With help from Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers, and Sufjan Stevens, the National return with their gentlest album yet: a collection of airy, tender gestures.

The National: First Two Pages of Frankenstein

First Two Pages of Frankenstein

The National’s ninth album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, is consumed with keeping track: where things diverged, where things were lost, what has been accumulated since. The band is taking stock—sometimes literally. “Eucalyptus” is a breakup anthem in which Matt Berninger spreads out their shared personal effects, pausing every so often to expand the negotiations. (“What about the ornaments? What if I reinvented again?”) During the chorus he makes an offer that is insistently, suspiciously generous: “You should take it/If I miss it, I’ll visit.” The negative accounting continues on the exhausted “Ice Machines,” as Berninger lists everything he can do without (speaker systems, blinking white lights, being perceived). Bryan Devendorf’s drumming is particularly deft, almost sheepishly reticent.
That sort of light touch brushes nearly everything here: In both form and content, this is the National’s gentlest album to date. They’ve been on this trajectory for some time, but Frankenstein goes even further: shedding the prickle and urgency of 2017’s Sleep Well Beast, dropping the conceptual framework of 2019’s artfully orchestrated I Am Easy to Find. Like the latter, Frankenstein has a topflight guest list: Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, Taylor Swift. But only Swift contributes anything beyond vocal coloration. Everyone has their moments—particularly Bridgers, whose harmonies elevate the stately chamber-rock ballad “This Isn’t Helping”—but their presence feels a bit like moral support.
Not to dismiss the power of moral support. It supercharges the hipster reverie “New Order T-Shirt,” which runs sunny fingerpicking under its precise memories: a pack of blue American Spirits on a Russian restaurant table in August 2001, a “Japanese novelty bomb” and the ensuing customs incident. Closing lullaby “Send for Me” is an airy, tender gesture: a ballad that plays like their “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own” or “Fix You.” “If you’re ever sitting at the airport/And you don’t wanna leave,” Berninger dreamily mumbles, “Don’t even know what you’re there for/Send for me.” Still, the project of the National fundamentally differs from that of U2 or Coldplay: Berninger doesn’t offer hope or wholeness, just a simple ride home.
At this point in the National’s career, every sound and lyric perches on the edge of evaporation. They dangle the fantasy of escape but settle for the perpetual transit from city to city, room to room, poolside to poolside. And during all this travel come the nagging questions. “But would your life be so bad/If you knew every single thought I had?” a wounded Berninger asks on “This Isn’t Helping.” There’s an answer, perhaps, on the fidgety doomscroll lament “Tropic Morning News.” “Oh, where’s the brain we shared?” Berninger wonders as he glances up from his phone, mainlining everyone else’s unending urgencies. He admits that staying current can be a kind of stasis: an endless mechanical tapping mirrored by Devendorf’s clipped percussion pad.
Midway through Frankenstein, Taylor Swift hops in, returning the favor of the National’s credited feature on 2020’s Aaron Dessner-produced Evermore. Like “Coney Island,” “The Alcott” is a true duet, a waltz-time two-hander between estranged mopes condemned to mutual attraction. A subliminal industrial rapping girds the track; Berninger sounds like he’s running lines on a friend’s screenplay. The text, writerly and assured, hums with Swift’s energy: The result is the National (Taylor’s version). The mess is there, just not the chaos.
The chaos comes on the very next track, “Grease in Your Hair,” one of a couple songs that performs the National’s old sleight of hand: working the anxiety around until they pull an anthem out of thin air. As a way to address one of the primary tensions in their catalog—writing songs about dissatisfaction in spite of great conventional success—it’s a great bit. But as Frankenstein moves from wrestling to reckoning, the swells are tamer. “Grease” is rollicking enough, but it crests on wan resignation: “You were so funny then/And I kept thinking I would catch it.” On the pittering-in-place “Alien,” Berninger keeps interrupting his fumbling devotion (“I can be your nurse or something”) to have a breakdown, out of earshot. That kind of emotional withdrawal happens all over the album, and though Aaron and Bryce Dessner carefully daub their compositions with pealing guitars and a full string complement, it has the effect of filling a canyon with mist.
The band has been candid about Berninger’s year-long writer’s block—with depression acting as a force multiplier—that sidelined the singer at the end of a fertile period for both the National and his solo endeavors. (In interviews, the notorious live raconteur has also spoken about quitting alcohol.) By all accounts, his bandmates and family gave him the time and support necessary to recapture his voice. Some of that support surfaces on the record: When Berninger sings, “Your mind is not your friend,” he’s repeating something Carin Besser, his wife and frequent co-writer, told him. First Two Pages of Frankenstein isn’t a portrait of triumph—that would be too easy. Instead, it’s a depiction of someone made unsteady from their time away, but nonetheless desperate to connect: less with an entire arena than someone in the passenger seat.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the winding and mystic 1972 album from the Chicago jazz and folk singer-songwriter.

Occasional Rain

Restless wanderings in and through the American ghetto, told in miniature, sung by one of America’s greatest vocalists: This was Terry Callier’s project, met at every luckless turn with institutional ambivalence and obscurity. His second album, 1972’s Occasional Rain, is his small miracle: Formally folk, affectively soul, a sprawling, psychedelic shimmer. Folk music has often struck at the heart of American self-narration, stitching legacies of violence to the natural or the mundane: Western African vocal traditions were carried over to Turtle Island by trans-Atlantic slavery, developing into call-and-answer strategies in the plantations; the words and tunes eventually finding paper. Occasional Rain makes clear the Black aesthetic connection to folk music—as progenitor, mastery, unavoidable base layer—in a collection of stories from Callier’s native Chicago. The songs collide with and deflate America, breaking open every civic myth.
Terry Callier was born in 1945 outside the Cabrini-Green housing projects, growing up with Curtis Mayfield, jazz-pianist Ramsey Lewis, and the Impressions’ Jerry Butler, all artists whose music pushed against urban despair. Callier got his start doo-wop harmonizing with a neighborhood crew, auditioned for Chess Records, and at the age of 16, penned his first single, “Look at Me Now.” His debut record, The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier, released in 1968 by the jazz label Prestige, contained several retellings of traditional folk songs—Callier’s downtempo renditions stretching the lyrics out until they were thrilling once more. That created space for the wandering that would become Callier’s lyrical metier; his early track “Golden Apples of the Sun”—a reinterpretation of a Judy Collins song that reimagines a poem by William Butler Yeats—takes its deepest breath as Callier sings of travels through quiet and hilly lands in search of a berry, who’d once called him by his name, transforming into a “glimmering girl” before disappearing into the brightening air.
After a few years of woodshedding and joining the Chicago Songwriters Workshop, Callier signed with Cadet, an imprint of Chess, where he cemented fruitful collaborations with his musical partner Larry Wade, as well as Charles Stepney, the jazz fixture and production insider known for his work on the psych-soul rock band the Rotary Connection. Stepney would go on to produce Callier’s trio of albums with Cadet: Occasional Rain, What Color is Love (1972), and I Just Can’t Help Myself (1973). That trilogy was Callier’s folk-jazz opus, Stepney’s baroque orchestration finding common cause with Callier’s voice, relieving it of certain emotional burdens, and allowing for Callier’s songwriting to take on a more disarming and complex hue.
Occasional Rain marked Callier’s move from song interpreter to songwriter. His lyrics here contain the soul staples—invocations of love, leaving home, forgetting the past—while also transgressing their boundaries with levity and bluntness: “Leather, tinker, tailor man/Anyone you meet/Here come a flunky/What a failure man.” The record is made of narrative vignettes in a jarring mix that reflects the jazz tradition of Callier’s influences, chief among them John Coltrane. “And for my openin’ line/I might try to indicate my state of mind,” begins “Ordinary Joe,” full of passionate soul squawks and non-lexical vocables—what Callier terms a “rhythm for your spirit.” Narratively, Callier preferred a first- or second-person address but his interests predominantly lay in the subjectivities of others, his oft-titular characters—Edie-D, Handsome Harry, Sister Sadie, Ordinary Joe. They move through the world in observance, making scenes, receiving lectures from racists and politicians, their interiorities kept at some distance, compelling us to walk with them.
Callier was a drifter in the Northern soul tradition; families dislocated from the American South, supplanted to urban enclaves and kept there to occasionally wish outwards. That drifter condition is informed by the insurmountability of any sort of reclamation of the lands their families died on: A relentless America, ghosted lakes atop blasted pastoral, obscured by dirt mounds and forests. If some Black musicians found reprieve in the Nubian, or the “pan-African,” or the Jovian, Callier’s characters travel to Chicago’s wastewater plant atop a Black neighborhood and back: “I just can’t wait to get to Golden Gate/Maybe that’ll straighten out my mind,” he sings on “Blues for Marcus,” with a stridency befitting someone briefly unmoored from their sanity under the conditions of modern life.
This is true of the earlier Callier, at least: In later years, it was Dar es Salaam that called out to his protagonists, after he devoted himself to Islam. To me, this is part of a single, roiling current of faith that animates Callier’s art, which is invariably about divine love. That faith is on unremitting display on Occasional Rain’s title track, a perfect four minutes on the record’s B-side. In it, sporadic showers and the designs of a conspiratorial weatherman transform into stings of ordinary sadness, relieved at once by sun and by God in the key of B. When I listen to it, I am brought back; I can’t be sure, but I believe it was my first Callier. The record was playing at a Sunday flea market in the middle of a Manchester city square; I remember how everything slowed down, the synthesizer-y yelps of the sopranos making me stop and listen.
Like many others, I first heard Callier years after the album’s recording; that day in England was less than a decade ago. This makes sense; Europe’s acid jazz and rare groove scenes rediscovered Callier in the ’80s and ’90s—in particular, What Color is Love’s nine-minute-long chamber-folk blockbuster “Dancing Girl”—leading to a career resurgence. (Callier recalls feeling totally overwhelmed playing at London’s Jazz Café in 1995 and hearing the crowd sing back every line; who knows how things might have gone had he wound up in Europe earlier, like Josephine Baker, or Count Basie, or Jimi Hendrix.)
Callier’s women also spin in and out of the observable realms, but their presence remains obsessively felt. Occasional Rain plays in love’s tributaries: The perfectly circumscribed world of a bedroom return; an alienation from a past love seen stoned on the street; a vacant stare; a comfortable place to bury one’s head. “Golden Circle,” attempts a cool fuck-you, but slips into admissions of durable interconnectedness. These are men’s feelings, perhaps, but not men’s stories, and “Trance on Sedgewick Street,” the record’s most important song, makes this plain: All of Callier’s gentle and salubrious framings are distilled into a scattered whole-relation, his characters flowing in and out of each other’s lives along the planned outlines of their city. That “trance” is both urbanicity at work and a Black response. Attuned to them from birth, Callier captures and harnesses those energies, placing them atop his childhood places, in a dynamic swell that rejects the intentional enervation of the projects.
Callier’s tool for this is his voice. It’s a simple formulation, and yet, it is no less true: It is the only thing that could hold together Occasional Rain’s dizzying jazz, soul, folk, and gospel sounds. You can feel this on the record’s “Do You Finally Need a Friend,” which stretches out and out; in an account of a couple’s long-delayed reunion, a then-27-year-old Callier takes his cues from stories of homelife, backed by the vocals of Kitty Haywood and Minnie Riperton, coalescing together into a stillness far beyond their years.
Callier excelled in speaking to these paradigmatic human emotions: “The trouble’s gone/Let’s leave our tears behind/Just rest your head/And ease your weary mind/Let’s begin again,” he sings in “Do You Finally Need a Friend.” But the seemingly universal framings are filled with surprising antagonisms: The folk platonic, “And don’t ‘ya know each little bird in the sky/Is a little bit freer than I,” infers much more than its pleasant observation. Callier often allows the unsaid to do the work for him in this way, unspooling words into doo-wop garble, from which a breathless “aha!” can escape.
Callier is cool, never too precious. He neither attempts a totalizing theory of Blackness nor an experiment in daily abjection; his goal is songwriting that moves the listener through the world. This was not, however, a humanist project, and sometimes the stolidity of white culture comes out in flashes of relief: The draining “Man,” the preening “money makers”—trouble on the street below. But Callier doesn’t cheapen his people’s experiences of racism or poverty. Instead, his music seeks to surround them like a shield.
After Callier was dropped from Cadet, ostensibly due to poor sales, producer Don Mizell signed him to Elektra, who attempted to slot him into the “disco-loverman” formation, releasing Fire on Ice (1978) and Turn You to Love (1979). Again, the mislabeling hindered his career, and in 1983, when Callier’s daughter Sundiata told him she wanted to live in Chicago, he retired from music, got a job as a computer programmer at the University of Chicago, and focused on raising his daughter. Callier’s collaborations were riddled with premature deaths: Stepney at 45, Riperton at 31. Callier persisted until he died of throat cancer in 2012.
It is a little disorienting to read posthumous essays that emphasize the “discovery” of Callier’s talents, projecting him as unsung hero. It is meant respectfully, and I am not sure I achieve anything different here in attempting to impart that Callier was extraordinary and deserving of all that love. Besides fame, had found different meanings through his art: a respected singer-songwriter in the eyes of his contemporaries and, in a testament to his own experimentation, an influence on a wide spectrum of musical lineages, including early American grunge, British trip hop, and Japanese lo-fi instrumentalism.
His friends and family called it an “ordinary joy,” the way that man lit up a room, the childlike wonder he inspired among his friends and peers. That light was reciprocated: In 2017, after a community petition, Chicago inaugurated Terry Callier Way on a stretch near Seward Park in Cabrini-Green. It’s a small memorial to a Chicago man whose primary tension was between his people and the world outside. On “I’d Rather Be With You”, a warm and generous song from his third album, he sings of indispensability, of the sacrifices he would be willing to make to be with someone: “I could take my guitar/And hit the road, try to be a star/That sort of thing/Just don’t appeal to me.” Sometimes love owns us.


