a song about the smell of mushrooms) with shots of prickly wisdom. "And so the outside, it bashes us in, bashes us about a bit," she sings on the title track, one of the album’s weightiest moments.
For Stables, creating music—or making art of any kind—means bashing right back at life, matching it blow for blow. Yet, this resilient album is less concerned with enduring immense tribulations than it is with enjoying life’s simple pleasures. Stables’ concerns are microcosmically personal, trading in minute details and small observations that provide immense contentment. "Vitamins" is an ode to fresh greens, while "Nits" describes sheep on a hillside as "happy little fatties." Both songs land just this side of unbearably precious, but Stables doesn’t seem to care how such moments strike the listener. After almost a decade presenting herself as This Is the Kit, she has learned to root her music firmly in her own quirks rather than in the demands of any particular genre or trend.


Following 2013’s bludgeoning The Things We Think We’re Missing, the Doylestown, P.A. band returns with a cleaner, efficient, and more stylish sound.

Light We Made

Balance and Composure’s sophomore album The Things We Think We’re Missing could end up being the quintessential document of the new vanguard of old school alt-rock. In the context of its release year, 2013, this kind of aggressive guitar music actually felt like an alternative to something, and it still does. Its fanbase was too young to be embraced as “indie” (read: college) rock, and it lacked the obvious hit single or image necessary to break satellite radio. It was far too artistically and socially considerate to be aligned with the Warped Tour.
Though alternative rock can no longer claim a nation, bands like B&C thrive in a sizable Twitter, Tumblr, and message board underground, where Nirvana is classic rock, Brand New is modern canon, and Neutral Milk Hotel is still a mandatory rite of passage. It’s easy to figure which bands view this space as a final destination and those who are trying to find a bridge towards the mainstream. If you couldn’t tell where Balance and Composure’s ambitions lie with Light We Made, just know this: they’re labelmates with the 1975 now.
But true to form, their advancement is one that adheres to old school alt-rock ideals. Lead single “Postcard” was a surprisingly demure teaser that nonetheless felt like a big reveal, going against just about every formidable strength Balance and Composure had previously established: the riffs here are clean and hypnotic, where before they would bludgeon you into submission. Jon Simmons’ vocals are cloaked and conversational rather than a charred howl. Compared to “Reflection,” a steamroller that foretold the direction The Things We Think, “Postcard” might as well be a Prius: efficient, stylish, aimed at a more mature consumer.
“Postcard” is virtually unrecognizable as Balance and Composure; it bears more than a passing similarity to Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong.” This being 2016 and not 2001, ambitious, young rock bands aren’t really using Radiohead as their North Star (at least not publicly). But for a lot of listeners, a certain era of Radiohead still represents the zenith of alternative rock. Think the late ’90s, maybe half of Amnesiac: a man-machine interface both tech-savvy and tech-wary, while still maintaining the look, feel, and perspective of their angstier early days.
And so, Light We Made isn’t a total rebuild. Aside from a few drum triggers, synth-bass fuzz, and additions to the pedal board, Balance and Composure could play these songs live with their 2013 setup. Simmons gets occasionally chopped, screwed, and Auto-Tuned, texturing vocals that can often lack a personal watermark. More importantly, they underscore the incremental progress of his matured perspective. Simmons still strains to make even the most worn metaphors for physical desire, but B&C manage to create a number of distinct spaces where social anxiety and self-loathing can be tempered with well-meaning amorousness. “Mediocre Love” and “Is It So Much to Adore?” hypnotically churn with startling rhythms, while “Loam” and “Fame” are more inspired takes on the Cure’s latter-day metallurgy.
Balance and Composure are a far more flexible band than they were on The Things We Think We’re Missing, which had one move: repeatedly slamming the listener into Will Yip’s brickwalled production. Yip is back on board and rightfully so, since he oversaw Title Fight’s Hyperview and Turnover’s Peripheral Vision, two of this scene’s most divisive and relatively daring dives into traditional indie rock from 2015. Neither of those bands could completely transmogrify, but the remnants of their putative DNA made each of them stand out—Title Fight’s take on shoegaze had concision and a searing intensity, whereas Turnover’s hybrid of dream-pop guitars and pointed pop-punk lyricism created a legitimately novel hybrid.
The past and present of Balance and Composure can’t manage the same symbiosis. The arresting, trip-hop reverie of opener “Midnight Zone” quickly gives way to nü-bubble grunge singles that are not particularly compelling. Nowhere is the distance between Balance and Composure’s ambitions and abilities more chasmic than on “For a Walk”; it’s not too often you can use the Spawn soundtrack as a reference point, but that’s pretty much their nu-metal/industrial take on the lyrical thrust of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out.”
A few weeks before Light We Made’s release, the band opened up about a series of terrifying van crashes that caused them to put everything on hold for a year and a half. They had remained silent so as to not draw attention to themselves or offer a juicy narrative that had nothing to do with their music. It’s admirable, and it also speaks to a lack of disclosure that pervades Light We Made. As with The Things We Think, it feels like the sound of a curious band still working out how to make music as distinct as its influences; whether lyrically or sonically, they come across as either unknowable or proudly workmanlike. Strangely, as Simmons makes a French exit on “Afterparty,” he sings, “Let your feelings show, it’s easier than you would ever know.” Yet, judging by Light We Made, it’s much harder than he thinks.


