This week the legendary Sleater-Kinney returned with a new song, "Bury Our Friends", and word of a forthcoming album. The song was included as a single in Start Together, a vinyl box set containing remastered versions of all their full-length LPs. The records have lost none of their visceral power.

Start Together

"World domination is what I want for Sleater-Kinney." I am wont to believe Carrie Brownstein when the Sleater-Kinney guitarist, then 21, qualified this 1996 assertion by shrugging it off as a joke. She was, in all likelihood, alluding to the mainstream-affixed mantra of Seattle's blown-up grunge scene, which her own band's roots in the nearby punk-feminist community of Olympia opposed. Like Bikini Kill and Fugazi before them, Sleater-Kinney would never succumb to the beckoning of major labels. And in 1996, with their crass punk insurrectionism, the idea of mass success was laughable. Of course, Brownstein's reputation for regional parody on "Portlandia" now precedes her. "We're never going to be huge like Pearl Jam or something," she said in that interview, "but I want more people to have access to our music, not just the geeky kids." Seven years later, in 2003, during the beginnings of the Iraq War, Sleater-Kinney played its first of many arena-sized gigs—on tour with Pearl Jam.
From 1994 to 2006, Sleater-Kinney seemed to have it all. The trio of Brownstein, singer-guitarist Corin Tucker, and (from '96 on) drummer Janet Weiss created and then fervently revised one of the most distinctive sounds in rock: The friction of their overlapping voices—Brownstein's monotone speak-sing anchoring Tucker's wild vibrato—had an ecstatic, unusual beauty. The expressive longing of Tucker's alone was a gift, like Kathleen Hanna's hardcore holler aspiring to the quasi-operatics of Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson. Tucker is perhaps the first punk singer to attempt such a thing while worshipping the enormity of, say, Aretha Franklin, channeling lessons from the Queen of Soul into her own singing, holding onto moments for dear life and then projecting them to the heavens, becoming Queen of Rock.
In practice, Sleater-Kinney were humble, imageless indie-rockers; in song, they demanded icon status. This streamlined set, Start Together, captures that dichotomy, archiving the Sleater-Kinney canon with care: from the ideological-punches of thirdwave feminism to their post-riot grrrl classic rock revisionism, all seven albums have been remastered and paired with a plainly gorgeous hardcover photobook, as well as the surprise of a reunion-launching 7" single. In all, Start Together tells the unlikely story of how this band carried the wildfire of '90s Oly-punk to pastures of more ambitious musicality—a decade that moves from caterwauling shrieks to glowing lyricism, from barebones snark to Zep-length improv, from personal-political to outright (left) political.
Sleater-Kinney was consciously about rock'n'roll. Lou Reed sang for Jenny whose life was saved by rock; Ramones told us how Sheena became a punk. In 1994 there was no shortage of women plugging in—newly born classics included Hole's Live Through This, Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, the Breeders' *Last Splash—*but the lineage of larger-than-life stars, the deified behind-the-head-shredders, still had few instances of women delivering rock-as-saviour meta-narratives themselves. Sleater-Kinney turned the machismo of hippie-blooded '60s and '70s rock on its head: covers of Springsteen and CCR, homages to Kinks and the Clash, Brownstein's Pete Townshend windmills and shin-kicking swagger, Tucker's defiant declaration that "I make rock'n'roll!" A life-or-death seriousness is omnipresent with Sleater-Kinney, but they never rejected rock's base desires—sex, dancing, proverbial milkshakes—although sometimes they vaguely mocked them. Sleater-Kinney stole from men what men had in turn stolen from the margins: electrified blues that all still made girls scream.
The first Sleater-Kinney practice was in March of 1994. It was the spring that Kurt Cobain died. Hindsight paints it clear: Cobain's desire for a future-rock made by women dispersed into the universe. Brownstein and Tucker did Sleater-Kinney as a side-project to their respective bands, the queercore power-chord screams of Excuse 17 and soul-baring punk of Heavens to Betsy. Sleater-Kinney fused these politicized sounds, but as they grew—with affection for B-52's shimmy and Sonic Youth cool—they never let the punk rulebook limit their vision. Riot grrrl was fragmenting and they learned from its successes and failures—a radical streak pervaded their writerly Hüsker Dü-type storytelling—but they also fought to not be removed from the context of their foundation. The wiry blast of 1995's Sleater-Kinney is as good an indicator of Bikini Kill's influence as any feminist album since, echoing their sound as well as an interest in making punk become activism.
The debut is foremost a rejection of heteronormative sex, as Tucker and Brownstein were reckoning with life inside their bodies as women who approached sexuality fluidly. There's a song about how much sucking dick sucks, called "How to Play Dead"—it began Sleater-Kinney's mission of showing how society can silence women and minimize their problems. The urgency is real; all of Sleater-Kinney was scrappily-recorded in one night, on a trip to Australia, where they enlisted drummer Lora MacFarlane, who also kept-time on 1996's Call the Doctor. "A Real Man" is like an incendiary take on classic feminist text The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm: "Don't you wanna feel it inside/ They say that it feels so nice," Tucker gasps with visceral sarcasm. Call it clit-rock, I guess; over hard-style riffs, Tucker makes it clear she won't wait "to cum every time." Amid this whirlwind of pleasure and pain, which occasionally veers towards emo, Brownstein and Tucker's whispers erupt on "The Day I Went Away", one of two wistful songs that foreshadow Sleater-Kinney's impending greatness.
Sleater-Kinney continued feeding its appetite for destruction of archetypes on 1996's Call the Doctor. It improved their raw punk convictions in every way: more complex guitarwork, more distortion to intellectualize, more aggression and profound sadness. "Why do good things never wanna stay?" Tucker asks on "Good Things", an earnest stomach-twister of a teardrop tune, while the dire "Anonymous" wonders why its female protagonist is voluntarily unspoken. "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" uses tradition to infiltrate and subvert—the riff could be Ramones pushing Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" into the red—to cleverly protest the worship of male icons and spur revolution: "I wanna be your Joey Ramone/ Pictures of me on your bedroom door/ Invite you back after the show/ I'm the queen of rock and roll." It's a two-and-half-minute rock'n'roll joyride deserving of a gender studies thesis.
Tucker's fierce and vulnerable depictions of unconventional love marked the title track, where the dueling vocals first exploded. "It felt like something had opened up," Brownstein told Rolling Stone. "We just stopped. And [Corin] was like, ‘This is so awesome, you have to keep doing that.’ It felt like I had fused with her. This bolt of lightning had gone from my chest to hers." Call the Doctor landed at number three on The Village Voice’s then-influential critic’s poll. Their label, Chainsaw, couldn’t press copies fast enough.
Then, behold: Janet Weiss. She joined on 1997's breakneck Dig Me Out, an all-time great American punk statement, giving Sleater-Kinney the most crucial muscle a drummer can offer: not sheer force, but heart, taking the momentum to a new plane. Sleater-Kinney released their next four records with the larger Olympia feminist label, Kill Rock Stars, but none distilled the band's sound and attitude like Dig Me Out: sometimes brutal heartache, sometimes a menacing threat, always intelligent and extreme, there are enough hooks architected into these two- and three-minute songs to span several albums, but even the added dum-de-dum sugar seems as though it must be raw Portland agave.
"Little Babies" critiques stereotypes of motherhood, "Heart Factory" roars over synthetic emotions of the Prozac Nation, and the instantly classic "Words and Guitar" is an ode to rock that just feels necessary. At the peak of "The Drama You've Been Craving"—Tucker's "Kick it OUT!"—there are practically fireworks bursting on either side. Really, Dig goes from 0-to-100 within seconds of its opening salvo of a title track, which begs for transcendence from worldly oppression, "Outta this mess/ Outta my head." Unlike so much in the trajectory of punk, there is no nihilistic self-destruction in the face of chaos. More than skepticism, anti-consumerism, or the glories of tattoo art, punk teaches empathy, a principle Sleater-Kinney practiced with nuance. This is why Sleater-Kinney's music shines a light despite its loudness, why it is easy to be alone with the songs and feel protected. Sleater-Kinney would never forego the optimism to believe their songbook could make us smarter, angrier, more tender and hopeful. Dig Me Out dreams of a better future, clawing itself up with every note.
The highlight of Dig Me Out and Sleater-Kinney's career, "One More Hour" is one of the most devastating break-up songs in rock. "Oh, you've got the darkest eyes," Tucker and Brownstein quaver in unison—the song is about their own short-lived romance—and the way Tucker extends the last word, it is like she can't let them go. There are complex feelings near clear ones, which is what break-ups are: someone wants to untangle the mess, someone wants to snip it apart. "I needed it," Tucker howls, hardly distinguishing where one word ends and another begins. "One More Hour" is sublime sadness, a kind one can only know when staring at the end of something and wanting desperately for it not to be so.
This feeling would root 1999's atmospheric The Hot Rock: subdued and spiritual, it served a number of firsts for Sleater-Kinney, among them a slot on the Billboard charts (at 181). Tucker, Brownstein, and Weiss had never sounded so introspective, existential, and dark, so aesthetically poetic and conventionally pretty. The album's interlocking parts were influenced by the gentle alterna-pop of Go-Betweens and Yo La Tengo; voices intertwine gracefully, as if braiding together dreams and wounds. It's the Sleater-Kinney record you're most likely to play on a train while gazing out the window and getting lost in thought.
Brownstein and Tucker sang of personal becoming, the uncertainties of adulthood, dying relationships and technological paranoia—it was, after all, the year before tin-foil Y2K Bugs would signal the end civilization—sometimes with abstract metaphors. The jaw-dropping despair of Brownstein's wearied ballad "The Size of Our Love" has a lonely ambience, a love-story plaintively set between hospital walls: "The ring on my finger/ So tight it turns blue," she sings over a crying viola. "A constant reminder/ I'll die in this room/ If you die in this room." It's unsurprising that Brownstein has since catapulted her storylines to a mass scale: Comedians are professionals at manipulating our emotions, and if it is one's intention to make people laugh, it must help to have mastered the ability to make them cry.
The sun, ocean, and cosmos build the imagistic single, "Get Up". A staccato riff quilts the emphatic drumming, and the guitar tones are magic—had the band not called those natural elements out, it's evident that "Get Up" absorbed their expanses. Tucker's hovering speak-sing evokes Kim Gordon beaming down from an imagined heaven on Sonic Youth's "Tunic (Song for Karen)". Echoing Patti Smith as well, Tucker's words fly into the air as if given wings—"Goodbye small hands/ Goodbye small heart/ Goodbye small head"—zen-like as she watches her body go, "like a whole bucket of stars dumped into the universe." Sleater-Kinney didn't necessarily follow their '60s rock predecessors into ashram training, but this reflects the Eastern belief that when you die, you become a part of nature. Tucker works through primal desires—"Do you think I'm an animal? Am I not?"—and despite the textured makeover, The Hot Rock emerges as one of Sleater-Kinney's heaviest records.
Swinging back to capital-R Rock, 2000's All Hands on the Bad One was Sleater-Kinney's most straight-ahead arbiter of thirdwave feminism and also, surprisingly, their most jovial record. Sing-song guitar-pop turned up alongside plainspoken take-downs of sexism in music, and hints of new wave, girl-groups and Go-Gos mixed (cohesively, too) with some of their hardest whiplash-rippers. The enormously hooky "You're No Rock n' Roll Fun" taunts dry girl-averse indie snobs: "You're no rock'n'roll fun/ Like a piece of art that no one can touch!" the trio sang together, throwing "whiskey drinks and chocolate bars" at these guys to shake up the mood, 'cause why not? When Sleater-Kinney note how "the best man won't hang out with the girl BAA-AAND!" we're only left wondering why he'd pass on such fun.
Similar humor plays out on "Milkshake n' Honey", a Spinal Tap-esque wink at the debauched rocker/groupie complex, but the incisive messages make the best songs: "The Professional" uses charged surf-punk to condemn the marginalizing of women in music, "Male Model" dismantles the sexist canon and rejects investigations of women's authenticity. A lyrics sheet proves Bad One is Sleater-Kinney's most direct sloganeering, but it doesn't come off as such; Tucker's ferocity and Brownstein's French-sung interjections make it cool, even. "#1 Must Have" is the centerpiece, in which Tucker dissects the commodification of riot grrrl and—in light of the rapes at Woodstock in '99—powerfully asserts, "The number one must-have/ Is that we are safe." The song's lasting relevance can't be overstated.
The world was irreversibly changed by the time of 2002's One Beat, Sleater-Kinney's weightiest record. Adventuring with math rock and stomping horns, it was their most explicitly political album, grappling with the aftermath of 9/11 on "Far Away" and "Combat Rock". These songs reflected the national headspace as selflessly as any act of using someone's tragedy for art allows. Tucker questioned the all-or-nothing patriotism sweeping the U.S., and detailed her own experience that day with raw catharsis, calling-out the hidden President Bush, honoring those who served, and striving for a glimmer of kindness: "I look to the sky/ And ask it not to rain." One Beat was not all war songs—the bouncy organ-led love-anthem "Oh!" had glammy inflections, "Prisstina" chronicled an outcast's discovery of rock. The closer, "Sympathy", rips instrumentation from "Sympathy for the Devil" but inverts its theme, a prayer for the life of Tucker's premature-born child: "There is no righteousness in your darkest moment," Tucker belts, "We're all equal in the face of what we're most afraid."
Even the scope of One Beat couldn't predict Sleater-Kinney's monstrous phase-one farewell, 2005's The Woods. The band's appeal had become that of the indie rock mainstream, and a suburban high-schooler (such as myself, then) could readily learn of The Woods' greatness from the same weirdo dude-friends who repped new CDs by Queens of the Stone Age, the White Stripes, and Wilco (like I did). Sleater-Kinney had just played arenas with Pearl Jam, bending notes into heavier, looser sounds, when they journeyed upstate New York to track The Woods with producer David Fridmann, himself only two years removed from helping turn Flaming Lips' 2002 opus Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots into a wider breakout.
When your best work is also your most uncompromising and unintelligible, you have accomplished a considerable artistic feat—this was the The Woods. It was tracked live with more distortion than usual, giving it a freneticism, a deranged euphoria. "[Friddman would] say things to Janet like, 'Play like Keith Moon, but Keith Moon with a blanket coming down over him,'" Tucker said. That possessed orchestra-of-rhythm translated. The album's heaving 11-minute mega-solo, "Let's Call It Love", and the soulful echo "Night Light", comprise a grandiose jam colored in Deep Purple. Zep riffs abound. "Entertain" is an atypical military march, declaring war on hollow retro rock; its "woah-oh-ohs" are more like shields than exaltations. "You come around looking 1984/ You're such a bore, 1984/ Nostalgia, you're using it like a whore"—Brownstein's Orwellian invocation opposes this music with a far more poetic dismissal than "Fuck Interpol." Sleater-Kinney's first six records gave a lens through which we might imagine a feminist rewrite of classic rock; The Woods is a front-row seat.
"Jumpers" was inspired by a New Yorker piece on suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge—"the intensity of feeling that you can't find meaning in your life, so you need to find meaning in your death," Brownstein said—which oddly befit the band's decision to end on top. "Modern Girl" is Sleater-Kinney's most timeless song, impressionistic as closing one's eyes and staring at the brightest star: "My whole life was like a picture of a sunny day," Brownstein sings, like Sleater-Kinney's "Yesterday". But embedded in the soft twinkle is a critique of the consumer culture Sleater-Kinney resisted. (They despised the new proposition of a career-shifting iPod commercial.) The band stopped just as independent music was becoming more financially significant—2004 was the year future indie-Grammy-holders Arcade Fire landed*—*but traditional notions of integrity were also growing complicated. Brownstein was strangely prophetic: "I took my money/ And bought me a TV/ TV brings me closer to the world." This is music you make when you can sense it's one more hour 'til the walls close in.
Little is concrete in rock'n'roll—at the very least, its pivotal moments have often been shrouded in discrepancy and myth. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the first guitar hero; no, Robert Johnson. Pete Townshend's guitar-smashing was auto-destructive art; no, Townshend's wrecked guitar was privilege. Elvis is dead; Elvis is in Las Vegas. Punk started in London—no, New York—girls started punk rock, not England. But there are unequivocal truths of Sleater-Kinney's career. Objectively, the trio was born of riot grrrl, an underground band that started with two girls together in a living room and became the movement's greatest critical success and so much more: an initial seven-album streak worthy of setting in stone eternal. There is an overcast art-print that accompanies Start Together, set at a weathered race track: Tucker is pounding pavement with a raised fist, Weiss is caught in a fierce skip, and Brownstein, in the middle, has both arms extended skyward, cracking a smile as if she just crushed a marathon. In reality, the band was only just beginning. Sleater-Kinney look invincible there, triumphant even, like superheroes, and if Start Together proves a thing, it is that with passion, persistence, and unwavering purpose, ordinary people can become them.


