The iconic soundtrack marks the beginning of Angelo Badalamenti’s 30-plus-year creative partnership with David Lynch; torn between terror and ecstasy, it is as full of mystery as his films.

Angelo Badalamenti: Blue Velvet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

There’s a chapter of David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity where he describes the spark of inspiration for Blue Velvet in three simple motifs: “Red lips, green lawns, and the song—Bobby Vinton’s version of ‘Blue Velvet.’ The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.” (It had to be an ear, Lynch explained in a 1987 interview, because it’s an opening—a tiny portal into the vastness of human interiority.) “Blue Velvet” wasn’t really the kind of song Lynch would ordinarily listen to for fun, but something about it spoke to him. It gave him the feeling of being in the middle of a mystery—the same feeling the film’s protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont, describes to his crush/accomplice Sandy at Arlene’s Diner: “I’m seeing something that was always hidden.”
Why, of all songs, “Blue Velvet”? I’m not sure there’s ever a definitive “why” to David Lynch’s creative logic that can be explained beyond “Because it felt right,” but there’s something about Vinton’s 1963 rendition of the song that feels complicated in a way that, say, Tony Bennett’s 1951 version does not. There is a sense of cosmic misalignment between the song’s blithe doo-wop shuffle and its lyrics, which grow increasingly miserable: “And I still can see blue velvet through my tears.” That misalignment—an irreconcilable tension between how things appear and how they feel, creating an atmosphere in which your best navigation tool is your gut—is one way of distilling what people mean by the vague, overused descriptor “Lynchian.” And as Vinton’s recording soundtracks our first glimpses of Lumberton, North Carolina, USA—blue sky, red roses, white picket fence—we get one of the all-time great “Lynchian” scenes. Watering his lawn, a nameless man falls inexplicably to the ground, choking as his all-American terrier laps frantically at the hose spraying wildly in his grasp. Vinton’s voice fades into an anxious rumble as we descend below the manicured lawn and into the hissing, roach-infested soil beneath.
But Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” is not the version that appears on the film’s official soundtrack, recently reissued on vinyl more than 30 years after its release. Instead, it is the hushed, haunted cover performed by Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy Vallens, a lounge singer being held hostage by Frank Booth, a sadomasochistic, amyl nitrate-huffing gangster with a soft spot for torch songs. Rossellini was untrained as a singer, so producer Fred Caruso called in a mostly unknown composer from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn to coach the actress’ performance. Angelo Badalamenti, raised under the influence of his Sicilian father’s opera records and his brother’s jazz, was a former junior high music teacher with some experience writing for other artists, under the name Andy Badale, but he’d never been asked to contribute to a feature film of this magnitude. After a few hours practicing at the piano with Rossellini, Badalamenti presented Lynch with a taped recording. “This is peachy keen,” was Lynch’s delighted response (one that had to be translated to Badalamenti in Brooklyn terms, according to a 2014 interview: “You know, I’m from Bensonhurst—we don’t use those words”). Lynch requested that Badalamenti score Blue Velvet in its entirety—the composer’s big break, and the beginning of his and Lynch’s 30-plus-year collaborative brotherhood.
The first order of business was an original theme, one Lynch could not describe to Badalamenti beyond the phrase “mysteries of love” and the suggestion that it “should be a song that floats on the sea of time.” Lynch had desperately wanted to use a song that had proved prohibitively expensive to license: 4AD supergroup This Mortal Coil’s cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” sung by Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. Waterlogged and alien, the cover is so sad it almost hurts to hear. Badalamenti’s “Mysteries of Love” (which appears on the soundtrack in three forms: two instrumental variations and a final version sung by Julee Cruise, whom Badalamenti introduced to Lynch) is fascinating in how drastically it departs from “Song to the Siren”’s mood. The majority of Badalamenti’s compositions for the score set a dark, tense tone offset by pointedly hokey lounge jazz (“Akron Meets the Blues”) and guileless jukebox rock (Bill Doggett’s 1956 instrumental “Honky Tonk Part 1”). The few briefs Lynch provided had referenced Shostakovich’s Symphony #15, the Russian composer’s final symphony—a mortality-obsessed work shaped by the same tensions as Lynch’s own, opening with playful, childlike arrangements that soon become unnerving, corrupted. Badalamenti’s eerie “Main Title,” which scores the opening credits against the rustle of blue velvet curtains, directly quotes the symphony’s increasingly anguished second movement. Shostakovich’s influence is evident on “Night Streets/Sandy and Jeffrey,” too, as nervous strings, warning of impending danger, give way to more mischievous arrangements.
But “Mysteries of Love” is different: radiant, almost religious. Cruise’s vocal version, the soundtrack’s final song, has the mystical clarity of the best haiku poetry: “Sometimes a wind blows/And the mysteries of love/Come clear.” I like to think of it as Badalamenti’s “blinding light of love” music, to borrow a phrase from Sandy’s recollection of a dream she had the night she met Jeffrey: “For the longest time there was just this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free, and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference—and it did.”
It is impossible to imagine how differently Blue Velvet would have turned out—and how the next few decades of Lynch’s films might have sounded—had “Song to the Siren” been secured and Badalamenti never brought into the director’s world. In that sense, then, the film’s soundtrack is shaped just as much by its alternate-universe permutations as by its final form—an infinitely variable correspondence between what was, and what could have been. In the scene Lynch himself referred to as Blue Velvet’s pivotal moment (or, as he puts it, the “eye of the duck” scene), one of Booth’s cronies lip-syncs Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” into a standing lamp to as Booth mouths along, so moved by the 1963 ballad it seems to enrage him. The song is animated by the same tension that exists in Vinton’s “Blue Velvet”—that irreparable misalignment between the dreamy, naive instrumentation and the lonesome, occasionally chilling lyrics, whose creep-out potential is perfectly illustrated by the stammering, manic Booth, who renders ostensibly innocent lines like “a candy-colored clown they call the Sandman” nightmarish. In fact, Lynch had originally intended to use a different Orbison song, “Crying,” for the scene that’s now considered one of Lynch’s most iconic. I imagine that neither Lynch nor Badalamenti could conceive, any better than you or I, how the story might have shifted had “Crying” been used instead.
And perhaps it is the instinctive, serendipitous nature of the soundtrack’s ultimate form that makes it such an integral part of Blue Velvet’s enduring magnetism, as essential to the film’s mood and storyline as any of the characters. Alongside Lynch’s chosen songs, Badalamenti’s compositions invite the audience to process what they are witnessing not by logic but instinct, even as the mood shifts between terror and ecstasy. That Badalamenti’s “Mysteries of Love” could take the place of “Song to the Siren” seems born of the same impulse that drives Jeffrey deeper and deeper into a dangerous mystery: not to uphold the law for its own sake, nor stamp out some socially-ascribed wickedness, but to pursue some cosmic knowledge that might help him reconcile the complicated emotions he recognizes in himself, too. It’s a soundtrack for a strange world full of strange people unwittingly shaping the courses of their lives with each choice, as they fumble through the darkness in search of the only thing that will make any difference.


The second of Prince's HITNRUN series is another underwhelming entry in his catalog. From beginning to end, he seems more interested in establishing his proficiency than his creativity.

HITNRUN Phase Two

As a thought experiment, it's fun to imagine how classic Prince records might sound to fresh ears, to guess how "Kiss" and "I Would Die 4 U" and "1999" might be received by someone raised in the Spotify era. He's a notoriously streaming-unfriendly artist, after all, and even as his reputation looms larger than ever, his art has become more difficult to obtain. What would someone vaguely familiar with the legend but completely new to the music discover? Well, a millions things obviously—a particular melodic sensibility, the urge to continually reinvent, the indelible stories, his undeniable chops, a restless creativity. But in concrete terms, Prince's best work took new, unfamiliar paths to familiar feelings. Established song forms rebuilt the "wrong" way, Prince's discography has a stiff, funky, uncanny-valley relationship with the pop that came before.
And this is why HITNRUN Phase Two is an underwhelming entry in the artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince's canon. Relative to the idiosycratic and all-over-the place first iteration of the HITNRUN series, Phase Two is an organic-textured, polished, and predictable release. From beginning to end, Prince seems more interested in establishing his proficiency with pop forms, demonstrating his facility with the materials  to craft, as it were, a sturdy wooden table. Rather than an artist's interpretation, we get a craftman's tracing.
This is in part due to the absence of Joshua Welton, formerly of forgotten R&B group Fatty Koo. Welton  co-produced the bulk of the first HITNRUN album, accenting it with EDM flourishes in a way that felt mildly adventurous. Without them, the record feels bland. But ultimately it's a lack of ideas that sinks this record, a point which hits home every time these songs overtly or subliminally recall one song or another in pop music history. Whether the references are knowing (a nod to Prince's own "Kiss" partway through dancefloor record "Stare") or simply dial up favorites from R&B's celestial jukebox (the extended highlight "Groovy Potential" surely recalls Oliver Cheatham's "Get Down Saturday Night"), the songs rarely cohere into unique shapes. Or when they do, there's something quaint and mediated about the whole ordeal: the swaggering protagonists of "Stare," ("Now we got the sound that's popping in the street") may have the "party going ham" but the strutting feels calculated and theatrical.
We also get the waltz of "When She Comes," like an action-figure version of Otis Redding's "I've Got Dreams to Remember," or the ludicrous chorus of garage-rock vehicle "Screwdriver," which was first premiered in 2013 and could have been written for the Hives. Lyrics tend to be forgettably symbolic; "I'm in the big city when I'm in your arms." I mean, sure? This is perhaps most jarring on topical opener "Baltimore," which not only strikes a bum note tonally—the reassuriningly jaunty vibe is miles away from "Alright"—but just seems lazy: "We're tired of crying, and people dying/ Let's take all the guns away." OK, so no one needs Prince to offer policy positions, but in contrast with even the hippy idealism of his incredible '90s anti-gun anthem "Love Sign," "Baltimore" suggests complete creative fatigue.
The redeeming moments are ones which make some unpredictable moves—any shocks are welcome on a record as polite and poised as this. Near the end comes "Revelation," a spare version of an Isley Brothers-style ballad which holds attention by withholding. Prince's vocal performance has a touching grace, but what makes the song work is its subversive refusal to entirely exist: it feels like a shadow. But perhaps the album's true star is "Xtraloveable," a silly record with an amusing chorus conceit: "Whenever you need someone to take a shower with, call me up, please." It strikes a rare relatable-goofy balance, and like 2014's "Breakfast Can Wait" or 2015's "1000 X's and O's," this gives the record some weight and substance. It's a bit odd to imagine that shower sex is the most exciting part of Prince's day—after all, he's still a superstar living in a $10 million Paisley Park estate—but no reason not to take what you can get.


