Drawing on several decades of psychedelic music, the debut album from the Brooklyn project grapples with introspective feelings through expansive, transportive sounds.

Momentary Presence

“When You Feel It Come Around,” the opening track of GIFT’s debut album Momentary Presence, is a familiar psychedelic mission statement. “You feel it come around/It’s time, it’s time/You leave it all alone/It’s love, it’s love,” TJ Freda gently sings over waves of flickering ambience. Far from the abstract zone-out it may initially seem, the song is about Freda learning to navigate years of anxiety attacks. From there, Momentary Presence offers an abundance of transporting sounds, exquisite layers of warped guitars and synths that suggest lose-yourself transcendence. Yet the album more directly depicts a journey of re-centering—not dismissing the value in venturing out into psychological seas, but also re-embracing the shore.
There are whole histories of psychedelic music collapsed into Momentary Presence: Creation Records-style coos and swirls, guitars phasing in and out like early Spiritualized, bold new wave synth melodies, the sonic immersion of shoegaze. Freda is the person behind almost every sound on the album, and he crafted much of it from his Brooklyn apartment. While the novelty of world-building from a bedroom and a laptop isn’t groundbreaking in 2022, it does speak to the interplay in Freda’s project—grappling with interior thoughts and emotions while seeking a balm in the most expansive sounds.
To get there, Freda went to therapy and dove into Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, a pivotal document adjacent to the original psych-rock heyday. Freda’s own title, Momentary Presence, conveys a similar prompt, with a good portion of his lyrics fixating on seizing or embracing the beauty of fleeting moments, being present with an experience whether euphoric or traumatic. Freda sings things like “Lost my head and found it on my face” in a song called “Share the Present”; the album concludes with the sentiment, “Here and now, the time floats by.”
Freda keeps the album in that present with sharp spins on recognizable sounds, grounding each mantra with hooks. “Gumball Garden,” a pre-pandemic vision of waking up in a world where everyone has suddenly disappeared, rips through about half a dozen addicting guitar lines, including one big fuzzed-out attack that’s like the best riff Tame Impala haven’t written in the 10 years since Lonerism. The similarly propulsive “Share the Present” sighs above a glimmering, cascading synth motif. While those and other rockers like “Stuck in a Dream” are often the highlights, the greatest achievement on Momentary Presence is “Feather,” an airy and patient reckoning with somebody who is struggling and can’t, or won’t, be helped. Inspired by a lucid dream, “Feather” plays like a melancholic watercolor recollection until the beat intensifies three-and-a-half minutes in, lending the song a new urgency.
None of these songs are reinventing the form, but that also doesn’t feel like the point. Across Momentary Presence, there are ’60s mind-expansion koans filtered through ’80s dream-pop; there are ’70s stoner riffs reframed in ’00s digital amber. While seeking a salve for his own anxiety, Freda revisited these fragments of the past for eternal answers and he learned to wield them with beauty. He makes them sound whole.


Beach Slang is a Philadelphia trio featuring Weston's James Snyder, Ex-Friends drummer JP Flexner, and NONA bassist Ed McNulty. Considering their pop-punk pedigree, you wouldn't be wrong to go into this four song EP expecting a little sunshine, but they've got something stormier to offer.

Beach Slang: Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? EP

"These books and bars and this honesty, they're all I've got," James Snyder concedes halfway through "Get Lost", the third of four heartbreakers from Beach Slang's debut EP Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? Snyder—a self-admitted "slave to fucking up"—spends most of Broken couching his confessions in a certain romance: "We're just some dumb kids getting wasted and knowing we're alive," he sings on "Kids." When the so-called "accidents, whores, and wrecks" that populate Broken aren't screeching it out with the cops, they're drinking down or snorting up anything they can get ahold of. Yet, when Snyder insists "the kids are still alright," he's onto something.
And Snyder knows a thing or two about "the kids": before Beach Slang, he spent the better part of the last 20 years co-fronting much-loved Bethlehem, Penn., punkers Weston. To a certain stripe of east-coast pop-punk fan, the Philadelphia-based Beach Slang must look something like a supergroup; Snyder's joined by Ex-Friends drummer JP Flexner and NONA bassist Ed McNulty. Between their pop-punk pedigree and their SPF-spackled moniker, you wouldn't be wrong to go into Broken expecting a little sunshine. But Beach Slang's got something stormier on offer: four self-described "sweaty prayers" set to hard-charging drums and heartbleed guitars.
"I watched your palm hug your guitar—it buzzes like a bomb," Snyder remembers most of the way through "Get Lost". There's a careening, about-to-explode urgency of the guitars on Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? that's every bit as crucial to these songs' emotional heft as Snyder's lyrics. Everywhere you turn, breathless rhythms crash headlong into blaring, yearning leads, a perfectly outsized complement to the widescreen, fucked-up-and-loving-it sentiments. What this sound lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up in desperation, and that tug between those darting leads and Snyder's whispered-in-your-ear vocalese is electrifying. "I gave you taste, and a spine," Snyder sings on "Filthy Luck". The music drops out just in time for Snyder to stage-whisper his kiss-off: "And I hope you drown." The guitars charge back in a second later, the perfect punctuation to his seething passion.
While it's tempting to try to position the wild-eyed desperation in Beach Slang's music somewhere between the fuckup glory of the Replacements and the finely tuned angst of Jawbreaker, there's a considerably less cred-compatible touchpoint towering above the rest: the Goo Goo Dolls. Believe it or not, the hardscrabble Buffalo rockers turned adult-contempo mainstays are all over Broken; not so much the soggy "Black Ballon"-era ballad-slinging Dolls, but the scrappy pre-"Iris" Goos of "Naked" or "Only One". The longing lead guitars, Snyder's closed-miced confessionals, those everything-is-riding-on-this-moment stakes? Textbook Rzeznik. Despite the current onslaught of 90s revivalism, few bands seemed less primed for cool-kid revivalism than the Goo Goo Dolls. But chasing coolness seems to be just about the last thing on Beach Slang's mind. They're an earnest bunch, and the things they sing about—outsized romances, youthful abandon, feeling pretty good about feeling pretty bad—deserve the kind of big, heartrending, leave-it-all-out-there drama this surging alterna-pop only amplifies. And, between you and me, "Long Way Down" still bangs.
Broken is tantalizingly brief: four songs, 10 minutes, and barely a wasted breath. Still, it's not without its flaws: you'd need to consult the dental records to tell the ripcord melodies of "Filthy Luck" and "Kids" apart, while the limp harmonies that pepper "Get Lost" don't quite generate the same kind of heat as the three songs that surround it. But even when their nuts-and-bolts songwriting concerns falter, their passion rarely does: these songs feel like they bounded out of these guys fully formed, brash and urgent and very much alive. The people in Snyder's songs aren't always so good to themselves, but Snyder's awfully good to them: he celebrates their flaws, toasts their smallest successes, holds back their hair after another rough night. It may stick pretty close to the down-and-out, but Broken's a fairly life-affirming record; these people aren't perfect, but they've got time to figure it out. For now, they're accruing scars, gathering stories, and getting by with a little help from their fucked-up friends.