After the Britpop gestures and electronic touches of her last two albums, the UK singer-songwriter explores a more pared-back mode that highlights her incisive lyrics.

Big Sigh

Across her last two albums, Marika Hackman has been wresting herself from the dusky, somber folk songs of her 2015 debut, We Slept at Last. On 2017’s I’m Not Your Man, the British singer-songwriter tweaked her palette with nods to ’90s Britpop and a mischievous punk spirit. Hackman’s third full-length, Any Human Friend, was moodier, but still felt like a pointed departure, swapping softly strummed dirges for an electro-pop-rock hybrid along the lines of London’s Field Music and Hot Chip. But then, it all stopped. In 2020, Hackman developed an acute case of writer’s block; it was so paralyzing that she feared she’d never press another track to vinyl. Her new album, Big Sigh, is the result of slowly piecing songs together over the last few years and finding the confidence to helm production for the first time.
Likening the process to cracking into a block of ice, Hackman chipped away at writing Big Sigh with weary determination. Sometimes, the songs cleaved off easily in glistening hunks—but occasionally, you can hear the labor that went into all that chiseling. Acoustic closer “The Yellow Mile” is effortless and demure, its finespun fingerpicking reminiscent of Hackman’s earliest work. Little more than a mingling of guitar and her delicate register, “The Yellow Mile” is an uncluttered canvas where Hackman’s incisive lyrics glint like blades. Chronicling an unhealthy relationship, she likens her stasis within it to that of a wounded bug. “I left my body in your care,” she sings, teasing a happy ending. The hairpin turn that follows is jarring: “You plucked my wings off and I went slack/I was a beetle on my back.” Hackman has always been adept at spiking sweet melodies with venomous couplets, and “The Yellow Mile” is a lean and prickly fusion of those tendencies.
Slow-burner “Vitamins” is from the same playbook, pairing hushed dynamics with gritty imagery. Here, Hackman meddles with the formula, coating her voice in metallic layers and sending the song out on a warped synth arpeggio. “Mum says I’m a waste of skin/A sack of shit and oxygen,” she sings. An electronic chirp cuts through her placid vocal, sounding almost like a dying heart monitor. There is something extremely vulnerable about Hackman’s plainspoken admissions of feeling worthless, a sentiment that’s somehow sharpened by her detached, steely voice.
Big Sigh is notably less poppy than Hackman’s prior two albums, but the most energetic tracks on the record are also its best. “No Caffeine” and “Slime,” both of which were released as singles last year, merge her sober delivery with sly hooks. “Slime,” a callback to the randy songs on Any Human Friend, is an ode to sticky, unfettered sex. What starts as a moody ’90s alternative ballad cracks open to reveal a tart and chewy guitar-pop core. Opener “No Caffeine” shares more DNA with the dramatic Britpop of I’m Not Your Man, stacking strings atop palm-muted guitar and swelling horns. Hackman penned the lyrics as a litany of “cures” for her crushing anxiety—self-written prescriptions for herbal tea, wine, TV, and sleep. As the power chords surge in the chorus, catharsis sets in.
Hackman’s attempts at alt-rock heft don’t always pay off. The title track is sludgy grunge cosplay, slow-moving and a bit dingy. Rather than contrast her voice with unexpected arrangements or intricately plucked strings, Hackman dulls her edge with a sleepy, Nirvana-esque bass riff, oversized electric guitar strums, and vague lyrics. Big Sigh is at its best when Hackman resists these broad-stroke urges, and carves out more precise imagery—whether with a pen or an ice pick.