The versatile, prolific techno and pop artist crafts a dark, funk-driven record that may be the best of his career.

Black City

If you've followed Matthew Dear over the years, then you know he doesn't like to stay in one place for very long. Even as a primarily electronic artist in the early 2000s, Dear hopped from label to label, switched aliases often, and made everything from steely microhouse to harder Detroit techno. But his biggest departure was 2007's Asa Breed, the record where he stepped out from behind the decks and reached for the mic. Singing on tracks and leaning more heavily on song structure, he built strange hybrid music that had one foot in techno and the other in pop.
Dear's latest album, Black City, follows this path but pulls a pretty drastic shift in tone. Where Asa Breed was bubbly and squeaky and ultimately dancefloor-bound, this record is dark as night. The music brings to mind blown-out warehouses, desolate alleys, and seedy basement nightclubs; it's some real threatening, grimy shit. The production is as inventive and immersive as ever, but what separates this album from the last is that Dear mostly sticks with one theme all the way through. Asa Breed was all over the place at times, but this album has a cohesive thread to follow and smaller vignettes within it.
It's worth noting on a general level that Black City isn't always an easy listen-- there's a lot of detail that can take a couple of spins to get comfortable with. Part of this is structural. Dear doesn't really do clean electro-pop; his approach is more about pushing contrasting sounds together and leaving the edges jagged. The other part is his vocals. Dear is not a classically strong singer and can often sound pretty flat; importantly he knows how to make up for it. He uses technology to stretch his natural range, wrapping choruses around beats in creative ways and sometimes layering multiple vocals together to create depth.
So the album has a lot of contrast and textural nuance. There's also a good amount of sex. In the first half, Dear explores this really nocturnal, salacious sound. Songs in this section are either slow-paced come-ons or faster club tracks, but they all ooze attitude and lust. Opener "Honey" is a good example of the former, kind of a sauntering R&B number with a gritty noise instrumental at its core. But one song stands out: "You Put a Smell on Me" is just total industrial-dance smut, with Dear soliciting an indecent ride "in [his] big black car." Mechanical synths grind, beats scrape against the wall, and Dear offers up double entendre: "You decide if you want to come." It might just be the raunchiest-sounding track since NIN's "Closer".
Dear gets that there's no point in going any dirtier after this, and he uses the rest of the album to divert the vibe towards something brighter. It's a move that threatens the overall theme, but it ultimately works in maintaining the idea of deep contrast and dark vs. light. So the back-end is more pastoral sounding-- beats don't grind as hard and vocals open up, feel more skyward. Rather than the dark disco earlier on, songs in this portion hew closer toward Eno/Talking Heads ambient pop, and there's some really beautiful stuff here. "Gem", the closer, is one of the album's best. A big, opulent track about loss and regret, it's both deeply sad and optimistic at the same time. And the album needs a big emotional anchor like this, otherwise you might feel a little filthy for enjoying it so much.


Recorded in front of a live audience, the latest from the Brattleboro songwriter is a meditative, idiosyncratic set about the impermanence of all things.

Alive People

The Japanese concept of mono no aware, roughly translated as “the pathos of things,” has gone on a curious journey through the music underground. Invoked almost two decades ago by William Basinski to describe a set of melancholy piano loops, the phrase provided the title to a landmark compilation of ambient music in the 2010s. Indie rock bands have borrowed it, too. Although its embrace by English speakers could turn out to be at least partly superficial, like wabi-sabi lessons on home-improvement TV shows or kintsugi-branded luxury hairspray, mono no aware feels central to Connecticut-reared singer-songwriter Ruth Garbus’ third solo album, Alive People.
Garbus is no stranger to transience. An avowed high-school dropout who also quit design school one year later, she moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, in 2001, to follow in the footsteps of her sister—Merrill, who would go on to craft her own skewed indie-pop universe as Tune-Yards. Garbus has played in a variety of genres across the town’s bustling scene, from Feathers’ psycho-folk and Happy Birthday’s fuzz-pop, both with local lynchpin Kyle “King Tuff” Thomas, to Gloyd’s free improv, with Western Massachusetts guitar whiz Wendy Eisenberg. Her solo work, however, has always centered on her clean, tuneful guitar and imagistic lyrics, which juxtapose the miraculous and the mundane. Her second album, 2019’s Kleinmeister, introduced subtle electronics and showcased how opera training had strengthened her extraordinary mezzo soprano.
Alive People elevates Garbus’ practice to a rarefied plane. Although recorded live in front of an audience of about 100 at the performing arts venue 10 Forward in Greenfield, Massachusetts, it’s not presented as a live album, and the crowd is barely audible until the end. It benefits from the immediacy of live performance, but rather than capture one evening or one tour, the album calls attention to the impossibility of freezing a live experience in amber. Alive People intersperses its eight proper songs with five improvisatory interludes from the performance, not exactly in chronological order. It’s willful. Sparse. Grand. In both its idiosyncratic form and meditative execution, Alive People is an erudite and overwhelming reflection on the impermanence of all things. That’s mono no aware.
The Japanese idiom is at the forefront of Alive People. Opening track “Julia” is six cryptic seconds of Garbus’s longtime collaborator Julia Tadlock speaking the phrase’s loose translation from onstage, accompanied by a warm ambient hiss, plus a rustle or two from the surrounding environs. After this fleeting introduction, each of the next two songs lasts about six minutes, another way that Garbus toys with perceptions of time passing. “Mono No Aware,” based around Garbus’ measured guitar and slow-motion vocal harmonies with Tadlock, unfolds patiently into a masterful examination of art-making and one’s place in it; verse by verse, she zooms out from the personal act of creation, to her teenage insecurities, to the squirrels outside her window, and on through to naming various aspects of her personality, before she finally sings the title phrase four times. “Healthy Gamer,” built on rudimentary electronic beats and elie mcafee-hahn’s tender keyboard, follows a similar existential progression as Garbus addresses another lost soul, this one “running through the tawny grass of elvish terrain.” With their deliberate pacing and lofty subject matter, both songs seem high-risk, like a breakneck Olympic routine, but Garbus sticks the landing, all cool grace and precision.
The rest of Alive People isn’t as audacious, but it’s similarly impressive in its avant-pop minimalism, like Joni Mitchell fronting Marine Girls. Garbus and her small band commune with their audience over the fleetingness of matters both cosmic and hyperlocal. After a pitched-up interstitial snippet about “buying a houseplant,” Garbus explores the nature of her purchase on “Rubber Tree,” which has a seemingly simple subject and lovely wordless vocal bit that wouldn’t be out of place on Cass McCombs’ recent kids’ album—except few children may fully appreciate the forlorn ambition “that our hearts may intertwine/like an interspecies vine.” A jazz quality animates “Whisper in Steel,” which leaps from comely assonance- and consonance-filled verses to a higher pitch and simpler diction on the chorus as Garbus contemplates ephemerality on the American autobahn. “Waiting on the Sun,” with “atypical” guitar by Julie Bodian, epitomizes Garbus’ languid perspective shifts, as the quotidian particulars of self-care purchases give way to the awareness that “someday the sun will shine so close it hurts.” Garbus faces down our impending annihilation by playing with enjambments: “The scenery reflects this blinding/Lightly, lightly.”
The remaining interludes of playful synth or lyric guitar act mainly as reprieves so all of Garbus’ lightly delivered headiness doesn’t leave us lightheaded. But the songs keep finding new approaches to mono no aware, which after all isn’t so different from saudade, the Portuguese word for nostalgic longing, or perhaps a form of the blues. She moves from blinding light to rainbow pastel on “Pastel Umbrella,” a jarring confrontation between the narrator’s youthful fantasy and adult doubts that highlights Bodian’s twinkling guitar and a mesmerizing spoken-word segment. “I always win when I’m playing alone,” Garbus sings on the introverts’ anthem “Sports,” dragging out the final, melismatic syllable as if the moment could never end.


Sophie Allison’s excellent studio debut is a compact album of clear melodies, plainspoken lyrics, and the impossibly tangled logic of infatuation.