On this collection of remixes from Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s 2016 LP, the latter artist flexes his mastery at deconstructing beats and samples—occasionally transforming the mood of a track.

Yes Lawd! Remixes

When Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge dropped Yes Lawd! on Stones Throw at the end of 2016, they entered the label’s lineage of underground superduos like Jaylib and Madvillain, pairing a vocalist and a producer with complementary styles, with shared ancestors on their musical family tree. They largely lived up to the tradition, lacing what would otherwise be a classic tape from the L.A. Beat Scene with .Paak’s soulful R&B vibe. Each artist stepped slightly outside his comfort zone, and in the process, proved that together they really do have the range.
For Yes Lawd! Remixes, .Paak’s vocals are recycled from the original LP, making this collection all about Knxwledge flexing his mastery at deconstructing beats and samples. That they’re his beats to begin with does nothing to diminish his technical prowess. The producer has an uncanny understanding of the function and importance of each instrument, expertly wielding them for effect. He doesn’t have to change much to completely alter the vibe. On “Alltypeofchnces,” he swaps out crunchy static for clean pickwork from an electric guitar; on the “Wngs (Remix),” the track is completely transformed by swapping the drum kit for a dominant percussive bassline. The macabre strings on “Lyk Dis (Remix)” transform its mood from a sexy bedroom jam to something more depressive.
Projects like this seem to flow from Knxwledge like water—his Bandcamp page currently offers a staggering 84 albums for sale—and he somehow manages to improve a number of the tracks on this already stellar LP. The original “Suede” impersonated the warm tones of Brian Jackson’s Fender Rhodes, which the remix abandons in favor of airy atmospherics worthy of a Sade record. “Best One” was already lovely, with a smooth organ melody, but the remix manages to be both crunchier and more lush, as the organ takes a backseat to somber strings and what sounds like a vibraphone. It’s gorgeous, and makes the additional “Chppd” version seem superfluous.
By its very nature, the Yes Lawd! Remixes were always going to be less consistent than the originals. Knxwledge is essentially disassembling a completed puzzle and re-fitting the pieces back together, occasionally to its detriment. The “Kutless” remix sounds completely Xan’d out, all the energy drained from the original, and the new version of “H.A.N.” has a distracting warble that doesn’t add much to what was Yes Lawd!’s standout track. If nothing else, though, these remixes offer a compelling glimpse into the mind of one of the game’s most talented beat architects, a sample artist freaking his own samples. He doesn’t always stick the landing, but the moments in which he does make it worth the effort.


With the energy and conviction of a debut, the intuitive singer-songwriter returns with a dazzling folk album that contends with the long grip of grief and the belief that it will steadily loosen.