The Deerhunter frontman and the cryptic singer-songwriter draw out each other’s playful sides on this one-off collaboration.

Myths 004

Every year at the Marfa Myths festival in Texas, a pair of musicians assemble to produce an off-the-cuff EP, which Mexican Summer then releases as part of its Myths series. Like Bon Iver and the Dessner brothers’ PEOPLE platform (now called 37d03d), it offers a low-key opportunity for well-known acts to try out new collaborations that might last, or might not. Either way, it quietly insists that process is important, and that low-stakes team-ups can sometimes yield beautiful results.
Bradford Cox’s Myths release with Cate Le Bon captures the pair of tender oddballs affirming their commonality. While they hail from the disparate environments of working-class Atlanta and rural Wales, they share an aptitude for unshowy beauty, idiosyncratic freakouts, and surrealist punk humor. They invest themselves fully in each aspect of their craft, never treating the less-realized elements like a sideshow. Le Bon also co-produced Deerhunter’s eighth album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? during those Marfa sessions, drawing out the poppiest side of the band in some time. Myths 004 has a woolier charm, running on antic, inventive rhythms that suggest a Rube Goldberg device.
Most impromptu collaborations have an air of “you had to be there.” But Myths 004 creates a magnetic and singular world from the beginning, aided by collaborators Stella Mozgawa, Stephen Black, Tim Presley, and Samur Khouja. “Come ride with me baby, I’m long in the tooth,” Cox croaks on “Canto,” while a rhythmic motif creaks like a bad rotator cuff; every time he sings “your eyes your eyes your eyes” (which is to say: many times), the hard “Z” of “eyes” pairs with the sharp scrape of a cabasa. The effect is unsettling and absorbing.
What’s missing from Myths 004 is the opportunity to hear Cox and Le Bon singing together. Other than barely-there backing vocals, their voices only share space on “Secretary,” and their parts don’t interlace, which is a shame given that the song seems like a quiet hymn to togetherness. At first Le Bon sounds distant, then she softens into a comforting refrain as she offers to “put you through to everyone or anyone”; the song concludes with Cox offering an oblique monologue full of arresting imagery (“mascara brushed across the planes”), like a Rushmore-style high-school savant staging a labored-over play comprehensible only to him.
Though their individual work doesn’t suggest people who need encouragement to get weird, there’s a freewheeling silliness to parts of Myths 004 that suggests two conspirators egging each other on (a quality also in evidence on Le Bon’s records with Tim Presley as DRINKS). “Fireman” is quite disturbing: they set a pitched-down sample of (presumably) an actual fireman narrating the story of a blaze that claimed a family but spared their puppy against jittery piano and Le Bon’s blank-eyed incantations (“fire in the kitchen … fire in my mind”).
And yet, it might be more disturbing to hear the distinctively poised Le Bon coming undone amid the queasy guitar of “What Is She Wearing” as she recounts a litany of daily indignities in a stilted tone that suggests pure improvisation and a unique comic eye. It’s a post-punk Falling Down: She rails about taking the bins out, forgetting to bring bags to the supermarket and having to pay 5p for a new one (a British environmental policy), wearing a shitty t-shirt under a sweater only for the hot weather to play “a cruel trick” on her, forcing her to remove her upper layer and reveal the shitty t-shirt underneath. Each offence is followed by the blunt exclamation: “THAT IS NOT NICE.” Then the neighbors chime in, commenting on her nest-like hair and affirming her suspicions that everyone is looking at her “as if I have committed a crime.”
It’s the last track on Myths 004, and after marinating in Le Bon and Cox’s headspace, it might strike you as the funniest song ever recorded. But it’s the friction in this fevered vignette that makes it as satisfying as a scratching post: a reminder of the unwieldy and neurotic glory of creativity, and of life.

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Nas and Hit-Boy cook up another collaboration, a low-stakes mid-career rap album to show that one of the genre’s icons is still in decent fighting shape.