Clean

When Sophie Allison sings, “I wanna be that cool,” you believe her. Coolness would be something to aspire to for a young indie rocker who records music under the decidedly uncool alias of Soccer Mommy. But the 20-year-old Allison, from Nashville, Tennessee, has something more valuable: humble relatability. Her hazy singing can be conversational and appealingly flat. She sounds like a person you might know.
In the summer of 2015, just after she had finished high school, Allison procured a Tascam four-track and collected her raw feelings—like an audio diary of teenaged heartbreak—onto Bandcamp releases with titles like songs for the recently sad and “moving to new york.” Still trading in piercing vulnerability, Clean is Allison’s excellent studio debut: a compact album of clear melodies, plainspoken lyrics, and the impossibly tangled logic of infatuation.
Clean has only subtle flourishes. Allison can be blunt like Liz Phair, or perceptive like early Taylor Swift, but she tells her stories of love and betrayal with a welcomed pop-punk brevity and kick. The melodrama of youth is rendered in sometimes uncomfortable detail—the seemingly innocuous memories that send you spiraling, like a particular way of brushing up against a person. In Clean’s songs, lovers become wolves; crushes linger with world-ending gravity; disaffected stoner girls become godly. Allison is caught between who she is and who she wants to be, singing such self-loathing lines as, “I am just a dying flower,” and, “Why would you still want to be with me?” But her dry voice itself deflects the anguish; it’s empowering.
Things happen on Clean that you wouldn’t expect. In the sad opener, “Still Clean,” Allison likens a greedy lover to a wild animal who literally eats her. It’s a twisted image, like a Grimm’s fairytale: “Left me drowning once you picked me out of your bloody teeth.” The pairing of lilting strums with such a savage lyric makes a statement: This soft music is not precious. It’s gnarly and intense, like the heart itself. When Allison sings that she “checked the window just to see if you’d come back to me,” it’s a crushing depiction of how easily obsession can lead to self-destruction. (Perhaps all this complication accounts for Allison’s simple desire, on “Skin,” to just “be the one you’re kissing when you’re stoned.”)
Over the breezy riff of “Cool,” Allison flips the script, romanticizing a rebel girl who’s equally vicious. She wants to be “Mary [with] a heart of coal,” a girl who treats boys like toys and gets high with her friends. The fiercer “Your Dog,” meanwhile, is not an interpolation of Iggy Pop but rather a total inversion: “I don’t wanna be your fucking dog,” Allison sings with fire. She conveys a sentiment about ownership that women have been shouting since they began picking up instruments without permission. Even when Allison’s strummy music evokes a coffee house open-mic, though, there’s an edge to it.
At the towering center of Clean is “Blossom (Wasting All My Time).” It is so spare as to be almost void-like: just Allison hovering six feet above her quietest strums, a mysticism perhaps learned from Leonard Cohen. When it starts, “Blossom” is so stinging that you might close your eyes. “Wasting all my time thinking about the way you treat me/Wasting all my time on someone who didn’t know me,” Allison sings, evoking a wrenching blues traditional. But the song cracks down the middle like a split locket, and halfway through, the bad feeling is replaced by an optimistic one. New longing replaces the old. And then life goes on.
If the album’s title brings to mind “Clean,” the pristine closing ballad from Swift’s 1989, you’d not be mistaken. Allison admits a devotion to Swift, and it shows in the sweetened ease and biting honesty of her music, in her knowing fixation on un-coolness. This comes into focus on Clean’s slow-burning “Scorpio Rising.” Allison is sitting in the car as the sun comes up with a boy who is going to leave her for another girl—one who’s “bubbly and sweet like a Coca-Cola.” She can’t let go: “You’re made from the stars/We watched from your car,” Allison sings as the song swirls. It’s the sound of knotted nascent love, a snapshot of a person with her messy thoughts. But in all its sonic clarity, Allison’s music contains the promise that these tragic scenarios could still be untangled. Clean is that much-cooler indie record Taylor once sung of. Below the surface, its spark gleams like a secret.


On his first album in 14 years, the drum’n’bass innovator blurs the edges of the genre, putting masterful sound design and playful pacing in the service of cinematic aims.

The Edge of Everything

An astronaut, a filmmaker, and a drum’n’bass producer. It sounds like the setup to a joke, but these unlikely bedfellows were among the base ingredients of The Edge of Everything, the first new album in 14 years from Bristolian jungle/drum’n’bass legend Krust (perhaps best known as a member of Roni Size & Reprazent). As returns go, it is a suitably ostentatious one: Determined to create music that might reach beyond the confines of a Friday night out, Krust spent four years making the album amid a maelstrom of mood boards and meditation, pondering topics from space travel to Damian Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull.
For listeners whose experience of drum’n’bass stretches little further than the industrial sturm und drang of the contemporary dancefloor, this might sound like an unnecessarily convoluted path for a genre that too often sacrifices innovation for sheer sonic oomph. But Krust has long been one of the style’s vanguardists, introducing jazz to jungle on 1994’s dreamy “Jazz Note” and pioneering the industrial-strength bassline stepper in 1997’s “Warhead,” which remains a sacred dancefloor text.
Confounding expectations and breaking boundaries are key to Krust’s work. At times The Edge of Everything feels like a massive game of bait and switch that plays merry havoc with our expectations of what drum’n’bass should be. A handful of songs—notably the excellent “Constructive Ambiguity” and “Deep Fields of Liars”—flirt with genre convention, thanks to their accelerated breaks and compulsive sub-bass. But Krust teases the listener with agonising pauses and don’t-look-in-that-cupboard! style dramatic silences, holding back the beat in a relentless orgy of suspense. Other songs, like “Negative Returns” and “Space Oddity” (very much not that one), initially bear the hallmarks of a 170 BPM roller, their charred synth lines barrelling along at a promising clip, only for Krust to upend our expectations with beats that sit closer to the distressed electro of early Autechre than jungle’s classic breaks.
Closing with a sampled testament to the transformative power of cinema, the outro to “Negative Returns” highlights one of the album’s key themes. Krust says that he was inspired by filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, and he created “Antigravity Love,” which follows “Negative Returns,” with help from director Michael Williams, who wrote a rambling monologue for the producer to build a track around. That this underwhelming collaboration adds up to less than the sum of its parts is symptomatic of an album that shoots for the fictive universe of film without quite landing. Krust’s intended narrative arc relies too heavily on the listener’s interpretation of song titles and the spoken-word passages scattered throughout the album’s 11 tracks.
But if The Edge of Everything isn’t quite cinema, it’s certainly cinematic, thanks to Krust’s masterful sonic design and a musical palette that nods to everything from 1930s horror flicks (the gothic organ drone on “Hegel Dialectic”) to the THX woosh of “Constructive Ambiguity.” If Michael Bay wasn’t so unimaginative, you could imagine the latter soundtracking a particularly stirring Transformers fight scene, liquid metal beats dancing a electric pasodoble as two robots pound the mechanical hell out of each other under expensively rendered nuclear rain.
There is a real elegance to Krust’s musical manipulations, a sort of gentle heaviness that weighs the steely tonnage of heavily processed synth against eerie ambience. And, if you won’t find yourself humming along to the melodies on The Edge of Everything, you will almost certainly discover a favourite sound. (I’ll take the strangled trumpet on “Hegel Dialectic.”) In this masterful precision, The Edge of Everything resembles the radically expansive work of cerebral drum’n’bass producers like Photek and 4Hero while nodding to Detroit techno in its dystopian sci-fi feel.
The Edge of Everything arrives at a moment where drum’n’bass is perched between two stools: hugely popular in its own rather inward-looking niche, and being cautiously revived by a new breed of music producers, from MoMA READY to India Jordan, who dabble at the edges of a junglist revival without jumping in headfirst. The Edge of Everything is perhaps too esoteric for either camp—a 5D rendering of the genre rather than a simple homage. But in calling back to concept-driven works like Goldie’s divisive Saturnz Return or the Japanese swordsmanship references of Photek’s Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu EP, The Edge of Everything proves that drum’n’bass can still wield an awesome experimental power as it enters its fifth decade.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The transatlantic duo of Heems (ex-Das Racist) and Riz MC (actor Riz Ahmed) link up for an album of politically-charged rap that's both thought-provoking and genuinely fun.

Cashmere

Even just on paper, Heems and Riz MC are perfect foils for one another. Heems is a rapper (and former member of Das Racist) of Indian descent, though his family has roots in Pakistan. Riz is a rapper (and actor increasingly known for his role in HBO's “The Night Of”) of Pakistani descent whose family history can be traced back over the Indian side of the border. Heems hails from Queens, Riz from London. Heems is sharp-witted but raps with a relaxed cadence while Riz spits in the pointed, rapid-fire bursts that characterize grime. The two MCs make for a formidable pair on record, complimenting each other sonically while seeking out the overlap between their perspectives.
After testing out their chemistry on a four song EP, Heems and Riz have now committed to the Swet Shop Boys project with the full-length Cashmere. Unlike the Swet Shop EP, which enlisted production from Ryan Hemsworth, Lushlife, and others, Cashmere was entirely helmed by London-based producer Redinho. In keeping with the EP’s sound, Redinho constructs propulsive beats from South Asian samples, providing ample fodder over which the Boys trade verses. Clocking in at just 34 minutes, Cashmere is more focused and consistent than any solo release from either rapper. In the push and pull between their styles, they find a compelling balance between hip-hop and agitprop, arriving at songs that are as enjoyable as they are thought-provoking.
Lead single and opener “T5” offers a representative sample: over a screeching shehnai and heavy 808 thuds, the duo catalog the hassles of traveling while brown, skewer euphemistic security speak and situate themselves within the South Asian diaspora (“I run the city like my name’s Sadiq”). “No Fly List” builds a slinky banger around Heems’ hilarious flex, “I’m so fly, bitch/But I’m on a no fly list.” “Shottin” weaves tales about the NYPD’s surveillance of mosques using the time-tested format of true crime boom-bap. Only the goofy club number “Tiger Hologram” really falls flat, feeling like an inside joke we’re not privy to and featuring an entire verse where Heems raps with a comical lack of effort—about as funny as salt in a wound to anyone who’s continued to root for him post-Das Racist. While there are a few moments like this on Cashmere, the hungrier Riz usually picks up the slack. And when Heems does show up on these tracks, he sounds effortlessly charismatic, like when he’s twisting rap tropes into worldly new shapes on “No Fly List” (“Sweatsuit on with an Hermès turban/Pull up on a bad, brown ting out in Durban”).
While both rappers excel at making politics feel personal, Riz comes across as the more academic one, or as he puts it, “Rizzy speaks like Wikileaks investigations.” He raps passionately, though often from a remove, and peppers his lines with citations. For instance, on “T5,” he reaches all the way back to The Iliad to critique anti-refugee fear mongering, though he still manages to clown on less-woke rappers in the same breath (“We’re militant/You’re on a Milli Vanilli vibe”). Heems, meanwhile, takes a more personal tack, empathetically sliding into different perspectives as often as he leverages his own. He delights in erasing the post-colonial line between the Indian and Pakistani identities, tossing his New York rapper bonafides into the blender for good measure. On “Phone Tap,” he’s “Pakistani with a pack,” while in “Shottin,” he’s rocking a “Yankee hat with the kufi on top.” When Heems speaks from his own perspective, it’s often on issues that hit closer to home: racial profiling, tense interactions with authorities or outright racism (“Used to call me curry/Now they cook it in they kitchen”).
This is heavy stuff and as fun as it can be, Cashmere is an unabashedly political record, careening from one geopolitical issue to the next the way that most rap albums treat boasts. Ultimately, though, its most impactful moments lie in the simple act of representation. Album highlight “Zayn Malik” acknowledges as much: behind its clever punning (“Look, Zayn Malik’s got more than 80 virgins on him/There’s more than one direction to get to paradise”) lies a sincere desire to symbolize something (Heems’ aspirational quip “I am a college dorm room poster”). Malik is invoked as more than just a punchline here: alongside M.I.A., he’s been among the first South Asian celebrities to represent something more than a threat, egghead or other in western pop culture. The Swet Shop Boys seek to further broaden our understanding, an ambition that’s right there in the title. To Westerners, cashmere is a luxury textile; to South Asians, it’s the site of a violent territorial dispute between India and Pakistan that hinges on questions of identity. It’s a perfect title for a project that blurs the lines between all of these perspectives, that stunts as much as it elucidates, and which ties up all of these messy ideas into a refreshingly expansive vision of South Asian identity.