Keeper of the Shepherd

Not so long ago, Hannah Frances’ dazzling voice often got lost in the sounds around it. At the start of 2018’s White Buffalo, a fingerpicked acoustic guitar was enough to swallow her poignant opening words about the ways that time steals our chances to love. Frances was still new to her 20s, a recent art school dropout who had decamped to New York a year after her father died of a heart attack. The songs soon emptied out of her, three records’ worth in a little more than a year. As she lurked beneath the layers, she seemed to be hiding as much from herself as from the listener, trying to untangle a knot of woes in the private recesses of a quiet song. There were still traces of this during 2021’s very good Bedrock, her relatively loud and full-band contemplation of how to find redemption amid life’s wreckage. She would disappear behind the music, as if she still needed the space to sort these things out for herself.
There are no such retreats on Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances’ epiphanic fifth album but the first in which she fully grapples with what is possible when we finally step out of grief and into the rest of our lives. Her voice—a commanding alto one moment and a swan-diving soprano the next, often multi-tracked to give her words the credence of gospel—remains always at the fore, leading a compact band that can be as quiet as a creek or as rapturous as a waterfall. A triumph of perseverance, of trying to live alongside your fear rather than always underneath it, Keeper of the Shepherd has the inexorable energy of an auspicious debut, a set of songs that have simply been waiting to spring forth. Imagine if the love-riven Sharon Van Etten of Epic and Tramp had retreated, as Frances has, to the maple woods of Vermont rather than the concrete wilds of Los Angeles; it might sound a lot like the mighty Keeper of the Shepherd.
Many years ago, Frances found that the alternate guitar tunings that Joni Mitchell used enhanced her relationship with the instrument, augmenting her intuitive connection with its strings. Her work lingered in that gilded folk space for years, and she occasionally returns to it in these seven songs. With its big, open chords and subtly bent notes galloping beneath her, “Floodplain” feels a little like Mitchell and John Fahey sitting beside a campfire during a springtime road trip through the American Southwest. The long, interwoven phrases of “Woolgathering” suggest some unused Hejira skeleton, as if Mitchell never found the proper riposte to stick inside its graceful lope.
But for much of Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances’ intuitive instrumental patterns are only springboards for uncanny song structures, methodically built by Frances and producer and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Copeland. There is more than a touch of genteel prog around its folk core, situating Frances somewhere among Joanna Newsom, Jeff Buckley, and Fleet Foxes. Opener “Bronwyn” rises and falls, jerks and jumps as if on some ramshackle carousel, always about to slip into hell or ascend into heaven. Tangled wisps of saxophone curl around the dub-like strut of closer “Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave,” all of it blurring into a paisley dream after a brief cool-jazz interlude. Frances suffered a bout of writer’s block before these songs arrived in a rush; their scope and flexibility are gifts of endurance, of sticking with it.
That lesson is written into every song here, as Frances contends with the long grip of grief and her belief that it will steadily loosen. Frances returns to a small set of images—caves, shepherds and their sheep, ribs and rivers—repeatedly across these 37 minutes, allowing her to make a map of her own progress. In “Bronwyn,” it’s loss that rips through her chest, expanding her rib cage until her body warps like the distorted drums beneath her; two songs later, in “Woolgathering,” she is breathing in a new love and life. “Give me time to free my lungs,” she sings, like Vashti Bunyan in an electrostatic haze, “the ribs are loosening.” Frances says she often sequences her albums in the order in which she wrote the songs; witness her inching forward into her own life.
Frances might come across like some precious emissary of sylvan New Age yuppiedom, trapped somewhere between a favorite yoga studio in town and a preferred farmstand in the country. She is, after all, a self-described “movement artist” who makes earnest music videos amid lush evergreen landscapes and does interpretive dance to her own songs in the near-dark on the Olympic Peninsula. “As my writing is inextricable from my kinship with the land,” she wrote recently in her newsletter, “I weave ecological imagery and archetype to recount my personal mythology more expansively, more richly.”
Yes, that reads like a lot, but it’s also true: Frances’ songs betray a genuine rootedness in the world around her, an understanding that loss can lead to growth if given enough space and time. This is the most natural cycle on the planet. “Floodplain” wonders what it’s like to have your past washed away like debris on a riverbank, “Vacant Intimacies” to find a shelter that actually gives back. These are things Frances has seen, felt, internalized, and now sung. At the end of “Husk,” after she has pondered the toggle between life and loss for four steadily intensifying minutes, the taut strings and harmonies fall away, leaving her voice unencumbered at last. “Death is a husk,” she offers with unqualified clarity. “Holding the shape of my life.” Keeper of the Shepherd is an arrival, not only of a transfixing singer-songwriter who has made a stunning record but also of a person realizing they are more than the pain of their past.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Cyndi Lauper’s massive debut, a slyly feminist new wave pop record whose undeniable singles helped usher in the MTV era.

She’s So Unusual

As Cyndi Lauper leaped around singing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” on The Tonight Show in 1984, it seemed like she might never put down the microphone. After she kicked off her stilettos, danced with her backup singers, sprinted back and forth repeatedly from the monitors at the front of the stage to the drum kit in the rear, and belted out the final refrain enough times to ensure that every spectator would be singing it for the rest of the day, the song only ended with the musicians stumbling one by one to a halt: some of them ready to wrap up, and others apparently willing to continue accompanying Lauper until the end of time.
“If I wasn’t doing this, Johnny, I might’ve been a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist,” she told Johnny Carson afterwards, refastening her heels and adjusting her jewelry. “A visiting professor at Harvard,” he offered in return. Though the host’s response had a note of condescension for this young woman singer who’d just spent the last several minutes exalting the virtues of a good time above all else, it’s clear that she was in on the joke. There would be no rocket science or brain surgery for Cyndi Lauper: not because she was too fizzy and fun-loving to learn how, but because she was born to perform.
There are only three original songs on She’s So Unusual, Lauper’s 1983 debut. Years before its release, she’d been the frontwoman of a cover band. She didn’t need to write songs to express her immense natural talent as a performer. Instead, she used the words of men to illuminate her assertive vision of womanhood, each impassioned yelp a detonation inside its source material. Lauper waffled about ascribing deeper feminist meaning to songs like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” but there’s a gravity in her vibrato that’s hard to shake. She brought the weight of her past—her childhood growing up in an abusive home, her battles against male industry gatekeepers—into that music. Her voice walks the line between desperation and the self-assurance she gained from playing in bars night after night. It begs, with its technical skill, to be taken seriously, yet is softened by Lauper’s cartoonish inflections that garnered frequent comparisons to actresses like Bernadette Peters more than contemporary female rockers like Pat Benatar. “That’s all they really want,” she belted on “Girls” with more than a hint of indignation, as if to say, Is that seriously so much to ask?
With She’s So Unusual, Lauper shoehorned rebellion into the familiar, both musically and visually: Who else would play a 1920s song written for the real-life Betty Boop wearing tulle fingerless gloves and a mullet? With her taste for synthesizer-driven disco (she apparently met with Giorgio Moroder once, but he seemed to dislike that she called him “George”), Lauper helped to usher in an electronic era for popular rock. After decades of being rejected by her peers, local bands, and record labels, Lauper wanted not just acceptance, but an embrace, of not just her quirks, but of eccentricity itself. She’s So Unusual imagined a world where women danced through New York in ruffle skirts and combat boots, partied with a sense of purpose, and were just as powerful at their most vulnerable as their most ferocious.
Born and raised working-class in New York City’s outer boroughs, Lauper was too stubborn and strange to succeed at school socially or academically. Her parents, both casually musical, divorced by the time she was five. She and her older sister Elen spent the rest of their adolescence, in Lauper’s words, “dodging pedophiles and the crazy folks,” including their stepfather and grandfather. Cyndi left home at 17 to live with Elen on Long Island, where she worked as a “hot walker” for racehorses at Belmont Park, singing Hare Krishna mantras into their ears to calm them down. In her free time, she auditioned for cover bands that traveled the Long Island bar circuit. By 1974, she landed a gig as a backup singer, and was soon asked to step up for brief solos: “Lady Marmalade,” “Tell Me Something Good.” Once it became clear that Lauper’s voice worked best front and center, she became a permanent lead.
Cover bands were an ideal proving ground for Lauper. With her four-octave range and irreverent sense of humor, she reimagined the pop canon, imbuing it with her particular sense of wonder toward the world. Just as she would after finding stardom years later, she twisted other peoples’ words to her own will, cracking songs open to reveal new meanings beneath their popular interpretations. It’s hard to hear her sing Jackie Wilson’s “Baby Workout” and miss how enthralled she seems by her own delivery, adding extra vocal runs as if it’s as easy as breathing. And Lauper’s particularities as a performer offered a counterintuitive kind of universal appeal: If this highly unusual woman with a neon orange buzzcut who spoke like a streetwise Minnie Mouse could convincingly inhabit music from Jefferson Airplane, or the Rolling Stones, or Prince, then maybe those songs were for everyone.
Still, she aspired to more than singing other people’s hits. “If you sing ‘White Rabbit’ one more time, just shoot yourself,” she remembered thinking at the time. By the end of the decade, she had formed her own group, the rockabilly-inspired Blue Angel, with John Turi, a saxophonist from her cover band. Critics loved them; they toured with Hall and Oates and the Human League. Lauper was the kind of singer everyone wanted to sign as a solo artist—“Like Chrissie Hynde and Deborah Harry, Lauper possesses the vocal ability to make her stand out,” Billboard raved at the time—but she held out until Polydor agreed to sign Blue Angel as a full band.
It didn’t quite work out: After a batch of expensive failed demos, a subsequent lawsuit, and a debilitating vocal cyst, Lauper began the 1980s bankrupt and out of the music industry. She started working at Screaming Mimi’s, the Manhattan costume vintage store where she honed her singular sense of style, combining layered neon skirts with punk’s jagged industrial edges. She hired a vocal coach and connected with David Wolff, who became her longtime manager and boyfriend. By 1983, she found herself in the studio with Turi and producer Rick Chertoff, recording her first album under her own name.
Chertoff, an Arista veteran and Clive Davis disciple, saw Lauper as a mouthpiece more than a creative force, someone who could give life to a batch of songs he had been collecting, with his college buddies Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian of Philadelphia group the Hooters (named after the melodica, of course) backing her up. His selections were scattered: a cult classic from the short-lived pop rock group the Brains (“Money Changes Everything”), a little-known love song by Jules Shears (“All Through the Night”), Prince’s quietly bitter “When You Were Mine.” Lauper’s delivery clearly inflects the latter song’s meaning, her howl supplanting Prince’s coy plausible deniability with an unmistakable sense of raw, real rejection. It was Lauper’s job to make these disparate selections cohere, not just with her singing, but also with her slightly left-of-center musical taste. For She’s So Unusual’s arrangements, she wanted a fusion of synth-pop with reggae and ska; something that sounded like both the Clash and Grace Jones. Just like in her years on the cover circuit, she was forging a voice for herself from the material in front of her.
Not every song Chertoff pitched landed with Lauper. She initially balked at what would become the album’s first single, a throwback rockabilly song from an unknown writer named Robert Hazard called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” In the original version, Hazard’s male protagonist blames his listless life on the behavior of the women he knows, who understandably just want to relax after work. To Lauper, the lyrics sounded vapid and misogynistic. With some rewriting (and backing vocals) from Brill Building legend Ellie Greenwich, she found a second life for the song as a generational rallying cry. For Lauper, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” spoke to the repressed lives of her mother and grandmother, who were barred from any semblance of a social life outside the home. Changing only a few words—instead of Hazard lamenting that “All my girls have got to walk in the sun,” Lauper exclaims, “I want to be the one to walk in the sun”—they transformed the song’s perspective: from that of a moping burnout trying to placate his disappointed parents to a frustrated woman trapped by staid societal expectations of settling down.
Hazard sounded on the verge of tears in his version, his warbling Elvis Costello impression jostled about by the song’s breakneck guitar. Lauper, over synthesizers, gated snares, and a tempo that significantly slows Hazard’s original, sounds triumphant. The more relaxed pace fit Lauper’s delivery, the sound of a woman confidently making her demand for leisure, rather than a boy freaking out about his dating prospects. Her alternating staccato and extended vocals in the song’s opening verse lend a human element with their variations and slight imperfections, balancing out the slick and garish Memorymoog synth. Her vocal hiccups, inspired by Roy Orbison’s, act as the verbal counterpart to the marimba-like synth solo at its center. “Girls” reflected her vision of an electronic ska record, any incongruities between styles patched over by the theatrical flair of her singing.
There is a sad irony in the creation of She’s So Unusual: an album about an ostensibly liberated woman, whose creator was surrounded by men who wanted to control her artistic vision. Even “She Bop,” a thinly veiled ode to self-pleasure that was one of the album’s few original singles, came from a directive from the songwriter Steve Lunt, who insisted that “no other girl has done this before.” So Lauper, who never envisioned herself as a glorified cover singer, was ecstatic when Chertoff asked her and the Hooters team for one more original song to complete the album. She went back to the studio with Hyman, stood next to his piano, and began to sing over a four-chord progression he had put together.
Hyman and Lauper were both dealing with issues in their romantic relationships, the kind of messiness that comes with detangling lives spent together. He referenced a “suitcase of memories” that he carried around with him after his breakup. She thought of the clock Wolff brought back from his mother after he broke hers, its wind-up tick so unbearably loud that she moved it to the bathroom, only to hear it through the walls. The unwinding second hand of the first verse was real, too: Chertoff’s watch had become demagnetized, and he excitedly showed its machinery moving backwards to Lauper and Hyman in the studio. “Time After Time” used these metaphors to capture the sadness of a breakup: the slow-building resentment in a relationship like a metronome that won’t shut off, or the logic-defying bond between two ex-lovers that can erase years in minutes.
Hyman and Lauper originally wrote “Time After Time” with the ska-inspired uptempo groove that drives other She’s So Unusual tracks like “Witness.” But as they continued working, it became clear to them that this song would require a gentler treatment, one inflected with the conflicted feelings of nostalgia, betrayal, hopefulness, and acceptance. That ambiguity is the song’s strength, never fully giving into the sentimental desire for reconciliation or the petty urge to burn bridges. When Miles Davis began to work the song into his set a year after its release, he pulled on those threads, heightening both its triumph and its sadness with his improvisations, just as Lauper made songs her own as a cover singer a decade prior.
The album’s sound was only part of its success. Released the same year as MTV came on the air, She’s So Unusual had a symbiotic relationship with the nascent television channel; Lauper hosted its first-ever New Year’s Eve broadcast to close out 1983. At the time of its release, music videos were a relatively new concept: “Brief, Bizarre Films Rekindle Record Industry’s Hopes,” the Wall Street Journal reported that year. The video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” looked like Lauper’s life: volumes of hair and fabric heretofore thought unimaginable (styled by Screaming Mimi’s, of course), New York as its centerpiece, a cameo from her own mother. Though the concept might seem trite today—a singer dancing through the streets with a gaggle of backup dancers—its reimagining of a song away from a simple stage performance was groundbreaking at the time.
The video also featured professional wrestler Lou Albano as Lauper’s disapproving father, the start of a strange PR campaign cooked up by Wolff in which the singer and the wrestler took part in an ongoing staged feud. Lauper credits the wrestling connection with jumpstarting the album’s sales, but from today’s perspective it looks like just another male directive boxing her in: it’s painful to watch her repeatedly credit Albano and his “P.E.G. principles” (politeness, etiquette, and grooming) in interviews and performances around the album.
When Lauper performed on The Tonight Show, after bantering with Carson about her alternate career options, she broke the fourth wall and addressed the crowd directly: “You guys don’t know, but he’s got this whole thing back here,” she said in her over-the-top New York accent. She gestured at Carson’s elaborate set design, apparently fascinated with the artifice of it all, and wanting to bring the audience with her on her journey. She wasn’t some slick industry creation, just a strange kid from Queens, more like the people in the crowd than she was like Carson. She made pop music for outcasts and oddballs: the kind of artist who entered the homes of Americans watching MTV by dancing through the streets of New York and inviting every passerby to join in. Years later, she would win a Tony for her songwriting for Kinky Boots, the unlikely hit musical she wrote with “Time After Time” collaborator Hyman about drag queens and shoe cobblers, applying her career-long belief in the universal appeal of the particular. Lauper succeeded by harnessing the power of the underdog, a quiet majority that she knew was desperate for a voice. As she told Creem in 1984, “There’s a lot of us, aren’t there?”