On Suede's first post-reunion album, Bernard Butler remains absent, but his replacement, Richard Oakes, has an undeniably reinvigorating effect on frontman Brett Anderson. His lyrics strike the balance between decadence and elegance, and seek meaningful, one-on-one connections.

Bloodsports

Given the reliability of 20-year nostalgia cycles, the reunion of Suede-- or, here in litigation-crazy America, the London Suede-- was inevitable. A new Suede album, however, was not. Mere months after the Britpop progenitors embarked upon a well-received greatest hits revue in 2011, frontman Brett Anderson had returned to his decade-long practice of releasing small-scale solo albums, while a concurrent, exhaustive reissue of Suede’s back catalogue seemingly confirmed the reunion’s retrospective impetus. And there was, of course, the nagging question of whether a new album was even necessary. After all, Suede were their generation’s Saturday night soundtrack to being young, being lost, and undergoing all the necessary preparations (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs of dubious origin) to ensure you leave behind a most exquisite corpse. What could Suede offer to their faithful now that, well into their sober 40s, they no longer represent any of these things?
For Bloodsports, their plan is not to simply recapture their past, but imagine an alternate course for it. Like their 2011 tour campaign, Bloodsports employs the band’s post-1995 line-up-- i.e., the one without Anderson’s formative songwriting partner-turned-nemesis, Bernard Butler. In the absence of Butler’s authoritative presence, Suede’s albums sometimes veered toward the slight and frivolous, the tension and bravado that fuelled their definitive singles giving way to a certain self-satisfied complacence. But if the relationship between Anderson and Butler’s replacement, Richard Oakes, was decidedly less tumultuous, on Bloodsports, the guitarist’s presence has an undeniably reinvigorating effect on the singer.
Throughout Bloodsports, Suede consistently strikes the balance between decadence and elegance-- a “world wrapped in tinsel,” swathed in “lipstick traces” and “second-hand furs”-- that marked their signature work. But where Anderson once aligned himself with his fellow misfits, on Bloodsports he’s seeking more meaningful, one-on-one connections. Though it climaxes with a bleacher-baiting gang chorus, the Joshua Tree-toppling salvo “Barriers” is, at its core, an intimate, open-hearted address from someone who wants his relationships to be measured in years rather than nights. And it gets Bloodsports off to a terrifically rousing start; the succeeding “Snowblind” and “It Starts and Ends With You” both come loaded with the sort of do-or-die urgency and knockout choruses to earn retroactive placement on 2010’s Best of Suede compilation.
It’s fitting that Suede are staging their comeback the same month as their patron saint, David Bowie (with whom Anderson famously shared an NME cover back in 1993). But where Bowie spends much of The Next Day sardonically addressing his extended absence and his own mortality, Andrerson hurtles himself into Bloodsports with the stern-faced intent of someone who is grateful to have been granted a second chance and determined not to let it go to waste. And if his outsize passion isn’t enough to push every big-tent ballad over the top (like the middling “Sabotage”) or sell you on the odd underwritten chorus (e.g., “Come on and hit me/ With your mystery”), he keeps the frisson flowing well into Bloodsports’ more atmospheric and despairing second act. As the wide-eyed romanticism heard in the album’s opening stretch gives way to a vicious cycle of emotional dependency (“Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away”), betrayal (the eerily desolate “What Are You Not Telling Me?”), and predatory, restraining-order-worthy behaviour (the ominous “Always”), the band respond with their weightiest, most calamitous music since side two of 1994’s darkly epic Dog Man Star.
But if Bloodsports stays faithful to Suede’s signature sound, it represents a refreshing evolution in spirit. This is not the place to go to indulge your student-disco nostalgia; rather than try to swagger back onto the scene and try to out-snort men half their age, Suede shrewdly draw our attention to those youthful indiscretions-- ego, insecurity, obsession-- that we never seem to outgrow.