This Atlanta five-piece's shimmering Kranky debut is alternately murky and ethereal, drawing equal influence from classic shoegaze, early Factory Records LPs, and the enigmatic ambient recordings with which it shares a label, shifting between impressionistic, reverb-saturated reverie and psych-heavy pop gems.

Cryptograms

In Dennis Cooper's 1987 novel Closer, young George Miles gets totally fucked. Poor kid probably just wants to be loved-- either that or trip out on acid and live in Disneyland, whichever is more realistic-- but he falls prey to charlatans of all stripes. Old-fart perverts deface his flesh with loveless sexual violence. "Do you know what's inside that cute body of yours?" one asks, then comes brutally close to exposing the answers.
Atlanta five-piece Deerhunter, who hailed Cooper as a primary influence in a recent Dusted feature, show their guts admirably on this vast, visceral second album. Arranged in chronological sequence from two distinct recording sessions, Cryptograms is alternately murky and ethereal, amorphous and incisive, shot through with Sonic Youth guitar squall, Spacemen 3's blissful hymns, the morbidly introspective drum sounds of early Factory Records productions, and the abstract sonic richness of Harold Budd's collaborations with Brian Eno.
The album's willfully cryptic first half opens with a psych-out, both musically and mentally. Out of a nature scene's tranquility, a foreboding bassline and bird-calling keyboards summon singer Bradford Cox, who kicks off the galvanizing title track with a declaration of regret: "My greatest fear/ I fantasized/ The days were long/ The weeks flew by/ Before I knew/ I was awake/ My days were through/ It was too... late." As the song careens toward an increasingly chaotic climax, Cox finds his senses deteriorating until the final, indefinite repetition of the closing mantra: "There was no sound." Underpinned by Josh Fauver's primal bass and Moses Archuleta's paranoid drums, the similarly bleak "Lake Somerset" is a scream-saturated stomper with largely obscured lyrics about murder and pissing. No wonder Cox endured daily panic attacks throughout its recording.
"The skinniest man on the face of the Earth," claim the MySpacers. "He suffers from Marfan syndrome, try not to insult him," others retort. The 1 in 5,000 Americans affected are typically tall, thin, and at risk of heart problems. Source(s): MySpace, March of Dimes.
Deerhunter aren't content just to put their least welcoming side forward. Cryptograms also intersperses its loosely structured songs with a handful of extended, largely instrumental ambient passages. Guitarists Colin Mee and Lockett Pundt know their delay pedals-- the drifting chords on "White Ink" ring with the same washed-out analog shimmer that made Flying Saucer Attack's Further so powerfully nostalgic, gradually filling in with low end as keyboards and vocal effects add layers of texture off in the distance. The dream-like "Providence", written on a Rhode Island tour stop with Lightning Bolt, sounds at once radiant and terrified. "Octet" finds Cox's cries muffled behind the maelstrom, until the drums and bass lock together in the second half, erupting in a static-drenched propulsion that doesn't let up until a busy-signal organ tone segues into the droning, bell-swathed "Red Ink". The album's first half concludes with the tape to which the band recorded literally spinning off its reel.
"She said, 'Dream dreams the dreamer'/ I said it's not my fault." An earlier recording session was scrapped for, among other reasons, a poorly calibrated tape machine. At least one song here was written after several Ambien. Deerhunter's original bass player died in a tragic skateboarding accident; he'd just gotten clean. Source(s): Television, Bradford Cox.
That first 30 minutes of Cryptograms is a slow but steady build towards the vastly more accessible latter half, recorded several months after the first. Opening with the perpetual climax of "Spring Hall Convert", these songs depict a Deerhunter reborn-- if not happy, then at least comfortably numb. Here, all that brooding sludge-psych and those airy backgrounds give way to swooning dream-pop and comparatively lucid songwriting: "Strange Lights" is the first track on Cryptograms with clearly decipherable lyrics, Cox waxing childlike about "walking to the sun," bathed in bright, lambent guitars. The gauzy growing-up reminiscence "Hazel St." asks for protection in pop-glorified sunlight; portentous finale "Heatherwood", with its ramshackle percussion, promises another reincarnation. "Was not seen again," several voices repeat, ending not with a bang but with an enigmatic whistle.
The Deer Hunter is a movie. "Deer Hunter" is a game. Deerhunter are a band that sometimes gets called Deer Hunter. Deerhoof are somebody else. Source(s): Twenty-five years on Earth, Google.
Of course, even the second recording session's highly melodic space-outs aren't fully coherent. As Cox laments in "Hazel St.", "The subject is always just out of frame." At this point, with an album called Cryptograms, you're weird if you haven't been wondering what, exactly, the encoded message might be-- if, in fact, there is one at all. I like to think it's that Deerhunter are a pop band.
After all, while Cryptograms presents its own obstacles, it's easily enjoyed as a whole. Memorable melodies and an awkward, charismatic narrator are often peeking from behind the dissonance-laden mists that self-consciously choke them. From The Velvet Underground & Nico to Sid and Nancy, the sweetest romance of the rock underground's life was always death. And the tragic beauty of Cryptograms, as to an extent with Cooper's novels, is the way something as innocent as pop can be so mercilessly corrupted-- and due to the ensuing tension, emerge as better art for it.


There isn’t a cut on Paul McCartney's 24th studio album*—*featuring production work from Mark Ronson and Paul Epworth—that doesn’t make a compelling argument for him continuing to produce music. New is an LP that pushes hard against the popular conception of what a Paul McCartney record is supposed to sound like.

New

If there’s one single song that can justify the existence of Paul McCartney’s 24th studio album since leaving the Beatles, it’s track number five, “Early Days". At first blush it seems to be that most heinous of Boomer cliches, the acoustic Those Were the Days ballad where youth-culture narcissism collides with old-people shmaltz, but fairly quickly the song resolves into something much more interesting. While the verses are a rose-tinted reminiscence of McCartney and John Lennon’s brief period of pre-fame friendship in Liverpool, the choruses project something altogether different: “They can’t take it from me/ if they try/ I lived through those early days.” Whereas most of his hippie-era pop contemporaries enthusiastically embraced self-hagiography decades ago, McCartney’s relationship with nostalgia is complicated, and fraught with skepticism, and by embracing these complications he offers an understandably human portrait of a position few of us will ever find ourselves in: watching your life story being converted into mythology by forces outside of your control.
But really, there isn’t a cut out of the thirteen on New that doesn’t make a compelling argument for McCartney continuing to produce music. As his evolving relationship with shmaltz goes to show, he’s continued to stretch out as an artist long after most artists from his generation slipped into a comfortable rut. While it’s not as radical an aesthetic statement his searingly noisy 2008 Electric Arguments, his appearance on a recent EDM banger by Bloody Beetroots, or his stint as frontman for Nirvana, it still pushes hard against the popular conception of what a Paul McCartney record’s supposed to sound like, which is a wonderful thing.
He’s found some enthusiastic partners in this in the album’s four producers, each of whom approaches the collaborative challenge from a different angle. Adele and Florence and the Machine producer Paul Epworth revives the taut, nervy postpunk sound of his early work with Bloc Party for the album-opening “Save Us", and injects the single “Queenie Eye” with aggressively punchy compression and generous splashes of noise. Trad-rock specialist Ethan Johns gives two of the album’s acoustic moments, “Early Days” and Hosanna" an intimacy that’s almost painfully raw. “Alligator” and “New", the two tracks produced by Mark Ronson, are the ones that most closely resemble McCartney’s classic work (late-era Beatles and early Wings, respectively) but he’s given them a modern-sounding density. (He also proves his reputation as an expert vocal producer by stacking McCartney’s voice into a multitracked nod to Pet Sounds at the end of “New.”)
Overseeing the whole project is Giles Martin, son of George, who executive produced the album and directly produced half of the songs. Martin, who was responsible for much of the work on the catalog-spanning Beatles remix project Love, has a natural sense for finding the right balance between McCartney’s sonic ambitions and his established musical identity. As a result, the drum loops and computer-altered electronic sounds and other modern touches that they’ve brought to the table fit comfortably in settings that have over the years become Sir Paul’s trademarks: the jauntily psychedelic faux-classical jingle, the pastoral landscape story-song, the occasional acerbic ripper that he uses to remind us that he’s not all tea and crumpets and quaintly eccentric British aristocrats.
A lot has been made about how busy McCartney’s been keeping himself well past retirement age, and much should be: it’s gratifying and inspiring to see the pop musician who arguably most deserves to rest on his laurels steadfastly refuse to do so. But even more remarkable than his work ethic is the fact that he’s still trying to improve himself as an artist. While the songs on New don’t have the historical import or epic ambition of his best-known work, they also don’t have the same kind of flaws. He’s far less sentimental than he used to be, far less prone to letting his whimsical side carry a song off to cloud cuckoo land, and a much, much better self-editor than he was during the peak of his career. His fellow Boomer musicians could learn a lot from him. As a matter of fact, a lot of the ones from subsequent generations could, too.


The New York composer is an electro-acoustic minimalist who pays special attention to the spaces around her. Her latest album, by turns grounded and disquieting, feels untethered and limitless.