The latest, underwhelming installment of the rapper’s cosmic album series arrives 11 years after the original and coasts on a legacy built a lifetime ago.

Kid Cudi: Man on the Moon III: The Chosen

Man on the Moon III: The Chosen

If you’re of a certain age, the first Man on the Moon, from 2009, probably meant something to you. Maybe you took your first bong rip while Kid Cudi chanted “I got 99 problems and they all bitches.” Or maybe you sent your middle school crush a link to “Cudi Zone,” and they responded with, “Your taste in music is sick!” Or maybe you gloomily stared out of your bedroom window and repeatedly played “Day ’N’ Nite” hoping one day you could move out and go post up on a Soho street corner in a Bape hoodie. Cudi’s music was there for a lot of transformative experiences. And even though he has hardly released any memorable solo music in a decade, he’s still seen through nostalgia-tinted glasses with hopes that one day he’ll change lives again.
To Cudi’s credit, Man on the Moon III: The Chosen is not a cash grab or a plea for relevance. He’s been doing relatively fine without it. (This year alone, he starred in the new Luca Guadagnino HBO show, appeared in the third Bill and Ted movie, and scored a No. 1 single with Travis Scott.) But even though Cudi’s heart is in the right place, Man on the Moon III is still like when the old rock band reunites and their costumes don’t fit anymore.
On the album, the old crew is back—Dot Da Genius, Mike Dean, Plain Pat, Emile Haynie, and even Evan Mast of Ratatat—and some new faces have been added into the fold: Most specifically Take a Daytrip, the beat-making duo who show up when the major Atlanta-based producers are too busy. To make the album seem more important, it’s split into four acts and attempts to follow a loose concept about trying to defeat his demons and find peace. Part of what made Cudi’s music appealing in the first place was that he was an everyman. His stories about how struggles with depression and loneliness affected his relationships were detailed enough to be personal but also vague enough to be easily applied to anyone’s life. That’s not the reality anymore, and Cudi doesn’t appear to realize it.
When he’s not trying to be relatable, Cudi excels. “Girl is tellin’ me she don’t know what she want/Lotta demons creepin’ up, they’re livin’ underneath,” he raps with malaise on the album’s best song, “Tequila Shots,” rattling off a snippet from his life instead of attempting to capture the zeitgeist. Over this familiar-sounding Dot Da Genius and Daytrip beat, his tone catches the perfect balance, too, not too humdrum or overly excited, which is usually the case for him.
The worst thing that has happened to Cudi, musically speaking, is the time he’s spent hanging around Travis Scott. On “Damaged,” the hollow arena-ready production, one-note croons, shrieking ad-libs, and an underwhelming drop check off all the boxes of a record generic enough to fit on Jackboys. The same could be said for “Show Out”; Pop Smoke’s verse sounds as if it was never meant to be used, the drill-influenced beat is like when fast fashion steals runway designs, and Cudi’s spirituality is shallow. Cudi seems to think he’s making records the crowd at Rolling Loud will eventually moshpit to, but it’s probably more likely to end up at dinner parties hosted by Virgil Abloh.
But even when Cudi pauses the rage, Man on the Moon III is no better. If it wasn’t real, “She Knows This” would be known as a lazy parody of a Cudi song: It starts off with a Michael Cera sample from Scott Pilgrim and ends with Cudi using vocal manipulation techniques that should have been retired after the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sessions. The second half of the album hits all of Cudi’s clichés: “The Void” has the lifeless hums; “Lovin’ Me” has the empty-hearted collab with an indie darling, this time it’s Phoebe Bridgers; “Elsie’s Baby Boy” has the half-assed singing on a miserable-sounding guitar sample that has plagued almost every Cudi record after Man on the Moon II.
And though it’s admirable to hear Cudi open up about his struggles with mental health and addiction, it doesn’t automatically make the music worthwhile. Cudi croons, “Say, ‘I’m waitin’ to die,’ I cry/Many nights I spent gettin’ fucked up, livin’ a lie,” on “Mr. Solo Dolo III,” a sequel to the Man on the Moon standout, but his flat vocals and plodding production just make it underwhelming. If anything, “Mr. Solo Dolo III” is only memorable because of its title, which like too much of Man on the Moon III is coasting on a legacy built a lifetime ago.

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The Philadelphia rapper delivers a bloated and messy new album, struggling to live up to their reputation for imaginative, genre-blending adventures.

Pink Tape

When Lil Uzi Vert dropped the Pink Tape trailer in late June, announcing their first full-length project since 2020’s Eternal Atake, it was an open question where they were headed. They have a famously wacky and experimental sensibility, constantly pushing hip-hop’s boundaries; anything is on the table, including Jersey club beats, anguished pop-punk shrieks, and blistering, relentless raps that harken back to the fury of early Meek Mill and Chief Keef. Pink Tape is a Frankenstein creation that attempts to marry all the parts of Uzi’s personality, creating a sprawling realm of pulsating rap, death metal screams, and rock riffs. With features ranging from Bring Me the Horizon and Snow Strippers to Nicki Minaj and Don Toliver, it slots metalcore right alongside Uzi’s rap stylings. The result is a cacophonous mishmash of an album that struggles to live up to its ambition.
Part of the allure of Eternal Atake stemmed from the rapper’s imaginative references, like the Space Cadet 3D Pinball sample on “You Better Move,” or the interpolation of the eponymous Backstreet Boys classic on “That Way.” Those remain on Pink Tape, but Uzi’s rapping gets drowned out by the surrounding noise too often, instead of working in concert with the chaos. The pounding BNYX production of “Aye,” which could soundtrack a supervillain’s entrance, feels wasted by two uninspired verses from Uzi and Travis Scott. The slowed-down interpolation of Eiffel 65’s “I’m Blue” on “Endless Fashion” lacks the sample’s rambunctious energy, making it feel lackluster, even if Nicki Minaj delivers a solid feature. Elsewhere, the System of a Down cover “CS” misses the pure rage and anguish of the original source material.
Other transitions into rock and metal are far more successful, producing some of the album’s peaks. On the grandiose “Nakamura,” Uzi oscillates between plaintive howls and breakneck flows, his voice accompanied by the strings of the WWE theme song. And the Bring Me the Horizon-assisted “Werewolf,” with its full-throated screeching and thrashing guitar riffs, is the most entertaining and effective harmony of Uzi’s interests. These ventures register as extensions of Uzi’s powers, not random shots in the dark.
Pink Tape produces (rare) occasions of tenderness and vulnerability, like when Uzi pays tribute to friends and family who held their hand during a recent rehab stint on “Rehab.” Just like they would spit about Balenciaga pieces or endless racks, they confess insecurities with stark clarity: “I got brain damage, but they overlook ‘cause I got cash,” they rap on “Days Come and Go.” At the beginning of the album, Uzi addresses rampant speculation about their sexuality, using hyper-masculine boasts that seem empty and obligatory: “First of all, I fuck eight bitches a day/How could you ever say Lil Uzi gay?” they rap on “Flooded the Face.” There is one notable omission from the record: In 2022, Uzi pleaded no contest to an assault charge from ex-girlfriend Brittany Byrd, a situation which they don’t overtly address, instead letting the hype of a surprise release wash away the gravity of the allegations.
At 26 tracks, Pink Tape is bloated and messy, with occasional flashes of excellence between grating screamo misfires and unremarkable songs that feel like retreads of Playboi Carti or Trippie Redd hits. It undermines Uzi’s sterling record and acts as a cautionary tale about undiscerning genre adventures; instead of driving into exciting new terrain, it seems like they are just veering in the wrong direction.