Magic 2

Hit-Boy has brought his ear for samples and synths to collaborations with several artists in the past, but in Nas, he’s found a kindred spirit interested in the interplay of old and new. With every new release, Nas and Hit move slightly further away from the stately bland boom-bap of the first King’s Disease in 2020, and Magic 2 features some of their most adventurous moments to date. “Abracadabra” and “Black Magic” embrace rhythms from Atlanta and Memphis, respectively, that give Nas space to explore new patterns and pockets. He said he’s inspired by the youth, and it shows. He rattles off triple-time couplets over pianos and 808s and catches a stutter-stop flow over sampled scratches and tinny horns and organ. On “Earvin Magic Johnson,” he bounces lyrics between a fanfare and speaker-shredding drums like a basketball between legs. Phonetically, the words pop and bounce around the production in a pleasing way, and he sounds more awake and engaged than he has in a while.
But more often than not, the spell comes undone when you home in on exactly what Nas is saying. When he spits lines with catchphrases and slogans like “Durag energy/I’m on a wave, you niggas cap” or ends a handful of others with “for real” on “Abracadabra,” it feels forced, like he’s cycling through Urban Dictionary tabs open on a laptop in the booth. Try-hard wordplay causes him to put his foot in his mouth multiple times and dull the effects of his words—“My scrotum is golden” sounds cringey coming out of his mouth, though it’s not clear who could make “My scrotum is golden” sound cool, either.
Nas and Hit clearly have a lot of fun putting these projects together—otherwise, why make five of them in three years?—but the punchlines and flexes are hit-or-miss, and it doesn’t help that Hit’s beats lose all of their luster once they default back into his dead-eyed retro-traditionalism. Ironically, Nas’ jokes and boasts land better when mixed in with his trademark eye for storytelling. Take the second verse of “What This All Really Means,” which converts his frustration about his double album I Am…The Autobiography leaking into fuel to keep making music on his own terms well into old age; or how, on “Earvin Magic Johnson,” he looks back on memories of fights at McDonald’s in Manhattan and playing stages in Australia with the same reverent eyes. He’s getting better at balancing aged reflections without trying too hard for the kids.
It’s difficult to get too worked up about these Nas and Hit-Boy projects because, at their core, it’s miraculous they even exist at all. Nas is flying high on a career third wind (or fourth, depending on who you ask) and having a ball just kicking rhymes and experimenting with flows and styles with a producer who’s on the same wavelength as him. But at the same time, Magic 2, just like the four projects that came before it, isn’t grand, sharp, or thoughtful enough to warrant the several adoring re-evaluations of Nas’ GOAT status it’s spawned. It’s the textbook definition of a low-stakes mid-career rap album, a place for one of the genre’s icons to show he’s still in decent fighting shape.


German producer and theoretician delivers a fractured but surprisingly thorough look at the blues-- what it means, where it has come from, and how it left its fingerprints.

A Life Without Fear

From Captain Beefheart to Moby on down, blues lends itself to deconstruction. German producer and theoretician Ekkehard Ehlers referenced and sampled Robert Johnson for a single that wound up on his 2002 album Plays, weaving snippets of Johnson's voice and guitar into a minimal house. Loops and beats are one thing, but to engage with blues over an entire album, and to play it straight, seems a bit trickier. How might a guy like Ehlers, who dwells in the abstracted netherworld of Frankfurt School philosophy, fit into a style where authenticity is everything?
Pretty easily, it turns out. A Life Without Fear collects music originally written for a dance by choreographer Christoph Winkler, but no knowledge of that collaboration is needed to absorb this work. Working closely and writing with Cologne-based guitarist Joseph Suchy-- a shapeshifting player who can modify his style to fit numerous contexts-- Ehlers delivers a fractured but surprisingly thorough look at what blues means, where it has come from, and how it left its fingerprints. The overriding mood is heavy with doom-- returning often to death and apocalypse-- but even within this framework there's room for a huge range of expression.
The versatility of vocalist and harmonica player Howard Katz Fireheart is key. Katz is a U.S.-born and Berlin-based performance artist who leads a band called PostHolocaustPop; his singing here lends a sense of gravity and human frailty. He sounds brittle and haunted on the opening traditional "Ain't No Grave" and mean and strong-- and a lot like Captain Beefheart-- on the closing "O Death", made famous by Ralph Stanley. Suchy accompanies Katz's moaning with processed guitar that sound like it's bubbling up from a fissure in the earth; the way Suchy plays, there's no question where the singer is going when his last breath leaves him.
Typical for an Ehlers project, questions of authorship are completely up in the air and the record is difficult to fix in time. The guy who looped a few seconds of a Beatles recording for 10 minutes and called it his own work has no problem borrowing when it suits his purpose. On one track, a 78 of "Strange Things" from depression-era preacher Charles Haffer, Jr. is played with Suchy adding subtle guitar distortion and Ehlers adding bits of processed noise. The record is made more "modern," sort of, but simultaneously sounds even older than it actually is. The fidelity of the added instruments provides a "live" illusion, and it comes across like something recorded in a drafty old house in the early days of electricity.
My guess is that the Haffer track was chosen for its prescience, as the haunting lyrics have an almost creepy timelessness. The lines reach back to the Biblical John the Revelator, directly address the Great War, and then, by extension, move forward to our present-day insanity in a way Haffer never could have anticipated: "Now Wilson said to the Kaiser/ Please let our vessels be/ Kaiser said to Wilson/ 'Keep your vessels off of the sea/ If you put 'em on the stream/ They'll meet my submarines'/ Strange things happening in the land". Iran, anyone?
At the other end of the spectrum are the drifting, shapeless mood pieces that find Suchy spinning out crooked lines alongside trumpeter Franz Hautzinger, with electronics added by Ehlers (the trio recorded an album together for Staubgold in 2004). In a sense, these instrumental pieces serve to transport the record from one era or latitude to the next. While blues sits at the center of A Life Without Fear, the genre is sometimes hit sideways, by probing its roots and digressions.
During a mid-album stretch, the record covers 10,000 miles and several hundred years. "Die Sorge Geht Über Den Fluss" is jazz-- short, subtle, and lovely-- as Hautzinger's impressionistic melody seem to reflect the clear mid-range fluidity of Chet Baker. But nothing is fixed. In the track's closing seconds, another world pops out, as Suchy plucks his guitar in a manner referencing the West African kora. The exploration continues on "Nie Wieder Schnell Sagen", a drone played by Fireheart on harmonica, and "Misorodzi", a piece by West African professor Dumisani Maraire featuring Suchy on balafon and vocalist Fireheart singing lyrics in the regional Shona language.
So it's Blues (Not Blues), maybe. It looks chaotic on paper, but Ehlers has bound the disparate tracks tightly into a singular concept. In the end it's more about the possibilities inherent in a particular constellation of music's universe more than any one style. Ehlers turns the blues in its broadest sense inside-out, pulls it apart, and lays the shreds on the dissecting table while keeping the tissues very much alive. I can't imagine a better artist for the job. Ehlers is a true original who has never made the same record twice, and this is one of his very best.


Like the Strokes' Julian Casablancas before him, the Bloc Party singer explores electronic textures on his solo debut.