Metal Aether

Lea Bertucci is a composer in conversation with the world around her. She regards physical spaces as though they were her collaborators. Growing up in New York’s Hudson Valley, she was awed by the defunct cement mines, where her saxophone made deep reverberations. More recently she has described playing the walls of a bunker like an organ.
Bertucci is an electro-acoustic minimalist who works primarily with woodwind instruments, particularly the alto sax and low-voiced bass clarinet. But her most crucial instrument might be space itself: the surroundings and acoustics that naturally augment a sound, altering the way an instrument resonates. Last year, Bertucci co-edited The Tonebook, a collection of graphic scores by 17 contemporary avant-garde composers. Bertucci’s own contribution took the form of a highly contoured topographic map, which she called “an overhead view of the changes and textures within a piece of music,” underscoring her exploratory sensibility.
Metal Aether, Bertucci’s latest full-length, was recorded at a former military base in France as well as the New York art venue ISSUE Project Room. It feels like her fullest statement. Her extended technique for alto sax is at once swarming and clarifying, like dissolving clouds. These droning meditations offer disquieting jolts along with microtones that are hypnotic and grounding. Bertucci incorporates prepared piano and vibraphone, processed with electronics and tape, along with field recordings made anywhere from Mayan pyramids to New York subways. Harmonics accumulate and stretch toward infinity. Bertucci’s noise feels untethered and limitless.
With each repeated sax figure on “Patterns for Alto,” Bertucci mimics the motions of swimming or diving, growing more enveloping with each inquisitive note. “Accumulations,” with an ominous drone hovering in the background, is a reminder of Bertucci’s training in jazz, as sustained notes make way for alarming, high-pitched squalls. When “Accumulations” breaks into passages of noise, it feels like weather, like all the seasons at once. The more ambient “Sustain and Dissolve” tricks you into thinking it is a breath of air, but it pierces and drills as its tones subtly shift, making way for a deep gong sound and then flashes of brutal noise. It moves toward the sound of water crashing, evoking ocean voyages. “At Dawn,” the final piece, contains a peculiar fluttering. If this is birdsong, it is not peaceful. It sounds like birds attempting to reach beyond the sky.
Bertucci has a way with texture that both evokes the room and renders it endless. Perhaps a deep consideration of space is inevitable for a New Yorker such as Bertucci, who inhabits a city where space for artists is increasingly endangered. Bertucci’s work as a booker and curator has also guided her practice: She has said that many artists come to New York and ask, “What can I get out of this place?” rather than, “What can I bring to this place?” Bertucci’s work is accordingly generative; it brings life and voice to her generation of New York avant-gardists in a way that feels personal and rare. In Bertucci’s expanding world, walls are not the ends of spaces, but rather sparks for new ones waiting to begin.


The Hyperdub boss and his reclusive label-mate team up on a split single that highlights their differences, contrasting Kode9’s restless rhythmic energy with Burial’s contented melancholy.

Kode9 / Burial: Infirmary / Unknown Summer EP

Infirmary / Unknown Summer EP

Fists and feelings, muscle and moodiness: Kode9 and Burial cut opposite but complementary figures. For years the Hyperdub boss and his label’s elusive leading star have carved out distinct approaches to dance music aimed (respectively) at triggering listener’s fight-or-flight responses and tugging at their heart strings. Both emerged from dubstep as a common starting point. Kode9 ran with the genre’s weighted swing, layering tracks with ultra-fine detail while retaining the style’s punchy dynamism. Burial homed in on the air of romance emanating from garage and 2-step, chasing their space and atmosphere until the beat fell out from his music completely.
Burial is anonymous to the point of caricature while Kode9 is professorial in a politely punkish way; neither artist seems overly concerned with stoking a cult of personality. If the two were a little more complicit in their own meme, they might have wielded their Tom-and-Jerry buddy dynamic with a little more flair. But because there are about three pictures of Burial in circulation and the odds are slim of the duo ever posing for a silly Mike & Rich-style photo shoot, their tandem return has gotten a characteristically low-key rollout: a mysterious London billboard, a re-aired Mary Anne Hobbs mix, and the hushed word of mouth that a new collaborative EP was on the horizon.
London nightclub fabric has brought the two artists together again after their 2018 entry in their FABRICLIVE series to release Infirmary / Unknown Summer. The record is easy listening rather than guns blazing, a laid-back pair of tracks warped around the edges by drowsy July heat. If these songs are meant as a dialogue between the two friends, the subject seems to be the weirder properties of summertime: all of the ways in which time melts and distends as temperatures increase.
In its looped and swelling jazz samples, Kode9’s “Infirmary” recalls another classic of Hyperdub high summer, DJ Rashad’s Double Cup, although at some points it resembles the record a little bit too literally. The sheer massiveness of Rashad’s horn samples aimed to conjure a cityscape in sound, while the same instruments on the oddly titled track don’t telegraph “sickbed” so much as “genre exercise.” Footwork has an obvious appeal for Kode9, presenting an opportunity for him to flex his muscles as a producer and also go really, really fast. His approach is like a particularly elegant Rube Goldberg machine, crafting music that’s more complex than it needs to be, and all the more impressive for how smoothly it fires off. He makes his clearest personal mark on the genre by substituting its relentless hi-hat with a muted hydraulic rattle that he interlaces with streaks of grime synths, imparting an artificial iciness that pairs nicely with the warm swell of the horns. Even if the choice of sample isn’t the most inspired, the interplay between the song’s breezy flow and sophisticated, ultra-kinetic rhythm is compelling in its own right, creating a small temporal rift between sweaty nostalgia and bracing air-conditioner coolness.
Burial swerved into pure ambient with his Antidawn and Streetlands EPs, but “Unknown Summer” is a Burial song with a beat again! The drums remain fairly flimsy throughout, playing second fiddle to his synth washes and processed vocals, but they provide a subtle pulse and, more importantly, solid ground for a listener to sit upon while they stargaze into the mix. Despite its title, “Unknown Summer” is markedly clearer than anything on his most recent releases, which have been as dense and despairing and fog-ridden as Silent Hill or a Goya painting. Over faintly perceptible dub synths, snatches of dialogue melt and smear across the mix, bleeding into muted impressionist fireworks over the emptiness of the track.
Occasionally a little boy intones, “It’s just you alone, peace and quiet—nothing around you but clear blue sky.” It’s a signpost of feeling that’s a little too on the nose about the vibe that Burial aspires to capture—like that old creative-writing no-no, telling rather than showing. That’s been a problem in Burial’s latter-day output, although he recovers lost subtlety in the song’s second half. The beat is more pronounced but dusky, and it dawns on the listener that the light is fading fast from Burial’s summer day. The setting sun over this faded, bucolic landscape is the flipside of Kode9’s sweaty urban rush.


The Erika Wennerstrom-fronted Cincinnati blues rock quartet (and Friday Night Lights favorites) strip things down on their crunchy Jim Eno-produced fourth album.

Arrow

The Heartless Bastards never got tagged as the next saviors of rock'n'roll, although they certainly possess all the relevant traits: a strong grounding not in blues but in blues rock, a conservative aesthetic that nods to rock history but is never beholden to any one particular artist or scene, and most importantly a frontwoman with a commanding voice. Perhaps their name was too misleading or their lineup too precarious, but the Bastards escaped the mantle that's been assigned to everyone from the Strokes to the Black Keys and most recently to the Alabama Shakes. If that has left them out of enviable company, at least they've managed to attract a loyal audience and even star in a crucial "Friday Night Lights".
Their first for Partisan Records, Arrow is their crunchiest album since Erika Wennerstrom gutted the original trio in 2008 and rebuilt the Bastards as a quartet. Largely discarding the fiddle, pedal steel, and banjo that fleshed out 2009's The Mountain, the band and producer Jim Eno of Spoon strip things down to emphasize guitars and the rhythm section as much as vocals. They open these songs up, both enabling a heavier sound and making room for some weighty jamming. The result is less fussy than The Mountain, with room enough for some Skynyrd Southern rock on "Late in the Night" and Santana percussion on "Skin and Bone". They've developed a larger musical vocabulary, but the results can be cumbersome: With timpani and crackling guitar right out of a Morricone soundtrack, the nearly seven-minute centerpiece "The Arrow Killed the Beast" is more melodramatic than dramatic, weighted down by import and exaggerated ambience.
Perhaps the Bastards have begun courting the rock-revivalist constituency on Arrow. "Whenever you need a pick-me-up, you gotta have gotta have rock'n'roll," Wennerstrom sings on "Got to Have Rock and Roll". Despite the dry classic-rock riff and chugging momentum, the song makes for a tepid endorsement. "Skin and Bone" is much less corny, as Wennerstrom sings, "Oh, I want it to be like when I was young." She may not be speaking specifically about rock'n'roll, but that line succinctly sums up listeners' evolving relationship with music and a desperate desire to connect as strongly as we did in our youth. Most of the Bastards songs address travel rather than age, which is how most touring bands interpret the write-what-you-know adage. "Staring out at the city skyline, a marathon is going down the street," Wennerstrom sings on opener "Marathon". The song is about how life is a "long race home," and dangling participle aside, it's an immensely awkward image to open the album.
Wennerstrom has always been a fairly workmanlike songwriter, although her voice and her band compensate when words fail her. The lyrics on Arrow are best when they settle for serviceable instead of strive for profound, and the line that resonates with the most meaning is also the one of the simplest: "Oh I got you on my mind," she sings throughout "Late in the Night", and the romantic implications become clearer and bolder with each repetition. It helps that the Bastards play loud and hard enough to nearly drown out her vocals, reveling in the musical as well as the sexual tension. That's arguably more rock'n'roll than another song about rock'n'roll.


Featuring Heems, Danny Brown, and Wiki, the young New York MC 's first official album feels like a graduation, with bars and beats that feel both fresh and lived-in.