On the three albums that compose The Centennial Trilogy, the New Orleans horn player and composer pays tribute to the American jazz tradition by tapping into the legacy of fusion.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Ruler Rebel / Diaspora / The Emancipation Procrastination

The Centennial Trilogy

Depending on the decade, jazz artists who mix advanced improvisation with popular music might be required to engage in some tough lobbying—of audiences, critics, or even fellow players. We are not currently living in one of those eras. Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, and Esperanza Spalding have all built imposing reputations thanks, in part, to their adaptation of pop textures.
In this environment, fusion seems not merely legitimate or acceptable, but desirable. It’s a far cry from the early 1990s, when a talented saxophonist like Greg Osby could work with elite hip-hop producers and become the target of too-easy jokes. (Osby’s 3-D Lifestyles is now ripe for reappraisal.) That means the challenge before today’s fusion-oriented artists is not to defend the organizing principle, but rather to distinguish the execution.
In 2015, trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah formally debuted his fusion concept of “stretch music,” with an album of the same name. Over the course of three releases this year—Ruler Rebel, Diaspora, and now The Emancipation Procrastination—Adjuah has continued to hone his strategies. Together, Adjuah calls them The Centennial Trilogy, in honor of the 100-year anniversary of the song often considered the first jazz recording.
At points throughout Stretch Music, it was possible to pick apart Adjuah’s main ingredients, mid-song: a bit of soul-jazz driving the beat during solos before a rush of hip-hop-influenced percussion delivered a track’s hook. On the best portions of The Centennial Trilogy, the stirring happens more slowly and the flavors blend more fluidly over the course of the project.
Early in Ruler Rebel, we are introduced to “New Orleanian Love Song,” a melancholic, feverish track that presents Adjuah’s arcing trumpet lines over rhythms built up from samplers and African percussion instruments. The tune that follows is called a remix, but it feels like a complete rearrangement: A piano-driven melody is similar to that of the original take, but instead of moving through legato phrases, the line has turned staccato and nervy—the sort of motif you might hear in a track from E-40’s production shop.
On “Phases,” blending Sarah Elizabeth Charles’ ethereal vocals with burbling percussion programming yields a ballad influenced by trap music’s sonics. Ruler Rebel’s closing track, “The Reckoning,” draws from the clatter of drum ‘n’ bass and the sustained tones of ambient. With these reference points firmly established, Diaspora has a more relaxed, casual air. Throughout, Adjuah departs from acoustic-jazz practice by freely overdubbing his solos, most noticeably on “Idk.” That choice can help a listener acclimate to Adjuah’s overall environment, rather than living or dying with each improvised riff.
After two releases filled with high-concept fusion, some listeners might be hungry for solos that hang around longer and aren’t so beholden to the mood of the production. Adjuah delivers exactly this on The Emancipation Procrastination. It is also here that he more willingly invites associations with past styles. The prominent use of electric guitar suggests a vintage rock-fusion approach, and soulful Fender Rhodes playing by Lawrence Fields often seems like it’s channeling some of Miles Davis’ late-1960s sound.
The lengthy closing number, “New Heroes,” features some of the most exciting instrumental interplay of the entire series. Adjuah’s trumpet, Elena Pinderhughes’ flute, and Braxton Cook’s alto saxophone all take turns shining. Adjuah reserves the last solo for himself, letting rip with some of his most ecstatic riffs. Sometimes he growls through his horn. At other points he lets loose with some piercing cries. Eventually, he settles on a final texture, one both burnished and regal. It’s the sound of a player confident not just in his chops, but fully at home in his own compositional world.


The record that marks the end of Magnetic Fields' self-imposed "no synth trilogy" is also the first Magnetic Fields album in a more than a decade that isn't organized around a formal limitation.