On her gripping and redemptive debut, the Los Angeles singer seems bound for crossover status, with pop anthems that challenge power structures and embrace simple pleasures.

Premonitions

Premonitions, the debut album by unabashed Los Angeles singer Miya Folick, begins with an exquisite apology. Over the pearly synths, gauzy vocal intonations, and grinding cellos of gripping opener “Thingamajig,” Folick takes accountability for her actions and embraces the emotional flux that comes with it—the power of taking responsibility, the powerlessness of what comes next. Amid a cultural movement where unspoken wrongs are finally being aired, only to be met by the half-hearted repentance of systemic corruption and patriarchal nonsense, her sincere plea feels like redemption. “Only you know what to do now,” Folick sings in the haunting final words, relenting control. Premonitions, this introduction declares, is about fighting for the best version of ourselves.
Many of the tunes on Premonitions feel like anthems, battle cries for personal and universal empowerment. This comes, in part, from Folick’s incredible voice—deep and broad and rich, yet capable of soaring to fluttering soprano heights. That prodigious instrument is the shiny glint that first catches your attention, but the writing is arresting, too. It feels intimate but applicable, a successor to the likes of Lorde and Florence Welch. Joined by veteran producers Justin Raisen and Yves Rothman, who have separately made radio hits and esoteric pop, the classically trained singer crafts songs marked by fierce self-awareness and self-control. Her singing and songs recall pop predecessors who paired emotional force with creative trademarks—the elegiac coos of the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan, the alluring theatricality of David Byrne, the empathic lyricism of Imogen Heap. Both lyrically and vocally, Folick is a trapeze artist, plunging into uncertain, dark depths only to spring to the other side of the divide.
Premonitions speaks of uncomfortable battles. “Deadbody,” an apt theme song for 2018, is an antidote for those who’ve been gaslit for their trauma. A low, ringing piano mimics the final chime of a clock, a musical signifier for time’s up. Drums crowd Folick’s voice, which hovers just above a growl as she details the exploitation of women. Pushing back against hyper-masculine rhetoric, Folick asserts, “My strength lies within my gentleness.” On “Cost Your Love,” her vocals cascade between registers as she illustrates the tempestuous battle for love, not lust masquerading as something more. “I might love myself this time/I might win the fight this time,” she sings. From calling out abusers to offering up her own self-examination, Folick’s music feels urgent in its advocacy of resilience. “Don’t make it easy on me/Don’t let me slide/I’ll force myself to take it/Swallow my pride,” she sings on the title track, drums propelling her as chimes offer cover. Secret delights float through the mix—angelic fingerpicking, oblong slide guitar, spectral cries that echo around the dark.
Folick has coyly dubbed her music “domestic pop,” an attempt to make mundane moments feel significant, even crucial. She transforms physical rituals like shaving her head and bathing into processes meant to wash away the unholiness of the day during “Stock Image.” She makes turning off the phone a new avenue for transcendence on the racing “Freak Out.” An Irish goodbye during “Leave the Party” allows her to escape inside herself. Post-exit, she turns to disco music, a bowl of Cheerios, painting her pinky toes, and even over-tweezing to feel more self-assured. “I want to fill myself with bliss/When I’m alone, I exist,” she howls before horns envelop her. Infectious melodies and luminescent production give these ideas a sense of cathartic danceability.
“We have to speak with grace/We will become the words we say,” Folick sings at the end of “Stop Talking,” a perky and lovingly honest ode to friendships and against noxious boy fixation. This axiom is a core part of Folick’s belief that the way we speak about our memories shapes our present and future. She recently wondered, too, about a world where humanity’s ability to evolve emotionally is our species’ shining hope, not our inventive technological prowess. During closer “What We’ve Made,” Folick envisions this simple utopia, a place where “We make tiny happinesses in each moment.” Time and time again, Premonitions delivers on that promise as Folick shares her inspiring vision of an ennobled world.


On the heels of a new signing, the singer remerges with a four-track EP that reworks songs from her previous albums, coupling the flexibility of her original compositions with daring musicianship.

1/f EP

Laura Mvula has a knack for drawing out and distilling several moods in one song. On “Make Me Lovely,” from her outstanding 2013 debut Sing to the Moon, she alternates beautifully between defiance (“I can’t make you love me”) and whispered insecurity (“Don’t want the world to lose my soul”). Her 2016 follow-up, The Dreaming Room, went further by tapping the London Symphony Orchestra to fill out the emotional landscapes of her complex and layered arrangements to stunning effect. Mvula’s classical training is evident and is the easiest influence to parse out, but it’s just one color in a palette that includes jazz phrasing, funk, soulful melodies, and mastery of repetition.
Frankly, Mvula’s music is what pop should sound like: an unpredictable and stirring amalgam of genres. While mainstream success has remained frustratingly out of reach for her, Mvula’s mark in the pop world hasn’t gone unnoticed and has garnered her a crew of high-profile supporters, including Jill Scott, Nile Rodgers, and the late Prince. So when Mvula was unceremoniously dropped from her record label via email in 2017, less than a year after the release of her second album, it was not only painful but confusing to her. “I didn’t understand. I was always told I was such a valued part of what Sony had become,” she said at the time. “I was an artist who was taking risks and doing things that were fresh and genuinely new—I believed them.”
Save for a few guest features and an entry for a film soundtrack, 1/f marks Mvula’s first release in the five years since The Dreaming Room and the subsequent label fallout. The EP, which consists of three reworked versions of songs from her past two albums and a Diana Ross cover, comes on the heels of her signing with a new label. There is no new material on the EP, but sonically it signals a departure for the singer. The acoustic orchestra has been swapped for an electronic one, replete with synthesizers, electric keys, and a staccato pulse that’s reminiscent of both the neon sheen of ’80s pop and Prince-era funk. Instead of just putting a new dress on her older material, Mvula’s reworks have shifted the emotional center of the songs, tapping into a skill that made her prior work so compelling. The flexibility of the original compositions coupled with Mvula’s daring musicianship lends themselves wonderfully to a set of reimaginings that speak to her current position as an artist—closing the chapter on a past life and stepping into a promising future.
“Sing to the Moon” takes the measured encouragement of the original and spins it into something brighter and more forceful. If the former glided, this rendition charges forward with a spirit of determination. Accented by a metronome-like loop, the rework sheds the melancholy of the original and repurposes the choral harmonies into an anthem of uplift. The Dreaming Room’s tour de force, “Show Me Love,” makes a triumphant return as a celebratory ode to a former lover. The original sat firmly in the immediacy of loss—pleading and praying for love’s return—but this version feels redemptive. With a palpable sense of appreciation in her voice, Mvula has moved beyond mourning to cherish the best of the past amid a crescendo of sunny synths. On “Green Garden,” the multi-tracked vocals and handclaps are stripped away for Mvula’s solo voice and slinky guitar riffs. The result is a sultry update that points most clearly to Mvula’s new sound: loose, super funky, and sexy. Where the original garden was brimming with childhood innocence, this one holds the thrill of forbidden fruit.
A cover of Diana Ross’ 1970s UK hit “I’m Still Waiting” is the closest the EP gets to Mvula’s earlier music and could easily fit in either of her last two albums. Her crisp delivery on the closing track filters out the Motown version’s schmaltzy moments, and it’s not hard to imagine the lyrics as directly addressing Mvula’s struggles with the music industry. Mvula handles the song’s spiral from romantic naiveté to total disillusionment with calm and grace—a final look over her shoulder before walking away.

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Now down to a duo, the busy instrumentalists recruit Tune-Yards, Shabazz Palaces, and the singer of Yes for their aggressive fourth album.

Juice B Crypts

With their bracing debut single, Battles offered a new vision of indie rock. The quartet turned prog grandiosity, funk propulsion, and anarchic No Wave spirit into songs Rube Goldberg may have admired. With the vocals of early member Tyondai Braxton or the slew of subsequent guests, they suggested a sort of cyborg pop, as brawny as it was brainy. For a while there, Battles sounded like little else.
But Battles have been perpetually beset by instability. Braxton quit after their colossal first LP, 2007’s Mirrored, leaving drummer John Stanier, multi-instrumentalist Ian Williams, and guitarist Dave Konopka to recruit multiple vocalists for 2011’s wild-eyed follow up Gloss Drop. They tried life as a frenetic instrumental trio on 2015’s La Di Da Di. Following Konopka’s departure in 2018, Stainer and Williams return to the Gloss Drop template for their fourth album, Juice B Crypts, gathering a diverse roster of singers to slip into the narrow spaces inside their meticulous instrumentals. Jon Anderson (yes, from Yes) splits the singing on “Sugar Foot” with fascinating Taiwanese band Prairie WWWW. Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus, meanwhile, sings on the final two-song suite, “Last Supper on Shasta.”
Captivating tidbits rattle inside each of these 11 tracks, thrilling details that, when found, hit like syringes of adrenaline—the synths that seem to scream “Woo” when Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler finishes his verse on “IZM”; the pitch-shifted electronics that chase Xenia Rubinos like laser-guided missiles at the start of “They Played It Twice”; the West African guitar line that warps into a fractal midway through “Ambulance.” Amid the rubber-band snap of “Titanium Step,” the Pentecostal yelp of Liquid Liquid’s Sal Principato is a pure delight, flashing back to the Talking Heads and Battles’ own early work.
But the more you listen, the more these intricacies suffocate inside arrangements too busy for their own good. The instrumental title track seems to ride a dozen merry-go-rounds at once. And the sounds around Garbus simply won’t let her do the work, breathlessly modulating in every direction and stranding her inside the chaos.
Many of these songs feel like knots of ideas superficially strung together. “They Played It Twice” pivots between Rubinos’ electrifying lead and mutated breakbeats, but Battles never bother to make the ideas cohere. “IZM” hops from boom-bap thrust to astral krautrock projection, leaving Butler to repeat uncharacteristically pedestrian phrases, clutching them like guylines. Only “Fort Greene Park” shows restraint. Battles slowly build a single theme, sharing it between slicing guitars and spiraling electronics. Just before it spills into bedlam, they lasso it back, leaving something to the imagination.
Juice B Crypts is anti-gestalt music, where incredible parts are subsumed by wholes that try to do too much. You’re left to wonder if Stanier and Williams feel they have to prove themselves again. Or perhaps they’re aware that the polyglot power that made their early work so powerful is almost passé now, as the lines between genres corrode. Either way, Juice B Crypts is an act of overcompensation from a duo trying to make too much happen with less.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Brighton band follows Ian Parton's explosive home project Thunder, Lightning, Strike with its first record as both a full-fledged, crowd-pleasing band and a Sub Pop-signed act.