Packs

In June of 2014, a rapper by the name of Your Old Droog uploaded an eponymous 10-track EP to Soundcloud. Intentionally mysterious, with no photos, videos, or any identifying information, it quickly generated buzz in the rap nerd blogosphere. When he “came out,” he did it in a profile in The New Yorker, and when he sold out the Studio at Webster Hall for his first-ever show, it got written up in The New York Times.
So what powered the hype machine? It’s quite simple, really: Your Old Droog sounds a lot like Nas. At times, his fine sandpaper growl sounds similar enough to be unsettling. And before he revealed himself to The New Yorker, plenty of people were convinced that the 20-something Ukrainian immigrant from Coney Island actually was Nas. Once your brain makes the connection, it’s difficult to disassociate, even if the content of his lyrics (self-deprecating cornball humor) and favorite poetic device (punchlines laden with pop-culture references) don’t resemble anything that Nas has released in the last 20 years. But it’s ever-looming, especially for anyone intimately familiar with the Illmatic one’s oeuvre.
In the years that followed, Droog dropped a couple EPs (the rock-obsessed Kinison and The Nicest) and a collaborative project with Wiki, What Happened to Fire? But as the first collection of songs in his short career packaged and marketed as an “album,” his latest LP Packs feels like a graduation as it connects verses and beats from various collaborators to make a coherent statement. He taps comedian Anthony Jeselnik to provide radio-style interludes throughout; his dry, sardonic wit cements the generally absurdist tone of the LP. And while he’s stacked the deck with features—Heems, Danny Brown, Wiki, Edan, and Chris Crack all contribute verses—he’s never overshadowed. No one would’ve ever confused Your Old Droog with Nas if the bars weren’t hard.
Packs uses beats from a handful of producers—RTNC, 88-Keys, Edan, the Alchemist, and ID Labs’ E. Dan.—but the palette of sounds is relatively minimal. On the standout track “Bangladesh,” Droog and RTNC freak an ill Bansuri loop over a simple boom-bap drum beat. Most of the productions are sparse, but colored by thoughtful flourishes: Harp strings, record scratches, distorted vocals and explosions, even a Frank Zappa sample, removed from the context of his posthumous bizarro opus Civilization Phaze III. He’s riding a nostalgic sonic wave currently being surfed by NYC contemporaries Roc Marciano, Action Bronson, and Joey Bada$$, rappers doing their best to embody the spirit of New York hip-hop without getting stuck in its past. And if there’s any underlying ethos of the city’s hip-hop scene, it’s the merit-based hierarchy that rewards lyrical skill above nearly all else, whether it be sex appeal, skin color, or “gangsta” status. The beats always take a backseat to the bars.
Droog’s punchline-driven style evokes the vicious jabs wielded by Big L, were he less concerned with trapping and more into watching “Seinfeld.” He’s wholly unafraid to be corny; On “Rapman” he plays the part of “a hero with a cape and a mixtape” with a straight face, earnestly out to save the rap game from whack rappers. “Yo I’m sick of sycophants who want to make their idols proud,” he declares. “I want my hero to hear me and shit his pants.”
But much like his buddy Wiki, Droog venerates the art of rap storytelling, weaving colorful street tales of hood characters that make up his perspective of New York City. Each of the three verses on “You Can Do It! (Give Up)” tells instantly recognizable stories of people with failed dreams of stardom: The hoop dreamer, the washed up model/actress, the struggle rapper. His tone is dry but empathetic, the hook evincing a perpetual motivational struggle, the drive to succeed (“You can do it!”) competing with self-defeating loathing (“Give up!”).
And of all the characters in Droog’s raps, New York looms the largest. His rhymes are full of borough references (Funkmaster Flex night, nubuck Timberlands, bodega loosies), and while he doesn’t front as a gangster, he’s unquestionably hood; when his first EP dropped in 2014 he told Rolling Stone he paid for the studio sessions with winnings from playing cee-lo. Packs is a record by, of, and for New York City, espousing the romantic notion it will never change, no matter how much the world does.


The charged debut from the UK post-punks evolves from a band you think you’ve heard a million times before into one you feel like you’re just getting to know.

Uppers

When IDLES’ Ultra Mono debuted at No. 1 last fall in the UK, it signaled the end of the current post-punk revival. But the sound of surly Brits armed with rich vocabularies and brawny rhythm sections is not going anywhere anytime soon. Rather, IDLES’ chart-topping coup confirmed that post-punk has evolved long past the point of needing to be revived. It isn’t merely an aesthetic that fades in and out of fashion every 20 years, but a permanent feature of the rock lexicon that, like hardcore or metal, will be sustained by future generations of malcontents in perpetuity.
Still, it’s hard not to view TV Priest as the Stone Temple IDLES of this particular moment. On first approach, the London quartet ticks off all the boxes in the post-punk instruction manual. They’ve got a band name that sounds like it was cribbed from the cover of a Fall live bootleg. They wield a dissonant musical attack that shifts between motorik grooves and strobe-lit industrial clamor at regular intervals. And naturally, they’ve got a brash, melody-resistant frontman who deals in dystopian doublespeak and withering pop-cultural commentary, and who’s blessed with the perfect pubstool philosopher name of Charlie Drinkwater.
But while TV Priest are so new to the party that they only got to play a single gig before COVID came around, their roots run deep. Drinkwater, guitarist Alex Sprogis, bassist/keyboardist Nic Bueth, and drummer Ed Kellan are all childhood friends who previously congregated in the early 2010s quintet Torches, a band that leaned toward the sleeker, more flamboyantly goth end of the post-punk spectrum. And more recently, Drinkwater’s day job as an art director has seen him produce cover art for indie peers like Fontaines D.C. and Sports Team. So what TV Priest bring to the table on their debut album, Uppers, isn’t just a deep familiarity with post-punk conventions, but a keen awareness of their limitations. In almost sequential fashion, the 12 tracks here capture a band trying to wiggle out of an aesthetic straitjacket one buckle at a time, evolving from a band you think you’ve heard a million times before into one you feel like you’re just getting to know.
The TV Priest we meet at the album’s onset are punch-drunk on bull-in-a-china-shop bravado. Pitched somewhere between the slurred, stuttering sing-speak of Mark E. Smith and the gonzo braggadocio of Grinderman-era Nick Cave, Drinkwater unleashes a ceaseless stream of non-sequiturs about the media, consumerism, and narcissism that are a little too steeped in irony and too enamored with their own absurdity to function as cogent critiques. On “Leg Room,” Drinkwater rifles off a laundry list of increasingly silly indulgences (“I’m in love with a holographic representation of a singer we all used to know very well”; “I’m love with an animatronic dog”; “I’m in love with James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke”) that ultimately dilute and distract from the song’s breakneck thrust. And where tracks like “The Big Curve” and “Press Gang” get by on distortion-pedal dynamics and locomotive momentum alone, Drinkwater’s buckshot barrage of cryptic musings provide you with little to grab onto—melodically or conceptually—as the train goes barrelling by.
But Uppers gradually reveals there’s more to this band than free-ranging rant‘n’roll. Initially inspired by Daniel Defoe’s namesake 1772 account of the bubonic plague in London, “Journal of a Plague Year” was actually written before our current pandemic, and the song’s uncanny prescience extends beyond the subject matter to its depiction of cold indifference in the face of abject horror. Over a disembodied bass loop and casually clattering beat, Drinkwater declares, “Hey buddy, normalize this”—a directive that seems all too easy to honor when coronavirus death tolls have become just another humdrum stat on the newsticker like weather forecasts and stock prices. “Powers of Ten” is equally unnerving in its restraint, presenting a portrait of craven, ladder-climbing corporatism that dials up the intensity of its synth-pierced drone, as if translating capitalism’s unsatiated appetite into a single oppressive, unrelenting sound.
For all of TV Priest’s confrontational qualities, the band are ultimately less fuelled by a smash-the-system fervor than a self-effacing recognition that playing in a rock band probably won’t change the world. Amid the turbo-charged throttle of “Slideshow,” Drinkwater sheepishly admits, “Well, all I can do is talk”—ironically, one of the few moments on this record where he actually sings—before adding, “I probably never had an original thought.” Instead, he leaves us with a reminder that the most direct path to a brighter future begins at home. On Uppers’ epic seven-minute closer “Saintless,” he drops the acerbic color commentary and pint-glass-smashing aggression for an exhilarating, open-hearted anthem dedicated to his wife and child. “This world is dark, with saintless few/So guard your love, but give it too,” Drinkwater croons defiantly through a haze of fuzzy propulsion, rendering the song as an “All My Friends” that isn’t so much lamenting lost youth as embracing new parenthood, bottling up both the optimism and insecurities of becoming a father in an age of perpetual political and psychological stress. Never mind the post-punk; TV Priest are redefining dad-rock.

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Noah Weinman’s cloudy, spacious indie folk songs ruminate on the limits of human communication.

Runnner: Like Dying Stars, We’re Reaching Out

Like Dying Stars, We’re Reaching Out

There are a lot of ways not to say what you meant. Maybe you can’t find the words; maybe you just can’t choke them out. Maybe their intended recipient isn’t here and never will be. Noah Weinman, the singer-songwriter behind the melancholy bedroom-folk project Runnner, lands in all of these positions across his new album, Like Dying Stars, We’re Reaching Out. His official debut for Run for Cover follows a string of Bandcamp releases and 2021’s Always Repeating, a collection of early tracks that reflected on themes of inadequacy and longing. Like Dying Stars, We’re Reaching Out is no less moody, but here, Weinman’s sound is notably developed, prioritizing texture and nuance over the simpler, acoustic-forward approach of his earlier work. Through exhausted introspection and anxious inner questioning, his songs explore breakdowns in communication and how we’re set adrift when words fail.
“I’m an idiot; I cried in your car when I couldn’t find the words I was looking for,” is how Weinman opens one of the album’s catchiest tracks, “i only sing about food.” Self-loathing, and the storing up of unspoken sentiments like kernels of missed potential, is a constant undertone. “I only think about death, I only sing about food,” he eventually admits: If he can’t bring himself to voice his darkest fears, at least he can confess to that inability. As he repeats the line over a warm, shimmering synth refrain, there’s a feeling of relief and redemption. The unostentatious nature of the lyrics leaves room for the song itself to fill the gaps between admission and implication. On the sorrowful “bike again,” as Weinman imagines telephoning somebody he presumably shouldn’t, he simply sings, “Hi, I’m…,” his voice plaintive and rich with harmonies. Twined piano and banjo elevate the unfinished statement into a surrender.
When Weinman’s naturalistic, imperfect recording style picks up the tick of a clock or the hum of an air conditioner, the background noise fosters intimacy even as his layered compositions create distance. Ambient synths populate many of the slower tracks, forming gentle currents of emotional conflict. They sound the opening notes of “plexiglass,” then sit in the background for the whole song, like a nagging reminder. On “scabpicker,” where Weinman describes a lonely drive spent torturing himself with his thoughts, a swell of synth rises from the monotone guitar strum. The quick rush of color soon fades back into depressive apathy, as if a pair of oncoming headlights had suddenly revealed a different perspective only to plunge back into darkness.
As Weinman recounts all the fumbled admissions and unsent letters, the unstated implication is that these songs, almost all addressed to an undefined “you,” take their place. But whether his words ever reach their original targets isn’t really the point. There’s a deliberate artlessness to the songwriting, a cathartic late-night honesty that still feels robust in the morning. While Runnner’s music is easily compared to folk-inspired labelmates past and present (Field Medic, Pinegrove), the bleary atmosphere and humble commitment of Like Dying Stars, We’re Reaching Out mark a welcome delineation of identity.