The Boxer

No one could accuse Bloc Party of being averse to the dancefloor, or electronic music in general. Having internalized the jerky rhythmic lessons of their post-punk influences, they've eagerly outfitted their songs with club-friendly accoutrements and commissioned two albums of remixes. Yet the band is also often considered a major caretaker of trad-rock's rapidly diminishing flame, largely owing to its anthemics and lead singer Kele Okereke's lyrical earnestness.
Now, possessed by the same restlessness that's also lately stricken the Strokes' Julian Casablancas, Kele (having professionally dropped his surname) has made a solo album, and it's widely being framed as a bracing electro-minded departure. Admittedly, The Boxer inhabits electronic music more intimately than any of Bloc Party's proper studio efforts. However, the album's real departure involves less a greater embrace of synths and beats than the abandonment of soaring, big-tent songcraft. Regrettably, the lyrical earnestness remains.
In place of huge choruses and bombast, Kele offers an album heavy on tone, mood, and texture. Unfortunately, his efforts fail to make you forget the absence of things like hooks. Intriguing elements are in place-- the dubstep-influenced beats of opening cut "Walk Tall" and "The Other Side"; the kinetic minute and a half of squelchy synths and seismic breaks on the outro to "Rise". But rarely do the piecemeal bells and whistles add up to a worthwhile song, as "The Other Side" haphazardly trots out guttural grunts and light tropicalia touches, while "Rise" spends most of its running time meandering through a chintzy, xylophone-led groove.
At least those songs give you something to hold onto, which can't be said for "The New Rules" or "All the Things I Could Never Say" (a song title only Bono could love). Kele is in full introspective flower here, which means we get treated in the former to the gripping admission that he's "learning to be laid-back about things" while in the latter we have to put up with a tedious quarter-life crisis caused by an untrustworthy lover who's "making me older."
"Everything You Wanted" is whiny too, but it's more than saved by containing the album's one truly transportive refrain. Alas, the music's rather lukewarm, especially when you set it next to the album's most Bloc Party-ish cut, the driving post-punker "Unholy Thoughts". Given Kele's unwillingness to play to his widescreen strengths, perhaps it makes sense that the best moment here happens when he disappears entirely, pitch-shifting his voice into a thinly soft, Michael Jackson-like register on "On the Lam". Of course, there's not really a hook there, either.


Toronto folk-pop band explores sleep-deprivation, pain, and fear.

Metal Cares

Often folk acts are as meek and delicate in person as their music would suggest, and Toronto four-piece Picastro are no exception. After L.A.-based Pehr Records released their 2002 debut, Red Your Blues, Picastro inexplicably left the label. Refusing to step on any toes, the band remained tight-lipped about the affair despite claiming how awful the experience was. Singer/guitarist Elizabeth Hysen immaculately personifies this innocuous, victimized pathos, suffering from hyperaesthesia-- a sensory condition in which victims suffer from increased sensitivity to stimuli (think Daredevil).
Appropriately, Metal Cares exudes a sound seemingly tormented by sleep-deprivation, pain, and-- most pressingly-- fear. Hysen's vocals are much more prominent in the mix than on Red Your Blues, allowing her every grief-stricken crack and murmur to resonate above the equally tortured instrument parts. The track list serves as a peek into Hysen's neuroticism with titles like "I Can't Fall Asleep", "Teeth and No Eyes", and "Sharks", named after one of Hysen's foremost phobias. However, Hysen, a straightforward, no gimmicks songwriter, keeps the lyrics short and cryptic, not to mention unintelligible. On the chorus of "Dramaman", Hysen wails indecipherably amidst shrieking strings, while the ballad "Sharks" builds to a muffled chant sounding like "bigger hunter, hello hunter". Good luck trying to decode "Ah Nyeh Nyeh."
With her garbled drawl, Hysen could pass for a German laptop pop artist, though her bandmates' instrumental workings borrow the most from that genre. Rather than adopting the punchy, infectious folk-pop of past tourmates Cat Power or Smog, Picastro are content with allowing their songs to methodically unfold. Opener "No Contest" patiently unfurls on a cyclical acoustic riff for two minutes before finally revealing the song's subtle yet gorgeous refrain. Despite this asceticism, the album still contains several beautiful, striking moments between the gossamer acoustic strumming and haunting strings .
Hysen's hushed, sparing vocals leave a lot of open space between verses, but she's hardly twiddling her thumbs during that time. For all the allure Hysen's voice generates, her acoustic/electric interplay with guitarist Zak Hanna is the true glue that holds the LP together. "I Can't Fall Asleep" builds to a jarring chorus that features Hanna's reverb-drenched electric against Hysen's dissonant, ringing acoustic. Closer "Blonde Fires" puts a warmer, more inviting spin on this interplay, allowing the guitars to intermittently carry the lead melody. It's a sound awkwardly caught between Elliott Smith and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, balancing pretty acoustic melodies with chillingly shrill clangs and screeches. But hey, that's the unapologetic, enigmatic Hysen for ya; for all we know, part of her probably wants to be "Miss Misery", but the other half simply can't stop freaking out over sharks.


A pleasant palate-cleanser after the nourishing Hug of Thunder, the Canadian collective’s latest EP tackles familiar modes in capable fashion, while offering moments of life-affirming beauty.