The Magnetic Fields: Love at the Bottom of the Sea

Love at the Bottom of the Sea

Over the past decade, the Magnetic Fields have put out a trio of rigorously formalist albums, each of which, with the clinical exactitude of a lab report, handed the listener a tidy intellectual conclusion about pop music. Even the stuff we perceive to be "confessional" songwriting is just a parade of characters and personas (citation: i, an album-length meditation on the first person pronoun), every simple melody sounds a little bit better when buried under an avalanche of Jesus and Mary Chain-grade scuzz (see: the aptly titled Distortion), and music made with "real" instruments like acoustic guitars and ukuleles can easily sound just as artificial as music made on computers and synthesizers (the folksy yet artifice-guilded Realism).
With a frontman iconically haughty enough to be a feasible answer to a New York Times crossword puzzle clue (L.A.-by-way-of-East Village curmudgeon; 14 letters)-- it has been especially easy during this run of albums to dismiss the Magnetic Fields as Ivory Tower pop, wrapped up in the cleverness of their own ideas and out of touch with the world below. But a quick glance around the cultural landscape shows Stephin Merritt's inquires to be pointedly, perennially relevant: There's Dave Grohl at the Grammys, professing the very conceit that Realism poked fun at; here's a whole slew of underground lo-fi bands taking Distortion's dictum as gospel; there's the same voice that yelled "Judas!" at Robert Zimmerman shouting a whole string of unprintables at Lizzy Grant.
At the endless, stuffy cocktail party where everyone's going on about authenticity in music, Merritt's formalist convictions feel, at best, like a refreshingly icy gust of wind coming in through an open door. Or, at least, in theory. Because as interesting as these records might have been to think about or discuss, the fact is that their listenability varied greatly, with the most recent, the overstuffed Realism, pretty much unendurable as a front-to-back experience. Another tidy truth about pop music: You can't have a conversation about a record if you've never met another person who has cared to sit through it twice.
For anyone who found the Magnetic Fields' recent work too tethered to formal shtick-ery-- or who just missed the amiable synth-pop sound of Holiday or Get Lost-- the first few notes of their latest, Love at the Bottom of the Sea, peal like potential chimes of freedom. The record marks the end of their self-imposed "no synth trilogy," and its opening track, the bleakly comic "Your Girlfriend's Face" is the first Magnetic Fields track to feature a synthesizer since 1999's 69 Love Songs. Is this a return to form, or could it even be the beginning of a whole new direction? That seems possible on paper, since Love at the Bottom of the Sea is also the first Magnetic Fields album in a decade and a half that isn't organized around some kind of formal limitation. So is this record an exercise in liberation, an opportunity to explore bigger ideas, take risks, and reinvent the project as Merritt has so many times before? Well-- and isn't this becoming the damnedest phrase when it comes to this band-- in theory.
From the start, Love at the Bottom of the Sea seems to be a more welcoming listen than Realism. Two minutes in, we're greeted with an instant classic "Andrew in Drag", easily one of the band's best tracks since 69 Love Songs. It's sharply funny ("A pity she does not exist/ A shame he's not a fag," Merritt laments, "The only girl I'll ever love is Andrew in drag"), but it doesn't have the punchline-crazed flatness that some of his more self-consciously jokey songs do. Though just two minutes long, "Andrew in Drag" is an efficient, elegantly crafted character study, and once the initial jolt of its punchline wears away, it remains a surprisingly affecting parable about unattainable desire ("Ill never see that girl again/ He did it as a gag/ I'll pine away forevermore for Andrew in drag") that smartly, swiftly ends before it has a chance to become maudlin. And while the droll tableau "God Wants Us to Wait" doesn't quite have much in the way of emotional resonance, it still sets the album off to a strong start thanks to a few vividly goofy turns of phrase ("I guess it's true I should have told you before/ And not have waited 'til we're nude on the floor") and a catchy, Shirley-Simms-voiced melody.
But after these frontloaded highlights, it doesn't take long for Love at the Bottom of the Sea to become a rain-boot-worthy slog through water-logged mid-tempo material: There's a particularly plodding song called "I'd Go Anywhere With Hugh" that feels triple its two-minute runtime; there's the prancing, carousel vibe of "The Horrible Party" which feels like a retread of Realism's weaker material; and then there's "My Husband's Pied-A-Terre", which rhymes the titular line with "derrière." They're all foregone conclusions: Knowing just the titles, you can pretty much imagine exactly what these songs will sound like and, as the lyrics unfold, what the next rhyme (or punchline) will be. That's the frustrating paradox of Love at the Bottom of the Sea: Though it finds the band shaking off the limitations of their formal exercises, it's actually the safest and most predictable thing they've put out in years.
Of course, that Love at the Bottom of the Sea is ornate, pun-crazed, and flagrantly synthetic is not necessarily a strike against it: Merritt's spun these qualities into gold before. Marking the return to longtime home Merge Records and their long-shunned electronic sound, Love has the feel of a band getting resettled and plotting its next move, but it ultimately amounts to something less than the sum of its parts: It has the feel of a collection of B-sides rather than a proper statement. There are enough good songs to put it a cut above Realism (including, late in the game, the sweetly vitriolic "Quick!"), but it's a new kind of disappointment from a Magnetic Fields record: It doesn't even give you much to talk about.


Assembled from samples of unwatched YouTube videos, the Big Thief drummer’s solo album harnesses a harsh and overwhelming torrent of information to convey how the internet skews reality.

Blood Karaoke

James Krivchenia is drawn to projects with a wide-eyed view of the world and a hopeful interest in the interconnectedness of all things. It’s true of the nature-worshipping music he makes as part of Big Thief and Mega Bog, and it’s also true of his work with Taylor Swift, in whose hands a scarf or cardigan can take on cosmic significance. His new solo album Blood Karaoke presents the same unknowable vastness of existence through the lens of a computer screen, but this time, the overload of information it shoots through the listener’s brain feels claustrophobic, airless, humid, and chemical. Listening to this information-age nightmare next to the rootsy, utopian sprawl of Big Thief’s Krivchenia-produced Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is a great argument for logging off and touching grass.
What Krivchenia has done here is sample dozens of YouTube videos with zero views and mash them together into overstimulating collages. He’s not the first experimental musician to dip into YouTube detritus. The Range’s 2016 album Potential airlifted the video-hosting site’s aspiring singers and rappers into sky-scraping bangers that suggested anyone could be a star. On the Soft Pink Truth’s Why Pay More?, Drew Daniel pulled from the back pages of specific search queries to evaluate his own relationship with a site capable of hosting both fuzzy-animal videos and footage of senseless violence. Blood Karaoke is more interested in the sheer wealth of information available at the click of a button, and in its sonic density we get a glimpse of how immense the internet really is: a world within a world that both mirrors and skews reality.
Krivchenia’s default style on Blood Karaoke is a sort of deconstructed take on rave, with popping sequencers and blocky synth chords building to nothing. There’s a lot going on at high volume, each track barreling into the next with minimal interruption, and the longest reprieve comprises two minutes of droning strings on “Wall Facer,” just before the album ends. It’s not hard to connect this harsh and overwhelming torrent of information to the daily ordeal of scrolling social media, with mindless clickbait adjacent to global horror. Blood Karaoke is no less exhausting an experience, albeit far less addictive, and though the sheer volume of content makes it a consistently interesting listen, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone with a hangover, a predilection for panic attacks, or an interest in doing anything besides frying the frayed nerve ends of their brain.
There are moments of pop melody, but they’re delivered in the cheesiest, chintziest contexts: what sounds like a cheap Yamaha keyboard demo on “Calendrical Rot,” or a snatch of canned pop-rock on “Sub-Creational Reality” that could be a ringtone or a GarageBand loop. As in the music of Frank Zappa, another avant-garde prankster interested in the pitfalls of a media-saturated society, melodies and hooks only exist here to be parodied and exposed as sugar-coated simplifications of the world’s complexities. At times, the ear longs for something to remind us that as horrific as this hell planet is, it’s also beautiful and there’s a lot to make life worth living. But you’d have to hop on over to one of Krivchenia’s other projects for something like that.


The Detroit rapper’s latest mixtape is a vivid anthology of first-person vignettes driven by a deep sense of paranoia.

F**K Da World

Los’ songs go a lot like the scene in Goodfellas right before Ray Liotta is arrested: Helicopters hover above. He’s unsure if anyone close to him is trustworthy. The phone endlessly rings, but he’s afraid the feds might be eavesdropping. He goes on sweaty drives where every car might be the one that pulls him over. Usually, it ends with drugs flushed down a toilet, a race across state lines, and the decision to leave his life behind to fall off the grid. It’s blurred by a looming sense that all of this is driven by his own paranoia.
These tales aren’t completely rooted in reality, given that Los isn’t currently on the run. Los essentially makes crime sagas that if fleshed out further could be sprawling scripts of their own. His latest mixtape Fuck Da World compiles 10 moody, first-person vignettes into an anthology of sorts: On “Daisy Lane Records” he survives a scheme by the skin of his teeth, but the cops bust down his door anyway; on the aptly titled “Goodfellas,” he heads to Pittsburgh, a recurring location in his music, and a hotspot of duffel bag-passing chaos; “Just Start Saving” is like a montage of all his shady dealings going right for once, though we know darkness is around the corner.
But Los’ music is more than anecdotes about a man tired of a life he can’t seem to escape. They’re delivered in the type of gruff, hoarse voice you might have after waking up with a hangover, laid over grimy beats that could be deep cuts on a late-’90s No Limit cassette. “300k” is the blueprint of this style, with a trunk-rattling instrumental and piercing police sirens that set the tense mood. In only two minutes, Los builds a world full of sketchy detectives (probably in tailored suits), and cat-and-mouse games with faceless enemies (probably also in tailored suits). Occasionally, he’s held back by production choices that sound like cheap imitations of his Southern rap inspirations: The booming drums and grim melody on “Can’t Rap Bout It” would have been better suited in the Lex Luger era of Atlanta, and the church bell-heavy “Ain’t Goin’” is like a lifeless Tay Keith-type beat. Both distract from his storytelling.
Los remedies production mishaps through a growing relationship with the Detroit-based trusted hand Topside, who last year released a joint mixtape called G Shit Vol. 1 that remains their best work to date. On “Hit Em Wit Dat Fye,” Topside blends ticking hi-hats, Mannie Fresh-influenced blaring horns, and an atmospheric melody; Los is such a vivid storyteller, he can make the most monotonous tasks sound lively. Likewise, “Cool Cat 2” is captivating: Topside laces the emcee with a groovy bassline, and Los is so stressed out by his lifestyle that his typical intensity turns to exhaustion: “I’m just tryna get some rap money then take it home/The pandemic, yeah it’s over wit’, all the money gone,” he raps as if he wishes he could enter retirement. Similar to Scorsese’s mafia epic, the constant anxiety and paranoia are not only thrilling, but funny in a twisted way.

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Usher’s ninth album is another impressive display of his endless charm and vocal chops. Thirty years into his career, the R&B icon still knows how to keep it light and throw a great party.