Dylan Carlson's return as the Ennio Morricone of metal continues to confound, as he offers up the  biggest, cleanest, and most flagrantly melodic record Earth's ever recorded, a true band album as much about drummer Adrienne Davies and organist Steve Moore.

Earth: The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull

The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull

Earth's "Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)" is a steady, sedate, chiming march, a primary-colored burst of guitars, organs, drums. For a man whose scuzzy, Melvins-mainlined Earth 2 remains the document for drone-and doom-minded depressives-- some of whom actually named their bands after Earth songs/guitar equipment-- Dylan Carlson's return as the Ennio Morricone of metal continues to confound. The band that borrowed their name from Sabbath's earliest, nuclear-paranoid incarnation have become optimists, purveyors of uplift. Where Earth once pounded chords flat, the newly reconfigured quartet pulls them out like taffy. "Miami Morning Coming Down" nods at Johnny Cash, spaghetti twang, gospel hymns; even Carlson's newest title, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull, turns his band's fearsome reputation inside out, offering up metal's ubiquitous skull as the birthplace of something sweet.
Earth's hiatus, from 1996 to 2002, turned Carlson into a cult figure, and his return was fretted about by the acolytes he'd picked up while he was gone. Sunn0))), Boris, and Sleep had turned Carlson's sound into a movement-- a slow one, to be sure-- waiting eagerly for his return. Perversely, he came back with 2005's Hex, or Printing in the Infernal Method instead, a demoniacally glacial deconstruction of the post-rock twang that had abounded in his absence. Hex was heavy in the sense that it kept time even as Carlson meandered and detoured and wandered through melodic progressions so spaced out they sounded like jazz; one thing it definitely wasn't was Sunn0))).
Carlson's concept for Bees was even more abstract. "After we did Hex, we thought, 'Let's do a kind of gospel record,'" Carlson told Pitchfork last year. Perhaps Carlson just meant strength in numbers: Bees is probably the most band-oriented thing Carlson's ever done, as much about drummer Adrienne Davies and organist Steve Moore as Carlson's guitar lines, which for the first time were added not first but last. The result is an imperceptible relay between keys, guitars, bass, and drums, with any given melodic line handed off three or four times in the course of a song. Over time, the parts stay the same, the instruments change, and time slows down-- after a while, the songs shrink down to exact moments, static pictures that morph so gradually you never spot the change.
Still, Bees is the biggest, cleanest, and most flagrantly melodic record Earth's ever recorded. "Omens and Portents I: The Driver" has the kind of mildly ominous, lazily distorted tone that soaks Beach House records, while "Omens and Portents II: Carrion Crow" offers up the exact same five-note ascending harmony as the Microphones' "I Love it So Much!" It's left to Davies to provide the weight: "I've always noticed that it's hard to get your playing down towards where your heartbeat is... It's all about keeping your heartbeat down, for me," she told Pitchfork. Carlson's always played slow, but six years of playing with Davies (and touring with bassist Don McGreevy) has given every Earth improv the same massive feel of doomy inevitability. Even as Carlson opens up, and looks up, Davies keeps his compositions anchored to the ground.
But what melodies. "Engine of Ruin" deadpans a kind of flat keyboard line which Carlson expands, alternately following along and filling in, stalking down every harmonic permutation. "Miami Morning Coming Down" has probably Carlson's purest and most ravishing pattern ever, a trebly rise and fall that triggers nostalgia, sunrise, sunset, panic, elation, resignation. For a heavy record, Bees spends a lot of time just staring into space, thinking.
When Earth started, in 1990, it was an oddball project among friends; Carlson was better known for being pals with an aspiring musician named Kurt Cobain than he was for being one in his own right. In a way, Bees feels as quixotic as anything he was doing then: where once he spent his days stripping down Sabbath to a single ringing chord, now he's stripping chords for parts. Amazingly, the results are just as huge. Who knew you could do so much so slowly?


The former Oasis frontman’s second solo album is pitched as a re-introduction, but forward motion—whether musical or personal—remains foreign to him.

Why Me? Why Not.

There’s a moment on “Halo,” the fifth song on Liam Gallagher’s Why Me? Why Not., where the rocker breaks down and a flute comes to the forefront in a flourish of purple psychedelia. At that precise moment, it’s hard not to think of “Halo” as a sideways dig at “Holy Mountain,” the pounding, flute-filled first single from Noel Gallagher’s 2017 album, Who Built the Moon? Then again, it’s generally hard to think of Liam Gallagher without thinking of his estranged sibling. More than being just brothers, the pair have historically had complementary strengths, with Noel providing Oasis their songs and Liam giving the band its voice and charisma.
Noel managed to shake off the ghost of Oasis, but that task has proven much harder for Liam to achieve. Why Me? Why Not. is Liam’s second solo album, arriving after a pair of albums by Beady Eye, a group that was effectively latter-day Oasis without Noel. Considering that Noel was the chief songwriter in Oasis, this was a problem. It’s not that Liam didn’t write. He began contributing to Oasis albums in 2000, once rock’n’roll excess and sibling stress started to take a toll on Noel, and Liam continued to contribute a few tunes every few years, always maintaining a respectable level of craft without ever threatening to approach his brother’s level of mastery.
Beady Eye eroded Gallagher’s sales but not his fame. Tabloids continued to pursue Liam not only because he was mired in personal troubles, but because he made good copy. Tales of divorce and illegitimate children kept him in the spotlight as he made the slow transition from lead singer to lone wolf. When he reintroduced himself as a solo singer in 2017 with As You Were, the move made sense, since he needed to draw a clear line between himself, Beady Eye, and Oasis. What is a mystery is why he’s chosen to replicate this same maneuver for Why Me? Why Not.
Accompanied by a documentary film that attempts to justify Gallagher’s wanderings in the aftermath of Oasis—a movie that quickly devolves into an extended press kit, where the moments of high drama involve a late-night Twitter meltdown where friends plead, “Put the phone down”—Why Me? Why Not. scans as a re-introduction, right down to its title. That’s hardly necessary, in part because Liam has spent half of his life as one of the most documented humans on Earth, but also because musical forward motion is a foreign concept to him. Ever since Oasis conquered the world in 1995, he’s settled for singing psychedelic pop tunes, earnest ballads, and glam-rock stompers, a combination that also fuels Why Me? Why Not.
The sound may remain the same but the vibe does not. Oasis were young men dreaming of escape, but Liam Gallagher is a middle-aged man who is happy to be here now; there is no hunger here, no yearning, just classy contentment. Familiarity is a tonic. Now, when Liam nods to the Beatles—“Once” opens with a melodic line reminiscent of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” “Meadow” has a slide guitar straight out of George Harrison—it’s not a matter of arrogance: The fleeting Fab Four allusions are intended as a secret bond between Gallagher and fans. Similarly, nothing on the album sounds exactly like Oasis—it’s all too controlled and studio-sculpted—but not a song here would’ve been imaginable without the Gallaghers’ enthusiastic embrace of classic rock tropes. “The River” rambles along to crunching chords and swirling organs; “One of Us” indulges in a bit of nostalgic mid-tempo melancholy; “Gone” achieves a bit of cinematic grandeur with its spaghetti Western orchestration.
Oasis never attempted to paint with such a colorful palette, and the increased level of professional craft is surely due to the presence of Greg Kurstin and Andrew Wyatt, producers and songwriters who also worked on As You Were. Kurstin and Wyatt were enlisted as collaborators because Gallagher recognized the limitations of his songwriting; he has no shame in this—it’s one of the plot points in the documentary. This pair, along with a handful of other behind-the-scenes musicians, help turn Liam’s ideas into songs, honing their hooks so they snag quickly and painlessly, polishing the production so it gleams like a wall of mirrors. Every trick in the book is here: sawing strings, fuzzy guitars, stacks of harmonies, all with sequenced rhythms that gently push Gallagher right into the mainstream of modern music circa 2009. Maybe it’s not exactly modern, but it’s closer than Gallagher has been in the past.
The team of producers on Why Me? Why Not. helps refine Gallagher’s sonic signatures, but it also pushes him into adult-alternative territory. Which means that Liam, the last great rock singer of the 20th century, is now a pop vocalist. Age has softened his rasp, a change he modulates by singing with precision, not abandon. It can be pleasurable to hear him sing with such restraint—he’s turning into a nuanced ballad singer, as evidenced by the sepia-toned “Once”—but the shift underscores how his musical and emotional range is restrained by his adherence to the past. This fundamental musical conservatism still has its charms, but as he gets older, it’s beginning to be overwhelmed by nostalgia. Where Liam Gallagher once yearned for years he never experienced, he’s now pining for his glory days, a shift that gives his purportedly friendly music an accidentally pensive undercurrent. Despite the shiny, bright surfaces, what’s left unspoken is that Liam is not quite ready to admit that he’s already had the time of his life and is not quite sure what to do next.


Six years after leaving Wolf Eyes, Aaron Dilloway releases a collection that feels like a major statement, even if it's made of wordless, sometimes harsh noise.