Proof of Youth

For every artist that starts out with a solo home-recording project, hitting the road circuit can present a problem: It necessitates the recruitment of other musicians, a reworking of overdubs and sample-laden material for live performance, and a general shift away from the original plot. After a couple of hundred shows and radio sets, these adjustments can become part of the artist's musical DNA, redirecting all future work away from those lonely, antisocial earlier days, and towards a crowd-pleasing, stage-translatable compromise.
The Go! Team know this challenge well: After Thunder, Lightning, Strike became a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic, auteur Ian Parton found himself with a demand for a live version of his kitchen-sink project. By the end of 2006, he'd played every festival from Austin to Australia with his merry crew, slowly evolving from shy, nervous rookies to seasoned party-rock veterans, with the multimedia backdrop and headbands to prove it. When Parton found himself ready to record album #2, he likely discovered that his band was nothing like where he'd left it on his debut; for one, there were a lot more people in it.
In reaction, Parton seems to have overcompensated for these changes, turning Proof of Youth into more of a sequel that replays the Thunder, Lightning, Strike formula rather than allowing the new personnel to push the Go! Team mission in a new or different direction. That decision brings both pros and cons with it: On one hand, the Go! Team sound remains a pretty singular blend of unlikely sonic companions, but revisisting that approach risks hitting the bottom of the creative well.
First single "Grip Like a Vice" is the thesis statement to Proof of Youth's copycat philosophy: It instant-replays the template of "The Power Is On", staccato playground chants and roller-rink organ building to sports-highlight fanfare and caustic guitar peaks. It's a relief, at least, to hear that the addition of non-sampled vocals-- most courtesy of rapper Ninja-- hasn't changed Parton's approach to production: Her words are still low and faded in the mix, as if he recorded her, pressed it to vinyl, and then sampled it just to maintain his aesthetic. "Grip Like a Vice" isn't the only "Power" clone, though it's probably the best: "Titanic Vandalism" and "Keys to the City" find diminishing returns as the novelty of the approach wears thin.
The other welcome news is that the guest-star buddies that the Go! Team have accumulated don't do much to break up the gameplan either, as appearances by Bonde do Role's Marina Ribatski, the Rapper's Delight Club kids, and the Double Dutch Divas fade right into the grainy mix. Only Chuck D stands out: "Flashlight Fight"'s paranoid sirens and clattering drums hearken back to the Bomb Squad's urgent soundscapes.
While the kid-chants-as-hip-hop-maneuver bit starts to show signs of staleness on Proof of Youth-- even in spite of the album's guests-- other aspects of the Go! Team's philosophy provide more replayable highlights. "Fake ID" is less old-school rap pastiche than twee indie-pop given a supercharged engine, with glockenspiel and child-like vocals propelled by fuzz bass and Parton's voluminous drums. "Doing It Right" shuffles those poppier elements into the jump-rope rhyming and horns template, intercutting the proto-rap with a dreamy chorus. But would it kill the band to include a few more instrumental interludes like the Alan Parker cover "My World", which offer a welcome relief from the frenetic pace while sucker-punching memories of Sesame Street Super-8 interludes and weird Morricone-knockoff cartoon scores?
Those quieter moments may have been the necessary sacrifice to the Go! Team's new extrovert status, and if so, it's a fair but troubling tradeoff. Proof of Youth mostly recaptures the enthusiasm and unique sensibility of Thunder, Lightning, Strike, further filling that niche for lo-fi sample-based old-school-noise-rap we never knew we needed filling. But in retracing his earlier steps, Parton is beginning to flirt with the dangerous point where a thrilling new sound becomes a one-trick pony, allowing the band to drift more towards exclusively making the kind of music that plays big on stage.


On her first collection of original material in over a decade, the country-folk songwriter frames observations of modern life in timeless American musical forms.

Workin’ on a World

Workin’ on a World is like a parade on a stormy day, a celebration beneath increasingly ominous skies. Lyrical references to gun violence and police brutality place its stories in a modern context, along with a litany of proper nouns ranging from the Chicks and Mahalia Jackson to John Lewis and Rachel Corrie. But Iris DeMent also works to ground her writing in timeless forms, with songs that play like folk standards and gospel ballads, populated by Bible characters and old American idioms. “I’m not trying to impress anybody with my new, clever metaphor,” the 62-year-old songwriter recently told Paste. “I’m trying to speak to people emotionally and spiritually, and if something that’s been used before works? I’m not going to let my ego get in the way of letting it work again, if it says what I needed it to say.”
For her first collection of original material in over a decade, the country-folk songwriter slowly amassed material without an overarching structure in mind. Inspiration came from all directions: “Goin’ Down to Sing in Texas” is an eight-minute protest song written after she played a venue in Austin, where a sign at the door instructed attendees how to handle their firearms during the performance. “The Cherry Orchard,” a piano ballad featuring the single most breathtaking vocal delivery in her deep catalog, delves into the psychology of a character from the Chekhov play of the same name. “Let Me Be Your Jesus” is a poem written by her husband, Greg Brown, that she delivers in a devilish whisper, taking audible pleasure in setting his words to music.
It was Brown’s daughter, Pieta Brown—the folk songwriter who co-produced the album with Richard Bennett and Jim Rooney—who pushed DeMent to follow her muse wherever it led. Spacious, cozy, and glowing with urgency, her new album collects six years of work but plays like an everflowing vision. “Nothin’ for the Dead” seems to speak to DeMent’s current process, capturing her ethos in four distinct verses—one about a tree in the snow, another about the dynamic between two young parents and their screaming child, the next about the brutality of the world, and the last about leaving a mark during our short time here. “Use me up while I am living, Lord,” she sings with intensity. “Let’s not leave nothin’ for the dead.” A horn section and pedal steel wind uneasily around her words with an almost comic persistence, suggesting that the chaos and carnage will continue; it’s only our perspective that will change.
As always, DeMent’s writing is generous and quotable, showing the lingering effects of a childhood spent poring through the Bible. It also furthers the literary influence that informed her previous release, 2015’s The Trackless Woods, which set new arrangements to the poetry of Russian writer Anna Akhmatova. But the performances are also among the liveliest and most dynamic in her catalog, ranging from the full-band, Mark Knopfler–style riffs of “The Sacred Now” to gentler tracks like “The Cherry Orchard” and “I Won’t Ask You Why,” led by DeMent’s piano, an instrument she wields as elegantly as her writing. (Notice how in “Say a Good Word,” she gives herself space to sing the word “magnanimity,” adding a sense of musicality with a light, rhythmic touch on a major 7th chord.)
From the beginning, DeMent had a crackling, luminescent country voice, equally suited for capturing the grand unknowability of the universe, the addictive rush of physical affection, and the slow-burning sadness of watching a familiar way of life disappear alongside the people we love. “No voice has inspired me more than my mother’s,” she announced in a spoken-word recitation near the end of her debut album, Infamous Angel, in 1992. Even then, she seemed wiser than her years, able to swerve between the wisdom of adulthood and the wild openness of youth.
Three decades later, DeMent has found new ways to reach higher ground. In “The Cherry Orchard,” she sings about winter and aging, swinging upward to a brittle falsetto, letting us hear the gravel as she switches between registers: “My life, my youth, my happiness/I bid adieu,” she sings, with all the drama and distance necessary to make us trust she means it. This sense of tragedy seeps through nearly every song. It’s what unites the vast material and makes Workin’ on a World feel pivotal in her catalog. These high points also help recontextualize DeMent’s continuing evolution as an observer of American life, as her influence continues to spread throughout folk and country music. Even the title, which rings with the bold promise of a campaign slogan, finds a way to factor in the inevitability of death: “I’m workin’ on a world,” she sings to a steady drumbeat, “I might never see.” And while the worry seems to get louder with each passing day, it might also be the thing that pushes us to keep marching on.


The analog master’s first all-digital release is a compelling document of a veteran artist learning new tricks.

eeeeeeep! EP

Someday, there will be books and graduate dissertations examining the distinctly 2020 phenomenon of the quarantine album. The term already invokes a web of clichés: a stripped-down album exuding authenticity and Nebraska aesthetics, borne of isolation and quiet reflection. And John Vanderslice, the stalwart indie-rock songwriter and producer, has made absolutely nothing of the sort.
As a legendary analog disciple—he’s the founder of a studio where rooms are packed with vintage tape spools and “ProTools” is said to be a dirty word—Vanderslice has amassed enough purist cred for one lifetime. Now, in quarantine, he’s trading audiophile aesthetics for Ableton. His new EP, Eeeeeeep!, is billed as “the first songs I have ever recorded on a computer,” as well as an attempt to “blur my vocals and lyrics into some weirder shit.”
So, if you’re expecting one of Vanderslice’s more abrasive releases, you won’t be disappointed: The EP opens with a supremely discordant stew of scraping beats and mangled vocals. But overall, Eeeeeeep! is less a full departure from the compellingly skewed indie-pop Vanderslice has spent 20 years exploring and more an expansion of the squiggly synths and sputtering drum machines that have always lived on the margins of his songs.
There are plenty of familiar reference points for fans. “Lure Mice Condemn Erase” puts a glitchy spin on the distorted acoustic sound of 2007’s Emerald City. Its lyrics imagine Vanderslice as a zealous cult leader, an example of his knack for building emotionally resonant songs around outlandish plots. “Just give in, just collapse/Follow our total relapse,” he exhorts his followers. “Team Stammer/Savior Machine” provides a subtle callback to 2001’s “Keep the Dream Alive” with its counting-based rhyme scheme, except now the melody jostles against knotty drum programming. It’s a solid example of Vanderslice using digital software to make his music stranger rather than streamlining it.
These experiments may have emerged from quarantine tinkering, but they’re also reflective of other changes in Vanderslice’s life. In 2019, the artist left San Francisco, his longtime home base, and decamped for Los Angeles, setting up a small studio in his backyard. That year, he released The Cedars, his first album after a six-year retirement, jumpstarting a creative rebirth that fed right into 2020’s Dollar Hits—a companion album spun from mutated tracks from The Cedars—and now Eeeeeeep! When he was interviewed about his recent influences, Vanderslice cited experimental hip-hop eccentrics like JPEGMAFIA and Tierra Whack: hardly common touchstones for established indie-rock dudes over 50, but you can hear such influences bleeding into the fractured textures and abrupt edits of this EP.
Eeeeeeep! is a compelling document of a veteran artist studying new tricks. But the EP is brief, and skittering, chaotic creations like “Xxxx” and “Song for Leopold” feel more like intriguing sketches than fully satisfying compositions. Anyone who’s seen Vanderslice live knows that, despite his modest fame, his songbook is capable of bringing audiences together in raucous singalongs. (There’s nothing quite like a crowd of strangers shouting the words “Bill Gates must die!”)
His recent output—particularly since 2013’s Kickstarter-fueled Dagger Beach—has veered away from discernible choruses and unifying gestures. This is by design, and feels like the start of a new creative phase borne out of both inspiration and necessity. But Vanderslice’s left turn into digital wizardry works best when it doesn’t ignore his considerable gift for old-fashioned songcraft.