Coming Home

I can’t be sure of this, but I feel fairly confident that Usher Raymond IV has never consumed a drop of milk. How else could you attribute the archival-grade preservation of his vocal cords, his leggero tenor as athletic and diamond-sharp as the day he dropped his self-titled debut in 1994—which, if you recall, was a whole 30 years ago? On Coming Home, his ninth album, his low warbles and falsetto are soft and airy, his natural register as creamy as the dairy he’s certainly never consumed. You can picture him pairing his kettlebell runs right alongside his vocal exercises, as pristine and optimized as any Southern former choirboy determined to stay at the top of his game.
What went down at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show was everything that has made Usher into a pop icon: an old-school Hollywood entertainer whose choreography is always step-perfect and whose position as a multi-generational sex symbol is both good-natured and tasteful. Hordes of women, famous and otherwise, flocked to his Vegas residency for the Usher Seduction Experience, which included individual serenades that were so convincing they may have very publicly exploded at least one relationship (and produced a soundtrack for the meta-drama).
On Coming Home’s 20 songs, he remains most comfortable and effective playing the sensual lover with come-hither abs, where even the most blatant sexual metaphor doesn’t come off as seamy. “Wanna cuddle in bed/Won’t just open your legs and then leave you for dead,” he sings on the sunny title track, which is also an extended allegory for an orgasm. On the album cover, he holds a Georgia peach in front of his shiny deltoids just so, projecting hometown pride and provoking deep lust. On “Stone Kold Freak,” his request for enthusiastic consent should come with a fainting couch: “Right after you make your decision,” he warbles confidently, “I’m gon’ make my incision, girrrl.” A business journalist should investigate whether he has stock in folding fans.
As much as Usher plays up his lifelong amiable-ravisher persona on Coming Home, he maintains the versatility he’s established through the years, whether on enduring crunk hits like “Yeah!” or dance-music experiments like “Numb” and “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love.” Here his musical curiosity extends to amapiano, with Nigerian superproducer Pheelz joining him on the plush love song “Ruin” and a Burna Boy feature on “Coming Home,” while the delectable Tricky Stewart-produced electro jam “Keep On Dancin’” slide-glides its way around French house. The album sequencing divides these impulses into digestible and tonally paired sections—the bass-funk and backbeat of “I Love U” precede the baby-making midtempo jam “Please U,” both of which evoke Prince at his 1982 peak of shirtlessness, and pay homage with a wink, like Usher’s casually exhibiting his adaptability to the greats. “Big,” a horny song about a fat ass and, probably, his Magnum-wrapped anaconda, couches a salacious grin in a horn section and synth bassline reminiscent of Quincy Jones productions; “Luckiest Man” is an ‘80s throwback love song with a pristine synth cowbell that will leave you wistful and nostalgic for Al B. Sure!
On the handful of collaborations with The-Dream—the standout drippy flex “Margiela"; the crying-in-the-strip-club subwoofer anthem “Cold Blooded,” produced by Pharrell—Usher draws on sounds and sentiments invented and popularized in ’90s and ’00s Atlanta. It marks a return to the music that raised him as an artist while firmly reiterating his place in its legacy. It’s his comfort zone, but a performer with his emotional mettle doesn’t become complacent or entitled; even cheese is on the table. “A-Town Girl,” a snap-music track featuring a costly Billy Joel sample and a hyper-local Latto verse, interpolates Joel’s “Uptown Girl” for a love letter to the A. Is it corny? Yes, but I’m not from Atlanta, and within Usher’s orbit, this feel-good devotional to “Magic City lemon pepper wings” and a woman who “keep a blicky on her just in case somebody try” works markedly better than a Georgia tourism board ad.
Yet 2004's Confessions remains the standard-bearer, both in Usher's catalog and among pop R&B men proposing their own versatility. Part of that was its attendant narrative—that each successive single seemed to build up to a plot worthy of a telenovela (and it didn't hurt that Usher experienced his own breakup during the height of Confessions' popularity, with longtime girlfriend Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas). That level of cohesion is missing here, as Coming Home is more of a document of his own musical ambidexterity—a reflection on the first three decades of his career and a love letter to various R&B styles across decades—than the kind of all-encompassing album that can practically eclipse everything around it. Coming Home is full of delectable singles that prove Usher is still the king of pop-R&B—he’s simply reminding his fans what he can do, how many ways he can do it, and how nastily, too, if you’ll allow him.
Appropriately, then, the most classic-sounding Usher arrives with “I Am the Party” and “On the Side,” collaborations with longtime producer and career-maker Jermaine Dupri, the king of Atlanta and alleged source material for much of Confessions. The latter, built on a simple synth line played by co-writer Bryan-Michael Cox, is a heart-wrenching midtempo ballad about falling in love with his side-piece: “I mean, I love my baby, but she way thicker,” he coos, rude but endearing. And therein lies the secret sauce: Usher’s voice, full of solemnity, can even invoke sympathy while he’s being a dog. Performing better than all of his male peers may have gotten him to the top, but only this sort of emotional fortitude builds a legacy. As he puts it himself: “It’s all here baby… I am the party.”


Australia has a rich tradition of producing some of the most unfettered, uncontrollable metal. Impetuous Ritual, whose guitarists Ignis Fatuus and Omenous Fugue are also in Portal, carry on Australia's reputation for madness with their second album, Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence, which blurs the ever-thinning lines between death metal and noise.

Impetuous Ritual: Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence

Australia has a rich tradition of producing some of the most unfettered, uncontrollable metal. The country's most prominent bands, such as Sadistik Exekution, Bestial Warlust (the former band of Destroyer 666 leader K.K. Warslut), and Portal, are united by an absolute abandon of conventional form and an emphasis on conjuring as much chaos as their equipment can physically accommodate. The guitars can sound so reckless that they make Kerry King's free soloing sound like the most conservative nylon-string plucker, the drumming perfectly balances skill and savagery, and the vocalists less resemble singers than they do drill sergeants in spikes. It's metal taken to its absolute limits, nearly bordering on experimental music; Impetuous Ritual, whose guitarists Ignis Fatuus and Omenous Fugue are also in Portal, carry on Australia's reputation for madness with their second album, Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence, which blurs the ever-thinning lines between death metal and noise.
The quartet is sometimes confused as a Portal side project due to the shared members, who in reality only recently joined the long-running Portal; it's also tempting to assume that Impetuous Ritual represent a middle ground between Portal and Grave Upheaval, the latter of which Ignis Fatuus also plays drums in. Portal's sound is more jagged, though, and unless you literally recorded your album in a cave, it is impossible to sound more subterranean than Grave Upheaval. For Impetuous Ritual, repetition is more strongly emphasized than those bands, with tremolo-picking that builds and reinforces a howling wall of despair.
There are elements that break up the blackened torrent—the bells on “Metastasis,” some disjointed guitar solos here and there, the occasional doom-stomp—but otherwise the mood on Congregation is relentless and impossible to escape. In Portal, Omenous Fugue plays bass and Ignis Fatuus plays drums, so the fact that these guys can play a similar form of death metal in different roles makes you admire their skill in a way that triggers a fear for their well-being. Same goes for Ingnis Fatuus' vocals; mostly, he goes for a indecipherable growl, but on “Inservitude of Asynchronous Duality” he reaches piercing highs reminiscent of Absu's Proscriptor.
It's difficult to experience Congregation as anything but a full meditative experience. The vibe is so oppressive that it's not unreasonable to think that this record really does not give a fuck about any of your feelings. Is it oppression through freedom, or freedom through oppression? Congregation concludes with the nearly 15-minute “Blight,” and it's the most warlike in an album littered with doves' corpses. The song represents everything essential about Impetous Ritual pushed further and further into the breaking points of comprehension and endurance. If you made it through “Blight,” then congratulations. Your taste in death metal is superb, and you're probably a little imbalanced.


A sleek and bleary new project from the Savannah rapper drifts toward R&B and pop, communicating as much through the sound as its lyrics.

Faith Like Esther

Duwap Kaine is a true product of the internet: a drifter among the Soundcloud extended universe who’s had a marked influence on hip-hop but mostly stands on his own. His vocal runs are somewhere between the hazy confessions of Lucki and the spiraling conspiracies of Rxk Nephew, and with a propensity for lengthy projects with no features, his work can feel like a torrential flood whose individual songs often blur together. There’s something almost Zen about the swirling patterns of Duwap’s voice, marred by a distinctly digital sound, like the audio equivalent of a music visualizer. On his new album, Faith Like Esther, the 20-year-old Savannah, Georgia rapper assumes a more romantic and passionate tone—while he’s always had a sing-song delivery, he now drifts closer to R&B and pop.
An unapologetic rap nerd, Duwak often interprets himself through the personas of other artists. On “Oppa Gangnam Style” he says he feels like Migos, then just a few bars later changes his mind and switches trends: “This ain’t no Migos era no more/We ain’t rockin’ Versace.” As the title suggests, “Future & Designer” treats the resemblance between the two rappers as a metaphor for flow-jackers and clout vampires. Kaine’s flow is dependably unpredictable: a melodic falsetto or a verbose stream of imagery fighting the beat. As much as actual Auto-Tune, Kaine swaddles his voice in layers of reverb and overdubs, lending an almost shoegaze essence to his delivery. When he does land more purposefully trolling punchlines, they’re offset by the ethereal layers of his voice.
Faith Like Esther can almost sound like Drake fell down a rabbit hole into a trippy Dr. Seuss-like dimension, and the beat of “Outro (Seasonal)” resembles a sped-up Baltimore Club flip of “Passionfruit.” Beneath the powerful 808 bass, “Hard 2 Please” has an almost Sade-like instrumental backdrop, while “Revolve Around Me” is like an R&B ballad on fast forward, with a defined sense of melody that’s compacted and hyperactive. After exhibiting a sensitive and even sultry side, Duwap peaks into the red with the noisy crunch of “ProPella,” grounded in demented synths and overcompressed bass. There’s darkness behind the clouds, and the bleary eyes and blurry colors come as much from internal struggle as euphoria: “It’s really hard tryna quit the lean/Especially when you seein’ things.”
Duwap can slip into darker territory, but he remains sincere throughout the project, with an occasionally childlike sense of love seeping out of his bars. On emo banger “#Mood,” he croons about wiping away his tears with dollar bills, and he makes a hook out of his adoration for humankind: “If I could help everybody I would.” The title of the song “ASMR” offers a clear analogy for listening to Duwap at this stage in his career—the words and the content matter, but the experience is equally informed by the texture and our instinctive emotional response. While there’s still room to get hype, crack jokes, and express pain, Duwak Kaine seems increasingly concerned with soothing the listener.


Sacramento guitar/drum duo go Speakerboxxx/Love Below on this 2xCD release.

Church Gone Wild/Chirpin' Hard

Sometimes the best way to succeed in music is by pretending you're already the biggest band in the world. Hella, a Sacramento guitar/drums duo whose music elicited little more than a shoulder shrug and a "meh" from most listeners, confidently put the cart before the horse with Church Gone Wild/Chirpin' Hard. Borrowing the Speakerboxxx/The Love Below format, the epic double-solo album is the band's third and most extensive full-length, capturing virtuosos Zach Hill and Spencer Seim at their creative and technical apex.
So Zach's got Church, Spencer has Chirpin', and the two albums couldn't steer freak-out rock in more disparate directions. Seim's crowning moments thrive on electro-pop/noise synergy; as a result, Church feels a bit homogenous and redundant when juxtaposed to Chirpin'-- which is no surprise considering Hill initially composed the disc as one hour-long song. Still, on numbers like "I'm Quitting the Cult" and "Wish I Never Saw a White Man", Hill's metronome goes haywire as he pulverizes the skins at Mach speed, a change of pace from other tracks on which he merely bludgeons them at 220 bpm. To top it off, Hill throws in fuzzed-out vox, hellraising guitar sounds, chilling church organ, and any other instrument appropriate for the apocalypse.
Seim's response? A soundtrack for a chaotic NES game that never existed. The part-time Advantage drummer uses that band's covers as prototypes for his own twisted form of Nintendo-rock. Chirpin' employs Hella's traditionally linear song sequencing to enhance the disc's narrative quality. Opener "Gold Mine, Gold Yours" is exactly the song I'd expect after pushing the NES power button, "Famnail" conjures up that impossibly long level I could never beat, and "Home on the Arrange" menaces like so many Mega Man bosses. Even more impressive is Seim's channeling of NES pathos; just as Bowser simultaneously appears intimidating and ridiculous, Seim's songwriting evokes a healthy balance of fear and lightheartedness. And oh yeah, those 8-bit beeps and squelches are mostly acoustic instruments slickly altered to resemble digital sine waves.
Naturally, the double-album's peaks occur when both members' ideas intersect. "Song From Uncle" fuses Church's proactive percussion with Seim's buoyant songwriting. Likewise, Seim's guitar playfully mimics Hill's nihilistic vocals on "Imaginary Friends", Church's closest stab at melody. With these moments, Hella back up their ambition with impressive amounts of ingenuity and elbow grease, creating a White Album for disgruntled Gen Xers still finding solace in shoeboxes full of NES cartridges.