Led by charismatic vocalist Alanna Oliver, the Australian rock band draws on vintage references with enthusiasm and pomp, shooting their songs into the stratosphere.

Turn It On!

Romero’s Alanna Oliver spent her post-collegiate years touring Victoria, Australia, with a Blues Brothers tribute band, covering the likes of Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner, doused in more than a little bit of camp. This part of her origin story is a far cry from the scuzzy Melbourne rock scene that her bandmates—Fergus Sinclair, Justin ‘Murry’ Tawil, and brothers Adam and Dave Johnstone—came up in. But that element of virtuosity is also what makes them stand out in a community where attitude is as important as talent.
The sound of Romero’s debut album, Turn It On, feels like a collection of reference points, from the relentless drive of Royal Headache’s power pop to Thin Lizzy’s squealing solos, or even the vintage production effects of the Strokes, had they been born in Dunedin, New Zealand. But their closest analogue is Sheer Mag: Their crunchy guitar tones sound separated at birth, and they’re both referential, throwback rock bands whose charismatic singers occasionally carry them to moments of transcendence. Good taste makes even the most devout reverence more palatable, and Turn It On! plays to their strengths. There’s a satisfying crackle to Adam Johnstone and Fergus Sinclair’s choice in amplifiers, pickups, and pedals, and engineer Andrew ‘Idge’ Hehir places them in a dueling stereo mix, their loud, lo-fi tones battling across the left and right channels.
It’s hard to understate the rejuvenating effect Oliver had on the rest of the band. Drummer Dave Johnstone and guitarist Adam Johnstone had become disillusioned with Melbourne’s scene and were on their way out when they met her. Their old bands, Chillers and Summer Blood, were both jangly garage rock outfits more representative of what you might hear at the Tote, the Melbourne venue at the heart of an independent rock scene that venerates the punk and power pop of the 1970s and ’80s. These were good bands, but they lacked something that was hard to put a finger on—at least until they met Oliver. She wasn’t just removed from the scene—she was relatively unfamiliar with rock music in general.
That outsider POV is what makes Romero sound fresh despite the vintage palette, an injection of earnest enthusiasm and pomp that shoots these songs into the stratosphere. Oliver’s subject matter is largely drawn from people in her life, like the non-committal ex-boyfriend in “Halfway Out the Door” or her cool auntie in “Neapolitan.” Other lyrics offer a glimpse into how she approaches her performance. “Turn It On” is inspired by a remark about Blondie’s Debbie Harry from a documentary—“She just gets on stage and she turns it on”—and while their voices couldn’t be more different, the effect they have on their bands is similar. Oliver can ooze heartache and attitude with equal aplomb, following a soaring vocal run on “Halfway Out the Door” with a cocky strut on the title track. “Turn It On!” is Romero at its most fun—dialing up the camp and cowbell, leaning into “hoo-hoo” harmonies that fall somewhere between a smile and a sneer.
The album’s climax, “Petals,” packs everything great about the band into four minutes: a monster hook, a blistering solo, and a rollercoaster structure that tests the limits of their dynamic range, from the softest hush to Oliver’s most triumphant wail. Her lyrics are incisive and direct: “Don’t tell me what the fuck to do/You know I can’t live alone with you/‘Cause all my petals falling one by one,” she sings, rejecting a cycle of codependence under which she’s slowly wilting.
Romero’s rise has been rapid, scoring a deal with tastemaking Aussie label Cool Death after just a handful of shows. Their debut LP comes on the heels of just three previous songs—the double A-side ‘Honey”/“Neapolitan” and “Troublemaker”—and a head-turning performance at the final Maggot Fest, a long-running showcase of Australia’s best underground guitar bands. While their ascendance has been expeditious, their chemistry is undeniable. Oliver might be an outsider—a ringer, even—but she’s a natural performer leading a band that knows how to have fun. And on Turn It On!, that’s more than enough.