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New vinyl reissues spotlight a masterful pair of albums by the elusive German producer whose ambient techno occupies an interzone between the dancefloor and cloud nine.

Intershop / Oasis

Michael Mayer first encountered Olaf Dettinger in 1997, at a party in Bautzen, a small East German town halfway between Dresden and the Polish border. Dettinger played an opening set of battle-style Chicago hard house—a far cry from the mischievous minimal techno that Mayer had packed his crate with—and presented the visiting headliner with a demo tape of his productions. Mayer wasn’t wowed by the demo’s relatively straightforward club tracks, which paled in comparison to the squirrelly, idiosyncratic music that Mayer and his friends in Cologne—Wolfgang and Reinhard Voigt, Jürgen Paape, and Jorg Bürger, among others—were putting out via a tangled web of labels and an even more chaotic array of aliases, a network they’d established out of their hometown’s Delerium record store. The music wasn’t bad, Mayer told Dettinger, but he found the sound derivative and the choice of instruments—a standard array of Roland 303, 808, 909, and the like—predictable. Besides, he added, in Cologne they’d moved from drum machines to samplers, a shift that had opened up new possibilities in sound design.
A few weeks later, another cassette turned up in Mayer’s mailbox. Dettinger hadn’t just gotten the memo; the new tape was so in line with the sounds coming out of Cologne that he might as well have been one of them. The boom-ticking beats were ruthlessly reduced, and they swam in a strange wash of filtered chords whose source was impossible to place. There was a clear affinity with the dub techno of Wolfgang Voigt’s Studio 1 project, but Dettinger’s peculiar mix of grungy sonics and crisp drums stood on its own. One song was particularly striking: It sampled the pastel swirl of “The Ghost Has No Name,” from the Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s 1986 album The Moon and the Melodies, provocatively mixing techno rhythms, ambient atmospheres, and pop melodies—precisely the blend at the heart of so much of the Cologne scene’s music.
Mayer and his crew signed the tracks for their New Trance Atlantic label and ordered a test pressing. But before they could manufacture the EP, they made a fateful decision. The jumble of imprints had gotten out of hand. It was time to tie off the spiraling list of labels—New Trance Atlantic, Profan, Auftrieb, etc.—and bring all their projects under one roof: Kompakt. Following an inaugural EP from Jürgen Paape, a co-founder of the new enterprise, Dettinger’s Blond EP, originally slated as NTA017, became the second release on the new label, followed a few records later by Dettinger’s even more adventurous Puma. The two 12"s helped establish the fledgling outlet as the source of some of Germany’s most exciting dance music of the era. But Kompakt had yet another ace up their sleeves: Intershop, Dettinger’s debut album and the label’s inaugural full-length, which would follow Puma a month later, in May 1999. Newly remastered and reissued—and pressed on vinyl for the first time—Intershop captures Kompakt at a pivotal moment in its evolution, branching out from club 12"s into a new world of home-listening music.
Dettinger had already flirted with ambient on the Cocteaus-sampling track on Blond; with Intershop (named after a state-run chain store in the former East Germany), he moved more decisively into an interzone between the dancefloor and cloud nine. (“We always loved ambient,” recalled Mayer of his reaction to the Intershop demo. “KLF’s Chill Out was a record where everyone inside Kompakt could sing every note. To include ambient into the world of Kompakt was just a logical step for us.”) The first track—untitled, like every single cut in Dettinger’s catalog—lays out the palette that set the album apart from its peers.
His synthesizers have a blurry, liquid quality. The sub-bass is too low to register as anything other than a vague pressure welling up underneath. Sampled drum-machine hits flit backward and forward like windshield wipers. The gliding groove gives the impression of rolling ceaselessly ahead in slow motion; the tempo is an unhurried 100 beats per minute, though dub delay on the fogged-out snares and hi-hats adds a quickening sense of movement that keeps the groove from plodding. Where techno usually stomps, this aqueous opening salvo undulates.
Across six more tracks, Intershop builds on that humble set of ideas in evocative and vividly tactile ways. Track two wreathes its chords in a halo of distortion that glows like hammered copper. Track three, a loping fusion of hip-hop and industrial dub, is shot through with what might be the rattle of a film projector, gravelly and unyielding. On track four, reversed drum hits and elliptical delay patterns combine to create a groove that seems to pull apart at the seams—a lumbering, intransigent cadence that goes to the heart of Dettinger’s unusual sense of rhythm.
If his mysterious sound design—lo-fi, suggestive, always seeming to hide secrets beneath its mottled surface—ropes you in, the music’s emotional pull keeps you there. That’s particularly true of Intershop’s final two tracks. The penultimate cut is a loping dub sketch whose luminous melody flickers like a wraith in the woods; in the closing track, a handful of piano notes run through a delay chain that slips increasingly out of phase, swirling like water going down the drain. It is one of the simplest songs I’ve ever heard; on some days, I’m pretty sure it’s also the saddest.
Six months after Intershop, Dettinger returned to the dancefloor with the bruising, bewilderingly left-footed Totentanz 12", which lumbers like an elephant through a field of icicles. Then, with August 2000’s Oasis, he delivered his magnum opus. For many years, I’d considered Intershop to be his masterpiece, but with time, Oasis has come to rival its predecessor. The general approach is much the same as the first time out: The tempos are slow, the sounds dusty, the spaces between them yawning and empty. You can practically see the tumbleweeds bouncing through the music. But Oasis benefits from a more varied palette than Dettinger’s debut, and its crumbling sense of structure feels even stranger.
The first track is made of little more than two chords that cycle each other warily, blasted and bit-crushed. It’s the kind of perfect loop that you could listen to for days, trying to decipher where it repeats and where it varies; after years of listening, I’m still not sure. The second track, on the other hand, is rendered in ultra-high fidelity, offsetting seismic dub bass with crystalline digital clicks. On track three he busts out shimmery guitars that sound much like the Cocteau Twins samples of Blond; track four’s toe-scuffing ambient techno sounds like it’s been cobbled together out of dust bunnies, sawdust, mica, and chalk. If Oasis doesn’t have anything that hits with the heartbreaking intensity of Intershop’s closing track, it’s more cohesive as an album. By turns sullen and ecstatic, it’s held together by its meditative air; every track feels like an experiment to see just how much can be removed. The closing track is the opposite of Intershop’s devastating finale: a trance-gated expression of pure, wordless bliss.
Dettinger never released anything else under his surname; as far as I know, he never released anything else period. (According to Mayer, he worked in recording studios for a time, and eventually moved into the gaming industry.) But as far as posterity is concerned, he hardly needed to. Together, Intershop and Oasis invented a new vocabulary for ambient techno, creating the model for artists like the Field—Oasis’ closing track might as well be the starter from which the Field created his whole aesthetic—as well as Kompakt’s long-running Pop Ambient series.
Dettinger’s influence stretches beyond the Kompakt label. You can hear it in the gravelly desolation of Actress’ grayscale fugues, the hobbling machine rhythms of Germany’s Workshop, the vinyl-hiss fantasia of Burial. Dettinger is the third inspiration cited in the liner notes to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch. “For us, he was the dude,” Noah Lennox once said of the German composer. Yet as influential as Dettinger’s albums have proven, few artists have struck quite the same balance of tumbledown rhythm, sandblasted texture, and bleeding-heart emotion. More than a quarter century later, his slim catalog feels increasingly unique: a fleeting collision of a moment, a creative vision, and a nascent scene, yielding a sound not to be repeated.


Erika M. Anderson emerges from the ashes of her former project Gowns with an unsettlingly beautiful collection of songs about pain and loss.