These outtakes are less determined to deliver neatly packaged hooks, but there are still moments where the band strikes with full vulnerability and force.

Supermoon EP

On their second album, this year’s Young Enough, Brooklyn power-pop band Charly Bliss documented the simultaneous pain and ecstasy of growing into a better version of yourself. Buoyed by soaring guitar riffs and glittery pop choruses, the album was a self-critical and self-affirming coming-of-age meditation. The songs on their new EP, Supermoon, were recorded at the same time, before the band settled on a final track list. These outtakes provide insight into the ethos behind Young Enough, filling out a mood board of anxiety and romantic alienation. As a study in the process of writing and editing a record, Supermoon is interesting. But on its own, it doesn’t have the same impact.
Similar yet slightly grungier than Young Enough, the songs on Supermoon are dense and sweet like a tub of frosting. The chorus of “Slingshot” hits with the heart-swelling force of a Third Eye Blind anthem and the guitars on “Supermoon” chug like a heartbeat. There’s never a moment that reaches the unbridled euphoria of Young Enough’s “Capacity” or “Blown to Bits,” though. These songs feel unravelled, less determined to deliver neatly packaged hooks.
The greatest departure is in Supermoon’s lyrics. Slivers of bodies, relationships, and emotions—uncrossed legs, twisted arms, festering resentments, declarations of love that sound like threats—shine bright. But you have to squint to see the constellations they form, the bigger picture they’re building towards. “Feed” creates a chorus out of the line, “I would feed the whole world if I could.” It’s a hard sentiment to argue with, the kind that tells us almost nothing about the person saying it. Sandwiched between imagery of expired milk and melted trophies, it’s hard to know exactly what we’re supposed to feel. “Supermoon” and “Slingshot” are similarly opaque, evoking emotional chaos without establishing origins or intentions. It’s understandable that these songs didn’t make the cut for Young Enough, where every track encapsulated the joy of overcoming trauma and practicing self love.
There are still moments when Charly Bliss’ songwriting strikes with full vulnerability and force. On Supermoon highlight “Heaven,” the lyrics are simpler, often only a few syllables per line. Over gauzy, distorted guitar, lead singer Eva Hendricks relays dreamy romantic contentment, culminating in a triumphant declaration of hope: “I’m gonna buy a house and fill it/With daughters and daughters and daughters.” The bright guitar lines of “Threat” coyly conceal the aggravation of a comfortable but unfulfilling romantic relationship. Heartbreaking lines like, “I’d rather be dead than have it be true/That no one can ever love me more than you” are hidden in plain sight.
Creative writing instructors sometimes encourage students to develop a better understanding of their characters by describing the contents of their trash cans. But this kind of exercise is usually one step in a creative process, not the end product itself. By presenting their outtakes, Charly Bliss offer superfans the chance to better appreciate Young Enough by hearing what songs it isn’t. New listeners may wish to start somewhere else: Though fun and propulsive, the songs on Supermoon don’t match the time-stopping, soul-affirming exhilaration that make Charly Bliss’ best music so special.


Following career-peak Rook, Jonathan Meiburg and co. return with another excellent record of restrained grandiosity and enigmatic grace.

The Golden Archipelago

Some claim albums as a format are dying out, and I keep refusing to believe it. I don't think economics or the slipperiness of mp3s will save it, so much as musicians who like the format will. It lets them say something a single track often can't, and it's hard to figure a better way to capture a snapshot of where a band is in its creative life. Based on The Golden Archipelago, Shearwater are perfectly served by the medium. The record has just a couple of tracks that would be especially striking outside of their context on the LP, and nothing on the level of the huge highs of 2008's Rook, "Snow Leopard" and "Rooks". But it's still thoroughly captivating and confident-- and one of the best recent examples of effective sequencing.
The placement of every song is so precise that it almost sounds as though they were recorded in order. The listener feels an impeccable sense of balance as the album's loudest guitars follow its quietest whisper of a song during the transition from "Hidden Lake" to "Corridors". "Castaways" is deliberate and mannered and achieves the sort of restrained grandiosity that distinguishes Shearwater from nearly everyone else-- it carries you to a peak, and the song that follows gently carries you away from it as it bobs in on a swaying, natural beat. The album's first three songs feel almost like a suite. Hovering over all the perfect transitions is songwriter Jonathan Meiburg's loose unifying theme, islands. That seems simple enough for a concept, but it's a natural extension of Meiburg's fellowship work studying daily life in remote communities, as well as his well-documented interest in ornithology and academic work focusing on migration patterns.
Indeed, the record is introduced by a field recording of what sounds like an island choir, before the band kicks in with an oceanic swell of guitar and imagery of waves on the shore. Meiburg's voice is finely honed, and it's the primary reason the band is frequently (and justifiably) compared to Talk Talk-- he has the same richness, range, and inexact enunciation that made Mark Hollis so enigmatic and interesting. He belts powerfully on the intro to "Black Eyes" before he's joined by a weighty beat that subtly shifts beneath him as the bass line evolves and the drums gradually change their emphasis. It's a sharp arrangement that doesn't do anything overtly odd but makes the song captivating and exciting nonetheless.
The only parts of the album that don't feel quite as balanced as their surroundings are "God Made Me", which lacks the fluency of the record's other songs and weighs down the middle a bit, and the final two tracks: "Uniforms" is okay on its own, but its extreme dynamic range and slow start leaves the already wispy closer "Missing Islands" feeling, well, like an island, divorced from the rest of the record. Even so, it's a great piece of work, capturing a band at a moment of creative confidence and maturity. The band's organic incorporation of marimbas and other mallet percussion, its use of acoustic instruments to create textures, its sense of restraint-- these are all well on display on The Golden Archipelago. It's an album you can spend time with and understand as a whole work, and one that grows on you with each listen, revealing yet more detail and nuance.


To mark the 50th anniversary of the Staple Singers’ legendary 1965 performance at New Nazareth Church, the live album Freedom Highway has been remastered and restored to its original setlist and runtime. Don't Lose This finds Jeff Tweedy completing, at Mavis Staples' behest, a handful of spare guitar and vocals songs that Pop Staples recorded before he died in 2000.

The Staple Singers / Pops Staples: Freedom Highway Complete/Don't Lose This

It’s impossible to discuss the Staple Singers’ 1965 live album Freedom Highway without considering what was going down in America that year. On March 7, more than 600 marchers set out to make the 50-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and were attacked by Alabama state troopers and armed posses. Two days later, they tried again, but turned back when Governor George Wallace denied them state protection. Two long weeks later, they tried a third time, with federal protection from the US Army and the National Guard. It took them three days, but they finally reached the state capitol.
Just a few weeks later and several hundred miles north, one of the hottest groups on the gospel circuit debuted a new song during a service at the New Nazareth Church on Chicago’s South Side. Pops Staples, patriarch and bandleader of the formidable Staple Singers, explained the inspiration in his introduction. "From that march, word was revealed and a song was composed," he explains, sounding less like a preacher addressing his congregation and more like a close friend shaking your hand. "And we wrote a song about the freedom marchers and we call it the ‘Freedom Highway’, and we dedicate this number to all the freedom marchers." As he is addressing the congregation, Pops strikes a clutch of chords on his guitar, and those chords coalesce into a spry blues riff that he sends rolling down the aisles of New Nazareth.
Then Al Duncan enters on drums, his rhythm a little funkier and more physical than you might expect in such a godly setting; Phil Upchurch lays down an elastic bass line, and the syncopated clatter of handclaps completes the rhythm section. Just as the song is taking off, the Staple Singers—Pops and his kids Pervis, Yvonne, and Mavis—shout the chorus: "Marching… up freedom highway, marching… each and every day." Mavis sings lead on the verses, her voice lunging at the low notes and filling every space in the sanctuary. Despite the worry in the lyrics ("The whole wide world is wonderin’ what’s wrong with the United States"), the family does not sound concerned or beaten down or fatigued in any way. Rather, "Freedom Highway" is pure jubilation, as though the Staples are celebrating that third march to Montgomery, confident in the righteousness of their cause. With God on their side, how could they fail?
Recording the performance that day was producer Billy Sherrill, who edited the songs for radio play, then rearranged them for the Staples’ first live album, Freedom Highway. Instead of coming halfway through the performance, the title track opened the first side, announcing Pops’ intentions of connecting gospel music with the struggle for civil rights. It was the family’s biggest hit to date, a pivotal record that inched them toward the pop mainstream without sacrificing their gospel message for a secular audience. In that regard, the New Nazareth concert proves a pivotal event not just for the family, but for pop music in general—just as crucial as anything that happened at Woodstock or Monterey, albeit not as storied or as celebrated. Somehow, the record slipped out of print and has been unavailable for decades. (An excellent 1991 compilation bears the same title but includes only two tracks from the album among contemporaneous studio and live recordings.)
To mark the 50th anniversary of the freedom marches as well as the Staples’ performance, the New Nazareth concert has been remastered and restored to its original setlist and runtime, complete with a short sermon by Rev. Dr. John E. Hopkins, a benediction, and even a guilt-motivated offertory ("We got less than 75 dollars here. You know this is not right.") As a historical artifact, it is invaluable for what it reveals about gospel performances of the era, even if the proceedings fall into a lull whenever the singing gives way to talking. That’s true of so many church services, though, especially those you don’t actually get to attend.
This remaster, however, emphasizes the bustle of the congregation, lending the proceedings a you-are-there intimacy. You can hear every cough and mutter, every rifle of a Bible page, and every amen. In this vivid setting, the songs take on new power. Pervis’s recitation of Hank Williams’ "The Funeral" sounds more intensely melancholy, as though he is not quite convinced of God’s mysterious motivations but is surrendering to Him nonetheless. You can hear Pops joking with his son-in-law just before he launches into "Samson and Delilah", and his good spirits inject the song with a vivid snap.
And this version restores the original sequencing, so that "Freedom Highway" is immediately preceded by "We Shall Overcome", which was a familiar standard that had taken on new relevance for African Americans during the 1960s. It’s a sly bit of programming by Pops, as it primes the audience to respond enthusiastically to a tune they do not know. Yet, "Freedom Highway" is a very different song, one that is less concerned with someday and more interested in today. It was Pops’ way of marking a victory, of saying they were already in the process of overcoming.
Even if he was often overshadowed by his daughter Mavis, whose voice often sounded like the hand of God parting the clouds, Pops was definitely the leader of the group and the head of the family. Even as they won mainstream success, trading choir robes for Afros and churches for concert halls, he kept them rooted in gospel and focused on a spiritual message. He also became an influence on several generations of guitarists—including Robbie Robertson of the Band and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival—who mimicked Pops’s nimble melodic lines and distinctive tremolo. Shortly before he died in 2000, he recorded a handful of new and old songs, just him and his guitar, and he must have been pleased with the results, because he entrusted the tapes with his daughters with the request, "Don’t lose this."
Mavis held on to them for 15 years, before asking Jeff Tweedy to complete them. To his credit the Wilco frontman brings to these songs the same restraint he showed on You Are Not Alone and One True Vine. He never crowds the performances with extraneous elements or modern touches; in fact, he is largely invisible on Don’t Lose This, occasionally playing bass and generally trusting Pops and his guitar to speak as clearly now as they did in 1998 or in 1965. Spencer Tweedy plays drums on a few songs and proves himself to be as sensitive a sideman here as he did on last year’s Sukierae. His beats on "No News Is Good News" and "Somebody Was Watching" have a textural quality that accentuates the songs’ genial funk, and he knows exactly where to put the downbeat so that it complements Pops’ vocals. Spencer may be one of the best and most interesting drummers around, but he also knows this is someone else’s show.
As a result, Don’t Lose This sounds like an excellent entry point for newcomers and casual fans, a gateway to exploring the Staples’ vast catalog. Without sounding like a career retrospective, the album revisits the straightforward gospel of the '50s and '60s as well as the sunshine funk of the '70s, all the while playing up the humane optimism in Pops’ vocals. Songs like "Sweet Home" and "Love on My Side" may depict men at their lowest points—steeped in self-pity, pickled with booze, distant from God—but they are cautionary tales: Any of us could end up in a similar situation, lonely and despairing but never undeserving of redemption.
Still, this is a Pops album in name only. At its core, it may be the final Staple Singers record. His children—including Cleotha, who died in 2013—feature prominently on many of these songs, harmonizing as sweetly as ever in the background and occasionally even taking lead. It’s bracing to hear them sing together again, especially on a song like "Sweet Home", which plays up their individual styles. Pops’ vocals are steady and measured, exuding the quiet authority of a man confident that he’ll see heaven. But Mavis’ voice flutters around his in a perfectly controlled gospel melisma that mimics the motion and expressive tone of a reed instrument. For a lesser singer, her performance might sound ostentatious or overbearing, but for Mavis, it sounds natural and fluid, a perfect complement to her father’s performance.
Perhaps the standout on Don’t Lose This is "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", an old Baptist hymn popularized in the 1930s by another pop music patriarch, A.P. Carter. The Staples covered the song in the '60s, but 40 years will change anyone’s perspective on life and death. Chronicling the funeral of a beloved parent, the song poses the important question, Will the bonds of family persist beyond this world? On the new version Pops manages to gently interpret the song, singing not from the point of view of a child losing a parent, but from the perspective of a parent singing to the children he will leave behind. Even if it’s not the last song on the album, it sounds like a final statement, one last bit of wisdom from a man who showed us the spiritual potential in pop music of all kinds.