Broken Social Scene: Let’s Try the After Vol. 1 EP

Let’s Try the After Vol. 1 EP

Given Broken Social Scene’s current status as the heroic sentimentalists of 2000s indie rock, it’s easy to forget that the group’s post-rock roots run deep. Similar to their Canadian colleagues Arcade Fire, the sprawling and ever-shifting collective counts members with established histories in bands that embraced post-rock’s nebulous, largely instrumental sonic ethos; whereas Win Butler and co.’s anthemic approach was fully formed upon first impact, however, Broken Social Scene’s early records—including 2002’s star-making You Forgot It in People—were marked by the electronic squiggles, languid arrangements, and the penchant for catharsis that typified so much post-rock in the early 2000s.
Even as the band’s songwriting has taken on a more explicitly uplifting and streamlined form, they’ve never quite forgotten where they came from; 2010’s lovely, shapeshifting Forgiveness Rock Record was produced by John McEntire of post-rock godheads Tortoise and featured the Sea and Cake’s Sam Prekop on a song that practically mirrored the tropical, wafting dreaminess of his main act. After a seven-year hiatus (there are few things more explicitly post-rock than taking forever between albums), Broken Social Scene returned with Hug of Thunder, their shortest record to date, which represented a full realization of the warm-embrace rock music they’ve leaned toward since the days when bandleader Kevin Drew turned live renditions of “It’s All Gonna Break” into a call-and-response anthem.
But amid the empathy and urgency streaked across Hug of Thunder was a band still unafraid to doodle moodily in the margins, from the instrumental ditherings in the midsection of “Victim Lover” to the sax-led breakdown in “Stay Happy,” the latter which practically and lovingly ripped from the playbook of BSS-adjacent post-rock act Do Make Say Think. Even by its own hazy standards, post-rock has taken on an unusually wide range of forms, from the jazzy and quixotic to pure, uncut, ascendant drama. Over the last 20 years, Broken Social Scene have proven themselves the rare act to fuse those opposite poles in a manner that’s emotionally nourishing even at their most obtuse. The subsequent EPs that have accompanied every album since 2005’s self-titled record have typically offered explorations of Broken Social Scene’s alternately tight and loose approaches, at times doling out a bit of self-mythologizing for good measure.
Broken Social Scene’s companion piece, EP to Be You and Me, featured a fast-paced take on the previously slow-burning “Major Label Debut” and a submerged reprise of the title track to Broken Social Scene’s largely ambient 2001 debut, Feel Good Lost. In a few respects, the band’s latest EP, Let’s Try the After Vol. 1, is no different; it’s a mix of surging mostly-instrumentals and fairly compact pop songs, arriving with a promise from Drew himself that he and his compatriots won’t vanish for so long again. “The point is to keep going. We have more to give,” he promised in a press release accompanying the EP’s announcement.
The weakest tune in this new crop is the EP’s first single and closing track, “All I Want,” with Apostle of Hustle frontman Andrew Whiteman taking lead vocals; after opening with a dirty bassline faintly reminiscent of the Killers’ macho 2017 single “The Man,” the song mutates into a vaguely post-punk-ish groove that ebbs and flows unsatisfyingly. Otherwise, Let’s Try the After is a pleasant Andes Creme de Menthe following the feast that was Hug of Thunder, as Broken Social Scene tackle a few of their distinct modes—propulsive and tricky instrumental rock, explosive guitar-hero theatrics, slow-burning balladry—in capable, familiar fashion.
That familiarity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if you’re typically into what Broken Social Scene bring to the table. The Drew-led “Boyfriends” builds on Hug of Thunder’s skyscraping rock motifs as he effortlessly slides into the rousing chorus, “Let’s get you out of here,” a torrent of electric guitar and weighty piano chords arriving perfectly on cue. “1972” showcases the coolly delivered vocals of Broken Social Scene’s most recent convert, Ariel Engle, who previously provided the perfect counterbalance to the out-of-step chaos of “Stay Happy”; here, she vibes over a mid-tempo bass-and-drums combo vaguely reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk classic “Storms” before the rest of the band dives headlong into a mood-shifting orchestral outro.
Engle also appears on “Remember Me Young,” a compact mostly-instrumental that features her wordless vocals and also provides the album’s biggest surprise. It’s essentially “KC Accidental” turned inside out: The brief breakdowns that dot the track’s steady beat and fluttering guitar licks soothe rather than crashing through the scenery—they amount to a bed of vocal elisions and depth-charge piano stabs that feels like being smacked in the face with a downy pillow. Such forceful beauty—a sense of indefinable, life-affirming ecstasy—is practically woven into Broken Social Scene’s DNA at this point, and Let’s Try the After is proof that their genetic makeup is as complicatedly pure as ever.


After some big early singles and some unsteady mixtapes, Charlotte Aitchison’s debut album delievers on that initial promise. True Romance is an album of emotionally direct, bubblegum-catchy, off-kilter songs about falling in and out of love.

True Romance

Internet platforms aren't genres, and maybe it's time to call a moratorium on treating them like they are. In 2006, when Charlotte Aitchison turned 14, she started recording a later-shelved album she has more recently disowned as "fucking terrible MySpace music." Now, almost seven years later, her proper debut album as Charli XCX can hardly avoid comparisons to Tumblr, from fans and detractors alike.
A simple misreading of the UK singer and songwriter's biggest hit might explain this focus on technology-based shorthand. Swedish electro-pop duo Icona Pop's 2012 global smash "I Love It", co-written by Charli XCX but not on True Romance, emphasizes a generational divide: "You're from the 70s/ And I'm a 90s bitch." Sure, Aitchison was born in 1992, but her use of social-media formats also long frequented by droves of people born in the 1970s isn't exactly remarkable in 2013. As that catchy kiss-off's Republica-on-EDM wattage illuminates, Charli XCX is a would-be 90s pop star, too. And in only the best sense.
True Romance shares its title with an unbelievably well-cast 1993 movie written by Quentin Tarantino, who was reassembling cultural detritus way before mash-ups and microblogging. Charli XCX's approach to pop is similarly postmodern (how 90s does that sound?), pulling from moody 80s synth-pop, sassy turn-of-the-millennium girl groups, and state-of-the-art contemporary producers to create something distinctive and immediately memorable. She clearly understands the internet, having shared two original mixtapes and two influences mixtapes before her official full-length, but this carefully pruned set is no data dump. And there you'll see a glimmer of True Romance's most throwback aspect: its evident pop ambition, an overriding sense of an imagined mass audience for music that's radio-ready yet outsider-friendly. It's almost like Napster-- and the filler-crammed album sales model that preceded it-- never happened.
In fact, by the time Charli XCX was a teenage electro-house devotee, illegal file-sharing's early free-for-all had already given way to iTunes and other legal download services. Robyn had already released her self-titled comeback album. So it might be only natural that Charli XCX would keep the pre-bubble faith that people will pay for emotionally direct, bubblegum-catchy, yet stubbornly left-of-center songs about falling in and out of love. But the generous hooks on the previously released singles here, such as the gospel-kissed prechorus of the yearning "Stay Away" or the Santigold-savvy lilt of love-and-the-bomb brooder "Nuclear Seasons", are extraordinarily welcome just the same. Even better are newer singles such as the gorgeously bitter "You (Ha Ha Ha)", which inhabits its cloud-rappy Gold Panda sample like they were made for each other, and the almost-as-gorgeously blissful "What I Like", which recounts a still-young relationship with the cheeky frankness of Lily Allen or the Streets, and the sing-songy near-rapping of the Spice Girls.
The several songs on True Romance that hadn't previously surfaced in videos or other releases aren't quite as strong, but they're effective enough to suggest Charli XCX's best work might still be ahead of her. The Todd Rundgren-sampling "So Far Away", with the sun-dappled lushness of the Avalanches, is a clear highlight; Charli XCX's vocals are usually plain-spoken, but the anguished break-up plea "Set Me Free" proves she can reach for Jessie Ware–like dramatics when appropriate. The pitch-shifting "no one is forever" intro added at the start of opener "Nuclear Seasons" probably should've been given its own track-- and later on the album it is, when the same backing vocal forms the base of the cloudy, broken-hearted "Grins". Elsewhere, the haunted confession "How Can I", while solid enough, is a reminder that Charli XCX's lyrics so far tend to fall relatively flat; when, on swooning finale "Lock You Up", she sings, "It hits me like a ton of bricks," she leaves the cliché untweaked.
And then there's "Cloud Aura", a lovelorn, engagingly laid-back bit of groove that lets Grimes' "Genesis" video co-star Brooke Candy rap horribly about Chris Brown. Candy's guest verse previously appeared on 2012's uneven Super Ultra mixtape, and it was near-universally panned. It isn't any better now. But in an era when too many up-and-comers are all too eager to please, this stubborn refusal to back down displays another quality in short supply: genuine irreverence. The songwriting and production credits on True Romance include Usher's "Climax" co-conspirator Ariel Rechtshaid and "I Love It" collaborator Patrick Berger, among others, who also share some credit (and blame). But like 90s pop stars turned 10s pop sophisticates Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé, Charli XCX stamps her personality across the entire project, and True Romance suggests she'll be worth following for a while. On Tumblr, Instagram, and whatever comes next, sure, but musically most of all.