Past Life Martyred Saints

Erika M. Anderson has talked about finding "true bliss and terror" in the live performances of her former band, Gowns. The pressure-cooker atmosphere she and her partner in that group (and in life) Ezra Buchla immersed themselves in had to crack at some point, and it did, fatally and finally, at the beginning of 2010. Anderson's way of propping open an escape hatch from the bruised purging of Gowns was to retreat into herself, by gathering her collective musical ideas and putting them out under her own initials. But it's immediately apparent on hearing Past Life Martyred Saints, her debut full-length as EMA, that she's still all tangled up in "bliss and terror." For the most part, it's a white-knuckle ride. There's no pretense or pose here. No pulling back from the brink to foster an air of cool detachment. Anderson's music has the power to plummet to the depths and drag you right down there with her.
There's a lack of timidity in the way this music is expressed. It's almost as though Anderson snoozed her way through the past decade and is picking up threads that have mostly lain dormant since the early-to-mid 1990s. The boldness in her language, which thematically pings back and forth between emotional and physical duress, has the same naked volatility as Kat Bjelland circa Spanking Machine or Courtney Love in her Pretty on the Inside phase. It's often terrifying, distressing stuff. There's a feeling that you're watching someone in the midst of several life crises. It's a strange kind of testament to Past Life Martyred Saints that it often feels like a daunting proposition to listen to, as if spending too much time with it will leave you as scarred as its creator.
The lyrical fixations here frequently zoom in on Cronenberg-ian body horror, with Anderson exploring the gnarly elasticity of the human frame when it's placed under threat. EMA songs often duck into little mantras; "Butterfly Knife" bears one of the most unnerving of those in its "20 kisses with a butterfly knife" line. "Marked" is similarly nauseating and obsessed with physical abuse. Over a noise that sounds like water chugging down rusty steel piping Anderson devolves into repeating: "I wish that every time he touched me he left a mark." It dwells in the same kind of unsettling territory as Goffin/King's "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)", and the bare-bones musical arrangement heightens the severity of the message just as Phil Spector's production did on the Crystals' song.
That ability for her arrangements to acutely reflect her lyrical mood is one of Anderson's trump cards. She knows exactly when to add and subtract elements, bringing "Marked" out of the doldrums at its close with a warm organ tone that she deploys whenever things get a little too heavy (see also: "Milkman"). The opening "The Grey Ship" is one of her most ambitious conceits in that regard. It shifts in style several times, from its earthy, folk-y opening to a midsection where all the instrumentation vanishes suddenly as if the bottom just fell out of the world.
It's a sign of her confidence and ambition that she can open the record with such a multi-faceted song, full of odd diversions and unexpected twists that need multiple plays to really sink in. But the hit-rate here is high. "California" is among Anderson's best works, a stream-of-consciousness rant about displacement and alienation set to a musical backing that feels like civilization collapsing around her. "California" shows off her enviable talent for finding a comfortable place where big-topic sloganeering and personal tales can coexist. It's that sweat-soaked head-rush of repulsion, sadness, anxiety, and nostalgia you get when you feel the tug of home.
Past Life Martyred Saints is a fiercely individual record, made by a musician with a fearless and courageous approach to her art. Crucially, the desire to let such raw emotion out in song never feels forced. It simply wouldn't work this well if there was a hint of artifice, or a suggestion that Anderson hadn't regurgitated all these feelings of loss, loathing, and rejection from a pit of genuinely volatile emotion. There's a conviction to her delivery that leaves you in no doubt that this is something she needed to flush out of her system. Comparisons can certainly be drawn to artists such as Patti Smith or Cat Power, and her dry, deadpan delivery occasionally orbits the same sphere as Kim Gordon's vocal work with Sonic Youth. But this is Anderson's own brittle unease. It hits as hard as a cold slap in the face-- and will leave its mark on you.


The Bolivian American artist formerly known as Elysia Crampton spins Andean music, digital effects, and overwhelming distortion into a binary-smashing collage with ecstatic overtones.

DJ E

Chuquimamani-Condori’s gloriously fractured music mashes the mundane with the divine, leaving every jagged seam lovingly exposed. As Elysia Crampton, E+E, and now using their Aymara name, the Bolivian American experimental producer has woven cumbia, tarqueada, huayño, and other Andean folk and dance styles into splintered collages pierced by white-noise blasts, electronic rhythms, and hyper-compressed digital bass. Beyond simply invoking these genres, they capture a sense of their passage through the world—as if their muffled rhythms were blasting out of an overdriven PA system in the park, or ripped from an online mix with the ads still intact. Chuquimamani-Condori treats these sounds as a breathing social organism, an animated embodiment of traditional music as it lives today.
After a handful of releases like ORCORARA 2010 and Selected Demos & DJ Edits [2007-2019] that presented the disparate building blocks of Chuquimamani-Condori’s music at their rawest, DJ E dazzlingly rejoins the pieces. Dropped onto Bandcamp with little fanfare toward the end of last year, it feels like a full-circle moment for Chuquimamani-Condori; like 2018’s self-titled album or their mesmerizing 2015 debut, American Drift, it could never be mistaken for the work of another artist. It is simultaneously harrowing yet warm, deathly urgent yet defiantly playful. Though everything from the album’s low-key release to its proudly unmastered sound may seem to undercut its significance, Chuquimamani-Condori’s rejection of industry norms only serves to highlight the vitality of the music.
The first thing you may notice about DJ E is just how busted it sounds. Chuquimamani-Condori stacks one ultra-compressed layer on top of another, their claustrophobic mixing only heightening the music’s intensity. “The older I get, the uglier I want my music to feel,” they told Tiny Mix Tapes in 2015, arguing that clean, self-consciously futuristic sound design is rooted in a colonialist “mode of educated whiteness.” By that metric, DJ E is Chuquimamani-Condori’s most violent rebellion yet: “Forastero Edit” skitters with sword-drawing stock effects and stop-start guitar from their brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton (whose own ultra-minimal music has paralleled Chuquimamani-Condori’s over the last few years). “Return” buries its pleading siku panpipes in a blown-out fog of throbbing bass and crunched-up distortion, in what feels like trying to glimpse sunlight through a sandstorm. It’s not that far off from the disorientation caused by the weirder end of Brazilian funk, a kind of hypnosis only made possible by the sound of plug-in bass presets clipping out of control.
Though Chuquimamani-Condori’s music is concerned with destruction and transformation—whether of gender, apparatuses of oppression, or the spirit itself—DJ E highlights the way that repetition plays into catharsis. Songs don’t develop as much as softly mutate in place, and they often return to the same motifs. The manic laughter that writhes throughout “Eat My Cum” previously appeared on the E+E track “STEERED,” and the various DJ tags and radio transitions littered throughout the album will be familiar to anyone accustomed to Chuquimamani-Condori’s work. Where their previous albums could be disturbingly dark, however, DJ E reveals a newfound sweetness, a sense of coming home. Nostalgic tracks like “Breathing” and “Until I Find You Again” reconfigure the artist’s palette with all the earnestness of a handmade album of blurry photos your aunt printed off of Facebook.
Even the plastic detritus in Chuquimamani-Condori’s music feels charged by a higher power; few other artists could successfully deliver doomsday sermons while holding a keytar. On “Engine,” a tender piano melody glides alongside a whirring like that of a dentist’s drill—when its buzzing slows at the end, it feels like a great exhale. They’ve described DJ E as “the sound of our water ceremonies, the 40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora & the call of the morning star venus.” For Chuquimamani-Condori, this digital overload is tantamount to a spiritual release. The line between club and folk music smudges to the point where the two become indistinguishable, and the truth of who we are lies somewhere in that pixelated middle space.


Joined by an illustrious lineup of players including Yasmin Williams, Ryley Walker, and jaimie branch, the Chicago-based guitarist constructs wistful, evocative psychic landscapes.

Eli Winter

Give the mind a crumb of story and it’ll spin a tale, even in the absence of explicit narrative. This tendency proves true with Eli Winter’s new self-titled album, a six-track instrumental odyssey driven by virtuosic guitar. With ambling compositions that are as evocative as they are refined, it’s easy to imagine some lone traveler, cycling from defeat to resolve and back again. On this, his sixth record after this year’s Controlled Burning with Jordan Reyes and 2021’s Anticipation with Cameron Knowler, Winter transports the listener to a cerebral landscape as dynamic and storied as American topography.
Here, the Chicago-based wunderkind—an accomplished writer with storytelling bonafides beyond the guitar—merges the mythos of his native Texas with jazzy, explosive bombast, like a cowboy on DMT. He’s joined by a who’s-who of musicians at the intersection of tradition and experimentation: Knowler, Yasmin Williams, Ryley Walker, jaimie branch, David Grubbs, and Tyler Damon, among others. This roster might feel crowded if it weren’t full of career collaborators, practiced in subtlety and harmony. The resulting songs are dimensional and rich, but never baroque. The guitar remains at the fore, even as distortion (as on “No Fear”) or brass (“Dayenu”) lends additional dimension.
They’re also emotionally resonant—the deft finger-picking on opener “For a Chisos Bluebonnet” feels like wind in the sails, fortifying and hopeful, while closer “Unbecoming” builds from austere harmonium into a looping, bittersweet melody, wistful as the Texas plains. These songs are spiritual and sonic cousins to William Tyler’s “Highway Anxiety,” music of and for journeying (even if it’s just a trip through the psyche). “Dayenu,” with its fevered percussion and flugelhorn, crests to a frenzied climax that ends like a cliffhanger, playing as much with time and pace as with tone. Winter moves from fluid, honky-tonk rhythms to the precipice of abstraction, turning over the sunny familiar to see what writhes underneath.
That searching emotional current feels more potent in certain moments than others, and it’s alluded to directly in the titles of “Dayenu” and “Davening in Threes,” which reference Jewish prayer. The quest for meaning takes on varying degrees of urgency. “Brain on Ice,” with its slide guitar and languid tempo is a pleasant listen, but it doesn’t have the same impact as the songs that bookend it, which feel satisfying and textured, like massaging a scar. “Davening in Threes” feels mildly indulgent by its end, close to noodling, but charms with a freewheeling riff that circles layers of warm, reverberating chords. What it evokes—emotionally or narratively—will depend on who’s listening, but in this melange of past and present, beautiful and dissonant, the space for discovery is as wide as the horizon.


Mark Foster enlists more beat-filled haze for his third album, a tuneful but confounding modern pop event that lands somewhere between the Beach Boys and Just Blaze.