The Brooklyn duo’s cheeky spin on Gen-X slacker rock asks: What does it take to become a 1990s alt-rock star right this minute?

Household Name

Thirty years ago, the biggest sin an alt-rock band could commit was making it big. When the Smashing Pumpkins did it, Pavement dissed them directly: “I don’t understand what they mean and I could really give a fuck,” Stephen Malkmus sneered on 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Brooklyn duo Momma reference both bands on their third album, Household Name, a cheeky spin on Gen-X slacker rock by zillennial high-school friends Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten. Some of the band’s biggest musical heroes—Nirvana, Liz Phair—have lamented the trials of rock stardom. On Household Name, Momma seem to argue: What would be so bad about stepping into the limelight?
Household Name operates with foresight the Smashing Pumpkins lacked: If you aspire to selling out before other people accuse you of it, can their ridicule even touch you? The 2020s pop-punk renaissance has bred a number of acts whose schticky self-awareness often transpires as braggadocio. But no one said Momma weren’t putting in the work: Household Name opens with “Rip Off,” a song that navigates the art of schmoozing industry insiders between complimentary whiskey shots. “Rockstar,” the first song Momma wrote for the album, channels Pixies’ loud/quiet dynamics as the band seem to talk themselves down from impending imposter syndrome: “It takes a lot to admit it/Yeah, I got what they want/I’m a real rockstar,” the duo intone. On “No Stage,” Momma speculate that the only fate worse than remaining a nobody is to shine bright and flame out: “If I’m famous for the night/I’ll be lonely all my life.”
But each reference to imminent rock stardom on Household Name is shrouded by the fact that Momma are reminiscing on—even aspiring to—a title that arguably doesn’t exist anymore. “It’s just not something we’re probably ever going to experience,” Weingarten has said, meaning Household Name is, to some extent, satirical. In the whimsical video for “Rockstar,” Friedman and Weingarten take home a hefty cash prize at a Battle of the Bands and watch their single reach the top of the charts. “I wanna make a hit and run,” the duo muse, a winking triple entendre that conjures existential questions: What happens if you become disillusioned with fame just as it’s finally within your grasp?
Should Momma indeed become household names, it’s the hooks that will get them there: The beefy riffs and call-and-response chorus of single “Speeding 72”—their best shot at a true hit—just barely outweigh its cliché of a good old-fashioned joyride. “Put the pedal to the metal, lay it all to rest,” the duo sing, before piecing together a chorus from boilerplate rhymes. Household Name could easily feel too formulaic, but with tongue partially in cheek, moments like “Speeding 72” come as a welcome indicator of a band that isn’t taking itself too seriously.
As invested as Momma are in rocking out, they can also tap into the type of angst-ridden sincerity that put so many of their forebears on the map. “I can keep my body small ’til it’s good enough for you to fight/Don’t be delicate with me, keep it real, I don’t need polite,” goes the final verse of “Brave,” a heavy ballad indebted to Only Everything-era Juliana Hatfield. “Never disrespect me/I’m the fucker down the street/I could be your everything,” Momma warn over a mellow, Pinback-like jangle in “Tall Home.” These rare earnest lines are generally too slight to make a lasting impact, and feel slightly out of place on a record that otherwise eulogizes a lifestyle of rock’n’roll hedonism. If Momma never make it there, at least they can say they had fun trying.


The Aussie rockers’ unabashed fetishization of 1970s staples like punk, glam, and their country’s sharpie scene only helps fuel the invigorating rush of their music.

Amyl and the Sniffers: Amyl and the Sniffers

Amyl and the Sniffers

It’s entirely justified to find Amyl and the Sniffers annoying just on the basis that the Melbourne punk quartet romanticizes the dirtbag 1970s to a degree that’s cartoonish. Too young to have experienced Dookie firsthand, let alone Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, Amyl and the Sniffers are blessed by the callous disregard of youth, adopting ratty mullets and tacky high-waisted jeans as gleefully as they swipe riffs from the Damned and the Stooges. The blatant rips are the point: Irked by dead-end jobs and digital chaos, they’re seeking refuge in the past.
What keeps Amyl and the Sniffers from being a boring retread of old rock’n’roll tropes is that apart from their intentionally ugly images—whether it’s their stage getups or the cover art to their eponymous first album, they celebrate the aspects of the ’70s best left forgotten—the band really doesn’t care about the specifics of history whatsoever. No matter how often their fuzzed-out riffs and frenetic rhythms hint at familiar sounds, Amyl and the Sniffers rarely evoke any one specific band on their debut: It’s all a gaudy pastiche, cobbled together from barre chords, spittle, and lager.
On their earliest EPs, Amyl and the Sniffers played with this same aesthetic but they were constrained by their homespun origins. The group wrote and recorded the entirety of 2016’s Giddy Up within 12 hours, and its 2017 sequel, Big Attractions, seemed only slightly more considered. Both EPs were textbook exercises in DIY where it was impossible to separate the content from the format; as the songs blazed by in minute-long bursts, the sound thrilled as much as the hooks.
By the very virtue of being released on a major label, Amyl and the Sniffers reverses that equation. While the group still tends to run lean—most of the album’s 11 songs clock in well under three minutes, with the whole thing rushing by in half an hour—all of the songs feel formed. Give some of the credit to producer Ross Orton. A veteran of the Sheffield scene—he played drums in Add N to (X) and floated through Pulp’s circles on his way to working on M.I.A.s’ Arular, gaining a noteworthy credit by producing Arctic Monkeys’ 2013 LP AM—Orton gives the band a beefier, bolder sound. This increased heft accentuates how Amyl and the Sniffers can sound like heirs to the sharpie rockers of Australia, a dirty underground movement of the ’70s that traded upon glam and nascent heavy metal—a sound that eventually wormed its way into the gnarly riffs of AC/DC and Rose Tattoo. To an extent, these callbacks are deliberate—certainly, Amyl and the Sniffers borrow heavily from the sartorial style of the sharpies—but what makes the group such a blast is that it takes no knowledge of arcane Australian rock’n’roll to enjoy their debut. The group exists entirely on the surface, cranking amps to 11 and playing like it’s in a rush to head back to the bar.
What makes Amyl and the Sniffers slightly preferable to one of the band’s gigs is that Orton channels its energy and then adds definition to its roar. Also, at home it’s easier to catch lead singer Amy Taylor’s knack for the catchphrases and fleeting images that anchor their songs. Perhaps Taylor doesn’t often shape these words into a coherent story—“Gacked on Anger,” a perennial anthem of the underclass (“I wanna help out the people on the street/But how can I help them when I can’t afford to eat”), and the besotted “Got You” come the closest—but it’s enough to suggest she could sharpen this instinct once she bothered to take a breather.
Then again, the appeal of Amyl and the Sniffers is that it never bothers to slow down. That doesn’t mean the record lacks slack moments—the opening instrumental fanfare “Starfire 500” feels best left on the stage, where the lads can vamp as audience anticipation for Taylor grows—but the aggressive acceleration means the album never invites any time for contemplation. Such relentless momentum can give the illusion that the songs are sturdier than they are, but that’s also the pleasure of Amyl and the Sniffers: The album exists so thoroughly in the moment that it winds up obliterating the group’s fetishization of the past and just delivers pure, uncut rock’n’roll fun.