Folk outfit Hurray for the Riff Raff's Small Town Heroes borrows liberally from old-time traditions, including Appalachian reels, Big Easy R&B, and Piedmont blues. Yet these songs put a fresh and wily spin on old sounds and ideas, thanks to the formidable presence of singer/songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra.

Hurray for the Riff Raff: Small Town Heroes

Small Town Heroes

“Delia’s gone, but I’m settling the score,” Alynda Lee Segarra sings on “The Body Electric,” the centerpiece of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s new album, Small Town Heroes. Over tense eddies of fiddle and sympathetic acoustic strums, her dry husk of a voice sounds more resigned than outraged, as she realizes she's too late to save Delia. Several decades too late, as the case may be: The Delia she’s singing about is the title character in the popular murder ballad "Delia's Gone", written by Dick Toops and Karl Silbersdorf and recorded by Bob Dylan, Harry Belafonte, Waylon Jennings, and multiple times by Johnny Cash. “The Body Electric” seeks to rescue Delia and so many other murder-ballad victims, offering an empathetic—and feminist—reading of an American folk tradition that lives on today in contemporary covers of “Banks of the Ohio” and “Knoxville Girl". Murder ballads allow us to act out dark urges, using history to guard us against accusations of sociopathy or misogyny. But Segarra laments our fascination with such abject subject matter: “Shoot me down, put my body in the river,” she sings, “while the whole world sings, sings it like a song/ The whole world sings like there’s nothing going wrong.”
For Segarra, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican who gravitated toward Bikini Kill before discovering Woody Guthrie, the past is not a thing to be revered. Rather, it must be endlessly, aggressively interrogated. Small Town Heroes borrows liberally from old-time traditions, including Appalachian reels, Big Easy R&B, and Piedmont blues, yet these songs put a fresh and wily spin on old sounds and ideas. Segarra rewrites Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues”, retitling it “The New SF Bay Blues” and changing the subject from a wronged woman to a brokedown touring van: “You’ve been a good old wagon/ You got me there in style”). “Crash on the Highway” subtly rewrites Roy Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway”, its two-step beat evoking the boredom and frustration of backed-up traffic. These are songs about touring as rambling; instead of hitchin’ rides and jumpin’ trains, Segarra and Hurray for the Riff Raff are gigging around the country in a cramped van.
Small Town Heroes may not sound like what you’d expect from a New Orleans album, yet it is anchored in that city’s sense of musical adventure. Segarra learned her trade playing in street bands and busking on corners, which has given her a broad musical vocabulary. She arranges and produces these songs as eloquently as she writes them, often using just a few instruments to convey a surprisingly full sound. “Blue Ridge Mountain” opens the album with her clawhammer banjo and what sounds like a clogger working together as a makeshift rhythm section, with Yosi Perlstein’s spry fiddle dancing around them. “No One Else” is built on a folk-rock foundation, yet it pitches and yaws on a rolling piano bassline that might have been learned from an old Fats Domino or Professor Longhair record.
With Small Town Heroes, Segarra proves herself one of the most compelling stylists in a folk revival full of suspicious acts either too beholden to tradition or too uncritical to make much of it. Perhaps the biggest difference between Hurray and its peers is attitude: Segarra understands that these styles don’t need to be revived, so she’s not playing dress-up and isn’t concerned with projecting any sense of rustic authenticity. Instead, she understands that these old sounds still thrum somewhere deep in the American subconscious, even if our relation to them changes with each passing year. With the whole country as its geographical and historical backdrop, Small Town Heroes is an album about how life and music intersect. Rather than play to her record collection, however, Segarra takes the records out of their sleeves, scratches them up, and makes the old music speak to new concerns.


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 Mac Miller and Vince Staples’ 2013 mixtape, a fledgling but important document of freeform creativity.