Sacred Hearts Club

The unhurried lope of “Pumped Up Kicks” ran counter to Mark Foster’s rapid ascent. After graduating high school in northern Ohio, he moved to Los Angeles, eventually landing a job with the commercial-music concern Mophonics. It was in Mophonics’ studio that Foster tracked “Pumped Up Kicks.” Though he had songwriting partners in drummer Mark Pontius and former bassist Cubbie Fink, “Kicks” was Foster’s work alone: the version that hit No. 3 on the Hot 100 was his original demo. When Foster the People played the 2012 Grammy Awards—wearing matching striped Gant popovers for a Beach Boys anniversary segment—they performed “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” another pop smash written by a jingle writer/LA transplant.
A bout of writer’s block spurred Foster to travel; his final stop was Morocco, where he spent eight days with super-producer Paul Epworth, who worked on the band’s debut. The writing session led to 2014’s Supermodel, largely a lateral move. There were more indie-pop vocals massed like fog-shrouded battle formations; more ruthless refrains; and another bass-led, deceptively upbeat single. Afrobeat-jacking opener aside, the change was thematic. “You want more and ambition’s taking its toll on you,” Foster sang on “Ask Yourself.” The band, as you’d expect, grappled with materialism. “I’m bored of the game and too tired to rage,” went the bridge of “Coming of Age,” the album’s riff-riddled highlight. Unlike Columbia stablemates MGMT—to whom Foster and company have frequently been compared—Foster the People had become shepherds of a sound, not shamans.
On their third album, they’re still steering their flock through the smoke. In a teaser video released last month, Foster spoke of the album as being built from the beat up and influenced by ’60s psychedelia. In theory, this implies a pivot to MGMT’s template. In reality, Sacred Hearts Club splits the difference between the bookending acts on that Grammys tribute: Maroon 5 and the Beach Boys. Pontius’ boom-bap anchors the angsty one-two opening: “Pay the Man” threads a pitched-up vocal scramble into Foster’s falling-teeth fever dream, while the anthemic, electro-pop “Doing It for the Money” spends its verses in a fighter’s stance, shifting weight from one foot to another, waiting for the bell.
This focus on the beat leads directly to regrettable pop-rap cadences. “Loyal Like Sid & Nancy”—with its clap-heavy 808 coursing underneath—is an inscrutable data dump, with references ranging from sort of cute (“ghosting like I’m Daniel Johnston”) to ill-advised (“got my hands up in the air/I’m saying ‘I can’t breathe’”) to downright horrifying (“lock our voices in the oven/like Sylvia at home”). Despite the title, “Harden the Paint” owes more to Just Blaze than Lex Luger, as smeared synth hits give way to Foster’s sprechgesang (“I’m just floating with my hands up/All street and gold dust”). A lovely chromatic vocal counterpoint enjoins his lover, who we’re led to believe, does not play for the Houston Rockets.
But Foster’s first love was the Beach Boys, and he pays homage to them yet again on Sacred Hearts Club. On SupermodeI, it was the choral “The Angelic Welcome of Mr. Jones.” Here, it’s “Time to Get Closer,” a 58-second, full-band stroll through the surf. Their fullest tribute is the daydreamy “Static Space Lover,” a duet with singer and actress Jena Malone: Foster the People stuff the pre-chorus with sleigh bells and curlicue harmonies, then build the bridge around a piano line, leading to something like trap beats meets Pet Sounds.
Whether these developments bring more chart success is an open question. New co-writers (K’naan, Aftermath signee Justus, Ryan Tedder) exacerbate Foster’s tendency to sketch around his point. His gift, as his Mophonics bio once read, is writing “compositions... [that] won’t let you forget them.” For hits like “Helena Beat” or “Coming of Age,” this implies craft. For stretches of Sacred Hearts Club, it’s persistence, as Foster’s existential couplets become more like carnival barking through the production’s thick haze. In a sense, Foster the People already belong to another age. The week before “Pumped Up Kicks” entered the pop Top 50, Spotify debuted in America. The streaming service didn’t help the song—Spotify plays weren’t figured into Billboard’s formula until 2012, by which point “Kicks” had crossed three million paid downloads. But if you plug their name into the search bar, you can find a version of ”Pumped Up Kicks” on an official playlist titled ”Oldies but Goodies.”


After a long hiatus, the solo electronics master returns with a mesmerizing, terrifying, and emotionally nuanced “anti-fascist ritual” of an album.

OCCULTING DISK

More than 15 years ago, Norwegian sound artist and Supersilent co-founder Helge Sten seemed to bury his Deathprod alias. For a decade, Sten barbed intricate drones with spikes of static, then stuffed it all into four essential discs in a 2004 box set that suggested a coffin. He went largely silent. Motivated by the recent rise of nationalists and strongmen worldwide, though, Sten has resurrected Deathprod for what he calls an “anti-fascist ritual” with Occulting Disk. The album is, as Will Oldham writes in the liner notes, a 10-track attempt to “address ... hatred and reduce it by its opposite.”
Sten launches Occulting Disk on the offensive with “Disappearance/Reappearance,” a digital battle hymn that pushes one distorted note past the point of collapse. For nine minutes, Sten oscillates between corrosive washes and bellowing foghorn blasts, stretching out the rests between them to make you fret over what comes next. It’s as forceful and finessed as the best of Birchville Cat Motel or Prurient, and it offers a welcome progressive corrective for power electronics, a world often hamstrung by its flirtation with or outright descent into fascism.
Despite the truculent introduction, Sten does much more than rage. His emotional breadth and nuance remind us of the heart required to fight back. “Occultation 2” suggests the onset of a panic attack, with meticulously nested layers of static and sustain closing in around you, cutting off your ability to consider anything else. With its delicate tones drifting above air-raid sirens, “Occultation 3” evokes a mourner’s wail amid chaos.
Sten has often explored a sense of play with Deathprod’s concepts and titles. He’s got a beautiful track called “Orgone Donor” and an eerie drone dubbed “The Contraceptive Briefcase II.” The brilliantly ambiguous title Occulting Disk continues this thread. Is the music meant to conscript us into rebellions? Or is the “occulting” that happens here more akin to an interrupted signal, as when the moon occults the sun? Perhaps these tracks are acts of distraction, meant to be blasted at an enemy. Occulting Disk is somehow mesmerizing and terrifying—motivational for those who need it, a nuisance to those who don’t want it.
At 66 minutes, Occulting Disk may get tedious or even tiring. Its heaviest blows fling you against the ropes and leave you there. But the length and the range of these 10 tracks offer an implicit lesson in perseverance, a necessary skill when countering deeply entrenched, well-heeled oppressors. Sten emerges from the catatonia of “Occultation 7” with a 12-minute counterattack of a finale, a piece that overruns whatever space you give it. Looking from the edge of one decade where entropy has metastasized and into the increasingly anxious next one, Occulting Disk is a reminder to believe in rallying for the cause, no matter how long it takes or however hellish the prospect and process may sound.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Jonny Pierce’s eponymous new album reflects the characteristically sunny indie pop and increasingly inward focus of the Drums’ solo incarnation.

Jonny

For all the sweetness of the Drums’ music, they’ve always sounded crushed. As the leader—and now sole member—of the band, Jonny Pierce has written hundreds of spare, summery indie pop songs full of self-recrimination and self-examination. His new album, Jonny, is the culmination of 15 years of introspection. Pierce confronts head-on the memories of childhood trauma that have reverberated through the Drums’ past five albums, matching the mood with a sparer sound.
Filigreed with an edge of post-punk, Jonny is full of dreamy, minimal jangle pop. The lyrics are stark, sifting through Pierce’s past and examining how it’s invaded his present. In the sunny-sounding “Isolette,” Pierce describes the incubator where he was placed after a traumatic birth. He attributes his mother’s early detachment to this formative event, and the song follows those ripples into his adulthood intimacy. “You’ll find a better lover,” he apologizes to his subject. “I’m just back in the isolette.” Across Jonny, Pierce’s lyrics are unpoetic—the album ends with the refrain “I used to want to die/But now I don’t want to die!”—but the melodies are strong enough to carry them. “I Want It All” and “Plastic Envelope,” the two best songs here, express plaintive emotions with unadorned directness.
While the sound is pared back, there’s a greater variation in style, like the surprisingly grand, doo-wop-esque ballad “Be Gentle.” A Rico Nasty feature on “Dying” comes out of left field, but her voice, candy-sweet and bell-clear, blends right in; you only wish she had more interesting material to work with. Instead, the song is flat-soda synth-pop, with Pierce making a suitably uncomplex point (he’s been “dying all my life”)—a recipe that’s repeated across the tracklist. Pierce’s work has grown more insular since the Drums compressed into a solo act, and tracks like “Better” and “Pool God” feel at once bloated and shallow.
Even as excess weighs down Jonny, the album still glimmers with beauty. Pierce’s depictions of raw, strange intimacy have long distinguished the band’s music, and Jonny’s core scrutiny of trauma and its aftermath plays to his strengths. As a pop songwriter, Pierce’s instincts tend toward the brief and precise. With some editing and a tighter focus, Jonny could have brought those talents to their most evocative, full-bodied expression yet.


Celebrating its 50th anniversary, a new expanded edition revisits the album that burnished McCartney’s critical reputation after the Beatles’ breakup, reestablishing as a force to contend with.

Paul McCartney / Wings: Band on the Run (50th Anniversary Edition)