Modern Jester

It's been six years since Aaron Dilloway left Wolf Eyes, and he spent half that time making Modern Jester. That's not all he's done-- he's been involved in tons of other releases too, with my favorite being either 2007's rattling Chain Shot or 2008's The Squid, a collaboration with like-minded noise pal C. Spencer Yeh. But in terms of scope and ambition, Modern Jester is Dilloway's War and Peace. It covers practically all of his sonic obsessions, stretching them to lengths at which he can explore every detail and tangent. The result-- seven pieces encompassing four sides of vinyl-- feels like a major statement, even if it's made of wordless, sometimes harsh noise.
What exactly is Dilloway trying to say? That's open to interpretation, which is probably his intention. He's into ambiguity, both musically and discographically (he already released a tape called Modern Jester back in 2008, though only one track from that survives here). But as amorphous as his message may be, it's always about the power and attraction of loops. Each track here features some kind of repetitive cycle, whether it's off in the distance or up in your face. Some are lopsided and woozy; others are sharp and punchy; still others are so subtle they're more like ambient atmospheres or dense drones. But dig in deep enough, and you'll find Dilloway repeating some sound, whether miniscule or massive.
Those sounds flow together so seamlessly that he's often like a noise DJ, beat-matching his loops so it's hard to tell where each begins and ends. Aptly enough, the piece where he does that best is called "Body Chaos", a 19-minute journey taking up all of side two. Portions are like an alternate-universe dance track, as noises melt into each other, burst into anarchic climaxes, then recede into sparse echo. When Dilloway settles into that steady mode, Modern Jester becomes a travelogue where words and pictures are replaced by sonic textures.
Such naturalism makes sense given Dilloway's obsession with field recordings. He originally left Wolf Eyes to live in Kathmandu, where he amassed an archive of real-life audio. He released some of it in the fascinating 4xCD-R box set Sounds of Nepal, but he's also used it throughout his solo recordings, and I suspect parts are embedded in Modern Jester. Many moments feel environmental-- at points I imagine a train rolling down tracks, a printing press clacking out sheets of paper, and a power plant chugging smoke into the sky. And even when his music sounds more like a broken circuit or a skipping record, it has the primacy of life's routines-- the way the world seems to loop around you in repetitive patterns as you navigate your way through it.
That universality doesn't mean this album is for everyone. It takes some stamina to get lost in these lengthy sound essays. But then Dilloway has never done anything the easy way. If he tried to make his music more accessible, it would likely lose its core power. Instead, he's supremely patient, and he wants you to be, too. If you're up for it, Modern Jester rewards that patience infinitely.


On her first independent release, the pop star pivots to tamer themes and gives more lethargic performances, losing a lot of her spark in the process.

Dirt Femme

Dirt Femme is the first Tove Lo album you can play for your grandparents. It’s also her first independent release, which makes the family-friendly tone all the more confounding. On her major label records, Tove Lo blew past the boundaries of respectability: she sped down a highway getting head from a Muppet in the music video for “Disco Tits” and somehow got Universal to pay for it. Now, in apparent full creative control, the most explicit lyric she can muster is, “I prepared for tonight/Ate a pineapple slice for you.” It’s a mere wink from an artist better known for flashing her audience.
Why the shift? Tove Lo married producer Charlie Twaddle in 2020, but this album is no chronicle of newlywed sex. “I’m a pansexual woman married to a straight man,” she said when she announced Dirt Femme. This can be a lonely position for many queer women, who contend with assimilation into the heterosexual mainstream as well as “we get it christa you lived in madrid”-style exile from the queer community. Many tracks find Tove Lo struggling to bolster her own identity. “You’re the love of my life,” she sings, on the Soft Cell-sounding “Suburbia,” “but I can’t be your Stepford wife.” She worries about being obliterated by Hollywood (“Attention Whore”) and disordered eating (“Grapefruit”) but devotes most tracks to serious, stone-faced heteropessimism.
Sex is no longer a playground for Tove Lo, but a drama with life-and-death stakes. There is nothing like the breezy “Glad He’s Gone” or the gum-snapping “Cool Girl” on Dirt Femme. Instead, she offers track after track about the cruelties—and lethalities—of modern love. On synth-pop opener “No One Dies From Love,” she muses, “Guess we’ll be the first.” A corny reverb effect ruins the chorus, just as a Hot Butter (or Crazy Frog) sample sinks single “2 Die 4.” Amid amphibian riffs, Tove Lo and her lover disregard mortality, dancing at midnight on busy motorways. “True Romance,” an homage to the Quentin Tarantino script, manages to make a blown-out Bonnie and Clyde fantasy boring. Tove Lo delivers lyrics about killing and dying for love at the very outer limit of her belt, straining, never varying her volume to build tension. You can hear her gasping for breath between lines. Gone are Tove Lo’s upbeat odes to the little death; these days, her lyrics are genuinely fearful of the real thing.
Tove Lo’s collaborators do her few favors. Producer OzGo, who helmed “2 Die 4,” sanitizes her sexual yearning just as he buffed Marina’s moody edges on the lackluster Love + Fear. Rapper Channel Tres offers a pat verse on “Attention Whore” that adds about as much as Colby O’Donis did to “Just Dance.” Folk duo First Aid Kit are a funny match on the duet “Cute and Cruel,” not blending with Tove Lo’s electro-pop sensibility but keeping the song stuck firmly between gears. SG Lewis, who produced Dua Lipa’s “Hallucinate,” brings a fun energy to “Call on Me” and “Pineapple Slice,” but Ali Payami turns “I’m to Blame” into a country-pop ballad so weak Taylor Swift would have left it in the vault.
Tove Lo herself often sounds lethargic while singing these songs. She is contending with far more serious subject matter here than on, say, Sunshine Kitty; she is not enjoying herself. She is less daring, less awake, less alive to the pleasures of sex and love than she ever has been. When she sings, “I gotta get out of bed/I need a good kick/A kick in the head,” it’s easy to sympathize. It’s even easier to agree.


The singer's full-length follow-up to her influential 2011 album On a Mission finds her trying to write a new chapter in the story of post-millennial British pop: the artist who exploded out of the London underground and then crafted a sustainable career on her own terms, without relying on newer trends or reliable pop heavyweights.

Little Red

In the grand narrative of post-millenial British pop, Katy B is a crucial plot point. London’s culture of pirate radio stations has produced some of the world’s most vital music over this period, but those scenes—be it garage, grime, dubstep, or funky house—inevitably faced the glass ceiling that is the country’s pop charts. To be sure, tracks from the underground did eventually hit big: garage architect Artful Dodger scored massive pop hits with Craig David, while Dizzee Rascal and Wiley did the same for grime. But none of those breakthroughs were as smooth or as sudden as that of the singer Kathleen Brien, whose debut single, “Katy on a Mission”, shot straight out of the funky scene into the top five.
In doing so, she set the precedent for the rapid rise of artists like Jessie Ware, Disclosure, and Rudimental, the latter two of which defined British pop music in 2013 while also making quicker and more legitimate inroads in America than any of their peers before them. Katy certainly benefited from the groundwork laid by others over the years, but she proved that full-on pop stardom could be immediate. But now she is trying to write a new chapter: the artist who exploded out of the London underground and then crafted a sustainable career on her own terms, without relying on newer trends or reliable pop heavyweights.
Well, that second part is more like 98% true. Two songs on her sophomore album, Little Red, find Katy B collaborating with Guy Chambers, the co-architect of obscenely massive singles and albums by Robbie Williams. But you wouldn’t know that without looking closely at the credits; Little Red is purely the work of a singer redefining her voice. Though it can initially feel understated and even closed off, with repeated listens it detaches Katy B from a specific sound and establishes her as a pop star with a coherent point of view.
The most visible example of this, if not quite the best, is the current single “Crying For No Reason”, one of the cuts co-written with Chambers. A ballad that threatens to blossom into a disco song but never does, it'd be hailed as perfectly left-field if it was Adele’s comeback single (and it could be). But in the context of Katy’s career, it strips away the thump of house that has been her essence. She chooses to let the single live or die on her ability to sell the song vocally, and the soft grace with which she hits the slowly escalating notes is something like watching a gymnast: Katy steps carefully but with strength, never launching herself into the chorus but instead opting for a churning build. Her stunning performance of the track on Graham Norton’s late night show is a study in confidence and the power of tension.
Like “Crying For No Reason”, Little Red hangs on moments that reveal themselves over time. “All My Lovin’” sounds at first like one of her most generic songs, a ballad that flirts with American dubstep’s crushing drops. But the way Katy’s vocals rise out of the chorus is sublime, and by the time the synths start to slyly sound like a vocoder, it's one of the album's standouts. “Tumbling Down” is another mid-tempo song, but Katy sings the chorus melody like a feather slowly fluttering to the ground.
There are bangers, too. “Aaliyah”, the Ware duet carried over from Katy’s late-2012 Danger EP, is her most smartly-written song but also works as pure dancefloor euphoria. On “Everything”, Katy dons the crown of the diva over a tech house beat, and there she finds the sweet spot where yearning and control meet. Then there's “Emotions”, the album’s showstopper. It is yet another ballad, but this one turns up the drama almost immediately, with big synth stabs and tightly coiled strings. The climax is the one point where Little Red suddenly seems to become fully aware of the broader musical context: the drum'n'bass beat nods toward Rudimental smashes like “Waiting All Night”, but “Emotions” is constructed as a slow burn and thus has much more emotional resonance.
All that said, Little Red may be seen as a slight step down by many, and that’s not without reason. The album kicks off with the perfectly adequate but hardly spectacular duo of “Next Thing” and “5 AM”; “Sapphire Blue” and “Still” are two more ballads that sandwich “Emotions” and neither quite reveal their charms, with “Still” being particularly gloopy in a Celine Dion way. And though Katy has potentially charted the course for the rest of her career with Little Red, it lacks the inherent thrill of its predecessor On a Mission, an album of UK dance sounds aimed squarely at the top of the charts.
Still, this is a deft step for Katy B. She sheds the schoolgirl innocence that accented her debut and dives deeper into herself, probing love, lust, sorrow, glee, and power dynamics from all angles. Little Red is not the best album it could have been—a few of the bonus tracks should have made the album proper—but Katy displays a vision for her career that suggests an exciting future.