Vince Staples / Larry Fisherman: Stolen Youth

Stolen Youth

Mac Miller got the idea for rap camp from The Alchemist but he made it his own. A bunch of folks from all corners of his life, from fellow Pittsburgh acts like Hardo and Bill to old tourmates like the Cool Kids to his new circle of Los Angeles artists, would come in for freestyle sessions at his home recording studio, The Sanctuary. When Mac opened the doors to his mansion, anything could happen.
In 2012, accompanying Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples showed up to rap camp and Mac asked him why he didn’t rap more. Vince told him he was never offered beats, so Mac stepped in as Larry Fisherman, his producer alias. “We made a couple songs and it just went from there,” Vince once recalled with typical understatement.
At the time, Vince and Mac were both adjusting to the whiplash of growing up too fast. Mac was a surprise indie success living it up in his new home of L.A. Obsessed with being a rapper throughout his adolescence, he went from sneaking out of his house at 15 to attend cyphers, to headlining a tour at 19, to moving into a mansion at 20. By 21, he was so committed to music that, bizarrely, a reality show about his music career, Mac Miller and the Most Dope Family, was an escape. “I have been living in my studio for months working on my album, so the show kind of forced me to get out of that room and go do something entertaining,” he said.
Vince was trying to escape his reality. When he entered The Sanctuary he was a high school dropout and former Long Beach gangbanger whose relationship to music was transactional and tenuous. “I needed money, bruh. Ain’t nobody have no money around me,” he once reflected of that time period. “My mama needed some money. My sisters needed money. Somebody got to take care of my family.” By 18, he’d already weathered the deaths and incarcerations of multiple friends and relatives and was thoroughly jaded even as rap offered a way forward. He didn’t hide his cynicism. “Abraham Lincoln never kept none of my niggas safe/Only gave them prison dates and Church’s Chicken dinner plates,” he scoffed on his debut mixtape.
Stolen Youth emerged from Mac and Vince’s untested potential. At the time, Vince was defined by a show-stealing but narrow verse on Earl Sweatshirt’s “epar,” a rep that was intensified by Earl’s unknown enrollment at Samoa’s Coral Reef Academy. Vince was frequently asked about Earl’s whereabouts and pestered to release more music in the vile vein of Earl’s debut mixtape. He refused.
Meanwhile, Mac felt constrained by his most popular music in a different way. His success had made him the poster child for frat rap, a genre of trifling white-boy fantasia that he was adjacent to but quickly outpacing. If you listened closely, his music was shedding its kegger appeal and shifting into something foggier and more introspective—but he was still this grinning white kid who fit in well the frat pack he was lumped in with. As he insisted he was something more, it was easy to doubt him. “People weren’t really taking Mac seriously as a producer. It’s the same way they look at me as a rapper,” Vince once summarized. Despite their different backgrounds, Mac and Vince were united in their resolve to surpass what was expected of them.
Teaming up was formally Mac’s idea, but the ambient spontaneity of rap camp allowed Stolen Youth to take shape intuitively. With no particular direction, it blossomed into Vince’s first real self-portrait. Shedding the deadpan of his first two mixtapes, which were sharply written but withdrawn and cold, Vince emerges as a dramatist and storyteller. He remains jaded but begins to sound lucid, his grim outlook bolstered by his eye for detail. His rocky childhood isn’t some distant memory; its lessons and losses are embedded in his worldview.
What’s dazzling is that instead of a linear autobiography, Vince opts for a scattered personal history. His tales are specific and oblique, rejecting a bird’s eye view for a perspective that’s intimate and clipped. Gunshots are so common he can distinguish between the “cry” of a .357 and the “applause” of a Mac-10. His 9 millimeter is “chunky,” and his shotgun shells can be caught from 50 yards away like a Roddy White completion. The Buick LeSabre is black and lacks plates; you probably don’t want to drive it down Orizaba Avenue because that’s where the undercovers park. Vince uses these details less as markers of his authenticity and more as private recollections. He isn’t a Long Beach tour guide; he’s a resident whose inner life is reified in the physical world.
Within this whirlwind of memories, time and space melt away, blurring the line between kid Vince and adult Vince. In his “Heavens” verse, he evokes mall cops and real cops in the same breath; he ran from both. Other times, they were nowhere to be found. In the middle of matter-of-factly describing a driveby on “Intro,” he pivots to describing a dead friend lying in the street for hours: “First the Goodyears screech, then you hear that drum/Fuck 911, police don't come/Had Jabari on the streets till the sun came up.” On “Stuck in My Ways,” he questions religion by observing that he’s spent his life “sinning without a consequence,” but then flips that doubt into defiance: “We made the most out the nothing they give us.” It feels like both a sneer and a sigh. Like his memories, his cynicism and his resolve sit side by side.
While Vince raps in 4K, Larry goes Technicolor. Larry Fisherman was a persona Mac created because he felt the Mac Miller identity came with too many expectations. As Larry Fisherman, Mac is curious, fastidious, and semi-anonymous. He plays new instruments and embraces the toil of starting from scratch. “I know I’m not shit,” he once said of his burgeoning skill set as a producer. He clearly thought of that inexperience as an opportunity. For Stolen Youth, he pulls widely, drawing from trip-hop, cloud rap, and boom bap to produce beats that are feathery yet grim, woozy yet swingy. The drums kick, knock, flutter, and splat. Vocal samples, some of Mac himself (as on “Thought About You”), are stretched into dreamy yawns and clipped into gloomy loops. The flourishes and diversity of his composition profoundly outclass his rapping during this period. While an aimless Mac Miller rapped that he wanted to “make out with Foxy Brown,” Larry Fisherman was screwing Willie Hutch vocals from the Foxy Brown soundtrack. Mac’s rapping would eventually catch up with Larry’s production long before his death last year, but here the gap is instructive. Larry was who Mac wanted to be.
Larry’s versatility helps buoy Vince’s then-flat voice, which had yet to become the manic Swiss army knife it is today. The chorus of “Thought About You” features well-placed blasts of drumrolls that sound like a carburetor roaring to life. Vince’s hook comes alive, too. Similarly, the gusts of bass and distortion that shoot through the dancing minor keys on “Fantoms” hit like car collisions, giving Vince’s taunts a boost of intensity. These assists could turn corny—as on the goofy key-pounding of “Guns & Roses” and the shock waves of organ on “Sleep”—but they embody the spirit of Mac’s rap camp. The goal was to muddle the lines between work and play, collaborating and goofing off.
Vince had greater ambitions than rapping for fun.  You can feel it on the posse cuts “Heaven” and “Sleep,” where Vince is joined by Da$h, Mac Miller, Ab-Soul, and Hardo for what are essentially cyphers. On both tracks, he goes last, wresting all the showboating into something more purposeful and sharp. This disconnect extended to the record as a whole. “Stolen Youth isn’t me,” he’s said, citing his manager, Corey Smyth, and Mac as the real masterminds. The Boondocks-esque cover art (and accompanying comic book) certainly don’t make this sound like a mere change of heart. He made the record that circumstance allowed.
When everyone else retires to their cabins and it’s just Vince and Mac and the music, the tape shines. “On Outro,” backed by twinkly chords, splashes of kick drum, and a purr of bass, Vince’s rapping is effortless and graceful, flitting between images, memories, and taunts. The hookless, free-flowing song has no centerpiece, but it does have this striking vignette: “Mama playing Stevie Wonder while she in the kitchen cooking/Pigs knocking on my door to take my dad to central booking/Reading books up in my room cause she won’t let me go and play/Scared her youngest son will run around and go pick up a K.” The scene is vivid and compact and dense, a cross-section of life that’s as personal as it is panoramic.
That kind of piercing clarity is what makes Stolen Youth so enduring despite its shortcomings. Though Vince has outgrown the tape, his life fills it crags, his experiences guide its voice, his temerity forges something from nothing. He went on to take the raw talent on display here and become an aesthete, but even without the gloss and resources, his perspective is fully formed and resonant. At a wizened 19, Vince sees the abusers of power and privilege and is poised to confront them, already unconvinced of their authority. He’s not a rebel with a middle finger and an attitude, nor some kid prodigy with a god complex. He’s not a gangster rapper, nor is he a reformed gangster. He’s just Vince Staples, the griot of Long Beach, and Mac Miller is his friend.