Band on the Run turned 50 at the end of last year, and a new expanded edition—its fourth—celebrates the anniversary. As the proliferation of reissues over the years suggests, it’s Paul McCartney’s most consequential post-Beatles record, if not necessarily his best: the album that revived his critical fortunes and established him as a powerhouse outside his former band.
McCartney’s career was hardly languishing when Band on the Run appeared at the end of 1973. Earlier that year, Red Rose Speedway became his second album to reach No. 1 in the U.S., with the dreamy ballad “My Love” topping the Billboard charts and his James Bond theme “Live and Let Die” coming close. Yet his critical reputation was at a nadir, lacking the countercultural cachet of either John Lennon or George Harrison, ex-bandmates whose early-’70s successes hit the sweet spot where the underground and mainstream met. Cast as the primary culprit in the Beatles’ demise, McCartney was portrayed as a careerist control freak who specialized in featherweight pop.
But following the Fab Four’s breakup, McCartney hardly had a master plan. Newly married to the former Linda Eastman, he moved to a farm in Scotland and then revived an idea he had for the Beatles in their waning days: to get back out and play rock’n’roll as part of a group. As he recently told Mojo, he realized his path forward was “to get a band that isn’t massively famous, to not worry if we don’t know what we’re doing because we would form our character by learning along the way.”
An essential part of that fledgling band was Linda McCartney, who previously hadn’t played music. Paul recalled, “I wasn’t motivated by having a fabulous group. I was motivated by not wanting to leave my wife behind. We had only just married. What was I going to do, run off on the road? The Beatles weren’t very good when they started out either.” He had the pick of prime studio players, recruiting New York drummer Denny Seiwell after he played on Ram, the 1971 album credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, but he found his true lieutenant in Denny Laine, a guitarist who sang lead on the Moody Blues’ breakthrough hit, “Go Now,” in 1964 but spent the subsequent decade struggling to maintain a living as a working musician.
Laine shared a history with McCartney and also recognized his subordinate role. He later said, “Let’s be honest—[McCartney] wanted to be in a band in a sense, but he would still have the final call.” McCartney overshadowed the rest of Wings to the extent that their records were essentially treated as Paul’s creation: Jon Landau’s Rolling Stone rave of Band on the Run didn’t mention Denny Laine’s name once.
By the time Wings recorded Band on the Run, they had whittled down from a quintet to a trio. McCartney alienated Seiwell and guitarist Hugh McCullough; the two musicians chafed at their paltry weekly retainers—a pay system devised to mimic what the Beatles had in their prime—and their boss’ exacting vision. When McCartney’s constraints and eccentricities began to grate, they chose to bolt—right on the eve of Wings heading to EMI’s outpost in Lagos, Nigeria.
Having their choice of EMI studios throughout the world, the McCartneys chose Lagos believing it’d be a working vacation: “We thought, Great… lie on the beach all day, doing nothing, breeze into the studios and record,” recalled Paul. “It didn’t turn out like that.” That’s an understatement. Upon their arrival in Nigeria, Wings and Geoff Emerick—an engineer who had worked with McCartney since Revolver—discovered that EMI had drastically oversold their studio’s capabilities. Forget competing with Abbey Road; it barely had functional microphones. Wings rallied, but the setbacks were many. Fela Kuti visited the studio twice, convinced that McCartney intended to appropriate his music; the two reached an uneasy understanding after Kuti realized there wasn’t a trace of African music in McCartney’s new songs. Cream drummer Ginger Baker, who had recently adopted Lagos as his home, was also irked by the presence of the McCartneys, but for pettier reasons: He wanted them to use his (admittedly superior) studio, not EMI’s. McCartney placated him by cutting “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)” at Baker’s ARC Studio. Then there was the matter of the McCartneys’ mugging. Instructed not to wander about at night, the hippies figured they’d be fine, but one night, walking back to their villa after working at the studio, the pair were accosted in the street. Among the valuables the thieves obtained were a clutch of demo tapes, forcing McCartney to immediately cut a set of new demos from memory, just so he wouldn’t lose these nascent tunes forever.
That series of re-recordings could be a key to why Band on the Run is tighter than most McCartney records: Forced to revise from memory, McCartney effectively gave his songs a second draft. He saved the creative spontaneity for the recording, working well with Linda, Laine, and Emerick; he later recalled, “It was quite a joy being so slimmed down after the other two members of the band decided they didn’t want to come out."
Band on the Run lacks the detours and loose ends common to McCartney records without sacrificing his quirks; they’re there, simply used as flair. At a mere nine or 10 tracks—the American version, which is the one included on this 50th-anniversary edition shoehorned the glam-inflected hit “Helen Wheels” onto the second side—it doesn’t ramble, nor does it wander into foreign territory. The songs can be broken down into three familiar McCartney categories: There are sweet acoustic reflections and rampaging rockers, plus snazzy showstoppers that blend these two sounds. McCartney pulls out a couple of tricks he pioneered with the Beatles, threading song snippets into a mini-suite à la Abbey Road and closing the album with a reiteration of musical themes in a fashion that echoes Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There’s a crucial difference between those records and Band on the Run: Although Tony Visconti’s walloping orchestral arrangements on the perennial hits “Band on the Run” and “Jet”—written in just three days—create the illusion of a studio tour de force, the album actually captures the sound of a small combo being inventive with the meager tools at hand.
To that end, the “Underdubbed” version included here—a rough mix created by Geoff Emerick after everybody returned home, previously buried somewhere in McCartney’s archives—has instructive value. Initially, the absences are glaring, particularly on the tracks sweetened by Visconti. Without the orchestrations, “Band on the Run” and “Jet” can seem incomplete; indeed, “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five” contains no lead vocals whatsoever. It’s not a finished product but a working mix, one that nevertheless captures how Wings interacted as a band. Stripped of the gloss, Band on the Run’s quieter moments seem to be a natural heir to the ramshackle rustic strumming of Wild Life. It also becomes apparent how much texture Linda’s analog synthesizer adds to the songs, generating rumbling propulsion on “Jet” and adding a creeping sense of foreboding on “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five.” Laine acts as empathetic support, weaving his guitar with Paul’s and seamlessly intermingling his harmonies with the McCartneys’. When he trades lead lines on the lovely “No Words"—an effervescent evocation of mid-’60s guitar jangle that’s his first co-writing credit on a Wings record—there seems to be no distance between himself and his married partners. He’s not an interloper, he’s part of the crew.
In a sense, this is what McCartney yearned for since the waning days of the Beatles: to get back to the early days, when being in a band carried a sense of adventure. His phenomenal fame created an inherent power imbalance when he started Wings, but by Band on the Run, he had a pair of players who knew and accepted his idiosyncrasies. He didn’t have supporting musicians, he had a group with a distinct character, one that was captured on record during an extraordinarily difficult set of circumstances. Paul McCartney is surely the driving spirit behind Band on the Run—it distills his gifts as well as any album could—but the peculiarly warm, loving camaraderie of Wings is the reason it’s endured over the decades.


The London electro-pop artist takes a step forward after last year’s Bluff EP: The textures are richer, the emotions deeper, and her confidence more assured.

Babylon IX EP

Yunè Pinku makes nostalgia-fueled music infused with techno and garage, and airlifted by her gentle, occasionally deadpan vocal melodies, corroborating lyrics like “told you I don’t give a fuck” with a delightful, lilting shrug in her voice. Now 20 years old, the Malaysian-Irish Londoner broke out with her fidgety, incandescent debut single, “Laylo,” and hit her stride during a string of lockdowns early in the pandemic, creating a cache of song sketches that formed her Bluff EP last year. Thematically concerned with the paranoia that lurks even when you’re trying to let loose at the club, Bluff confirmed an exciting new voice whose buoyant hooks quickly tunnel their way into your brain.
On her latest EP, Babylon IX, Yunè levels up by adding richer detail and texture to her production, moving more assuredly in the process. Inspired by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, she sets a rave within its walls to seek out deeper pockets of euphoria and melancholy in her electronic music. Yunè finds an easy sweet spot between trance and electro pop throughout, gliding toward a sleek, tasteful approach without relinquishing her personality. The sing-song verses on “Sports,” an early standout, are a head-nodding delight framed by a strutting bassline, skittish drums, and blaring airhorn synth. “TV’s boiling over, love,” she sings to someone with an unhealthy attachment to their screen, a trepidation about technology that appears glancingly throughout. “I’m not digital,” she intones later, on “Night Light”; “I’m just feeling.”
Babylon IX’s best songs merge springy rhythms with a sense of wistfulness. On the storming “Fai Fighter,” which opens with an out-of-left-field Wilhelm scream, she hits a pleasure point with an oscillating synth melody and backing vocals pitch-shifted into a gossamer high. Like a breezier version of Orbital’s “Halcyon,” the song is kinetic and plaintive at once, outfitted with deep, melodic bass tones and lyrics urging to forget past mistakes. “Night Light” moves in a similarly rapturous mode, with sighing samples, an agitated beat, and bedroom-pop keys that anchor a pleading chorus: “Make me better,” Yunè sings, “Make me better forever.” Her words dissipate into a cloud of noise, rippling out with yearning.
When Yunè slows down further, the effect is just as dreamy. “Blush Cut” opens with an atmospheric prologue that gives way to a bittersweet, downbeat climax. “Hit me where it hurts now,” she urges, adding a sting to the lightness. Opener “Trinity” tiptoes toward its big trance breakdown, as flashing synth pads and murmured vocals are gradually fleshed out with a radiant, wordless chorus. Yunè’s melodic sensibility allows for slow builds as easily as a sharp tempo changes.
The small details make Yunè’s best songs dazzle—a beaming synth line suddenly shifted to a canted angle, a beat churning in on itself to inject a jolt of adrenaline. Imbued with more confidence than before, Yunè’s music on Babylon IX doesn’t peacock, but it doesn’t have to. She glides along at her own easy, assured pace, both comfortable and in control.


On his fourth album with his father’s Egypt 80 ensemble, Seun Kuti delivers a smartly distilled primer on the power of Afrobeat.

Black Times

The responsibility of writing protest songs is hardwired into Seun Kuti’s DNA. The 35-year-old bandleader and saxophonist is the youngest son of Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat pioneer who started his own Movement of the People party, penned lyrics that brazenly took shots at Nigerian politicians and, in the case of “Zombie,” provoked a bloody military attack on the Kalakuta Republic commune and recording facility that he’d founded in Lagos. Channeling this fiery legacy, Seun Kuti’s Black Times, the fourth album he’s recorded in cahoots with his father’s Egypt 80 ensemble, forcefully drives home the infectious protest power of Afrobeat.
“Last Revolutionary” sparks the eight-track set into life. Powered by Shinan Abiodun’s furious snares, Oladimeji Akinyele’s trumpet blasts lead the charge as Kuti anoints himself “the walking, talking struggle of my people.” This belief in the power of change pulses through the rest of the album. The title song, which features bluesy, wavering guitar by Carlos Santana, is rooted the idea of learning from history to achieve physical and spiritual of freedom. “Theory of Goat and Yam” pairs pounding bass and live-wire alto-sax blasts with lyrics inspired by the former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who justified embezzlement by comparing it to goats wolfing down yams left tantalizingly within reach. “Corporate Public Control Department (CPCD)” is a funked-up critique of self-serving politicians the world over that’s powered by spunky waves of brass. “Promise to give me peace and you give me war,” Kuti cries. “You promise me justice and then you jail the poor/You promise jobs and you close the factory/But there’s always work in the penitentiary.”
This working- class angle is Black Times’ defining motif, and it transcends African politics to speak directly to all those feeling the daily burden of economic oppression. On “African Dreams,” Kuti rallies against those suckered into chasing American capitalist goals at the expense of their own heritage and welfare. “Struggle Sounds” opens with a rousing, four-to-the-floor beat before introducing rapid-fire brass stabs and slinky keys over which Kuti delivers a defiant message: “I make that struggle music as the voice of the people/Struggle sound like the weapon of the future.”
Key to Afrobeat’s appeal is the way the music marries political messages to bewitchingly upbeat grooves. On Kuti’s watch, the experience is never preachy. Incendiary lyrics are delivered in a call-and-response fashion against tuneful brass riffs; expansive instrumental sections of songs skillfully add and detract instruments while building the grand groove of it all. And where Fela was fond of 10-minute-plus flights of revolutionary fantasy, most of the songs on Black Times are capped at the six- or seven minute mark, casting the album as an extra potent and smartly distilled primer on the punch of Afrobeat.
Growing up to the world as Fela Kuti’s son will naturally always cast something of a shadow over Seun Kuti’s music, but Black Times comes across as both a respectful reminder of his legacy and a demonstration of Kuti’s own fresh talent. Humble enough to acknowledge his place in a grander lineage, “Last Revolutionary” features Kuti embarking on a metaphysical roll call. “I be Marcus Garvey/I be Kwame Ture/I be Shaka Zulu,” he proudly proclaims, before delivering the knowing kicker: “I be Fela Kuti.”