The debut from the young Michigan rock band is stiff, hackneyed, overly precious retro-fetishism.

Greta Van Fleet: Anthem of the Peaceful Army

Anthem of the Peaceful Army

Greta Van Fleet sound like they did weed exactly once, called the cops, and tried to record a Led Zeppelin album before they arrested themselves. The poor kids from Frankenmuth, Michigan, don’t even realize they’re more of an algorithmic fever dream than an actual rock band. While they’re selling out shows all over the world, somewhere in a boardroom, a half-dozen people are figuring out just how, exactly, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant are supposed to fit into the SUV with the rest of the Greta Van Fleet boys on “Carpool Karaoke.”
Just look at this photo: Brothers Jake and Sam Kiszka, on guitar and bass, are both wearing hippie costumes they 3D-printed off the internet. The singer, the wretched and caterwauling third brother, Josh, is in dangly feather earrings and vinyl pants, like he was dressed by a problematic Santa Fe palm reader with a gift certificate to Chico’s. It’s a costume—Greta Van Fleet is all costume. And if things that look like another thing is your thing, get ready to throw your lighters up for a band whose guiding principle seems to be reading the worst Grand Funk Railroad songs as if they were a religious text.
Though their debut album, Anthem of the Peaceful Army, sounds like a bona fide classic rock record—with its fuzzy bass, electric sitar solos, and lyrics featuring the kind of self-actualized transcendence brought on by a few too many multivitamins—it is not actually classic rock. They are a new kind of vampiric band who’s there to catch the runoff of original classic rock using streaming services’ data-driven business model. Greta Van Fleet exist to be swallowed into the algorithm’s churn and rack up plays, of which they already have hundreds of millions. They make music that sounds exactly like Led Zeppelin and demand very little other than forgetting how good Led Zeppelin often were.
It’s possible to be an exceptional classic rock vampire act but it requires something more than the major label money and vaguely Native American accoutrements. It’s why Greta Van Fleet can’t compete with, say, the Darkness circa 2003’s “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” The Darkness—who aped big rock warhorses like Queen and Aerosmith and Van Halen—were so outrageous that they had to be credulous. They had a song that went, “Get your hands off of my woman, mother fucker,” and did a power metal cover of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” Who would do such garish things? They dared you, tongue in cheek, to take this impossibly foolish thing very seriously.
Greta Van Fleet do no such thing. They care so deeply and are so precious with their half-baked boomer fetishism, they mollycoddled every impulse of late-’60s rock’n’roll into an interminable 49-minute drag. Each song here could be written or played by any of a thousand classic rock cover bands that have standing gigs at sports bars and biker joints across America (the same venues where Greta Van Fleet cut their teeth when they were kids). So why should Greta Van Fleet be the ones signed to Republic and William Morris, because they don’t have bald spots yet? Tons of people in those cover bands play their instruments better than Greta Van Fleet, who are, currently, proficient at best. No one in this band offers anything in the way of personality that doesn’t sound like your average YouTube tutorial for a Jimmy Page–type pentatonic solo or a John Bonham–type shuffle.
And at least Zeppelin knew to separate their sweet-lady-I’m-horny songs from their howling-about-literary-fantasy songs. Hilariously, Greta Van Fleet combine them into one on “The Cold Wind,” where the narrator (who is dying) begs his “sweet mama” to take the family ox (I guess) to town to sell it, when, mid-ox-transaction, this happens: “The Yankee peddler bargains with you on his way/Whoa sweet mama’s gotten herself a new dress.”
That’s funny, but it’s not supposed to be funny, because Greta Van Fleet do not possess self-awareness—at all. When asked about a characteristically ugh lyric (“All my brothers who stand up/For the peace of the land”), Jake responded, in part, “I guess it’s subject to interpretation. But I think the initial idea with that was that, as brothers, we stand for the peace of land. And that was for the good of the Earth, and for man.” Ignoring that this is basically a gag in Spinal Tap, a much better answer that would speak to the spirit of the music they are trying to capture would be: “I don’t know, who gives a shit.”
What they lack in self-awareness they more than make up for in rigid self-consciousness, failing to make any fun or campy choices to lift these songs out of a morass of the worst impulses of Rush and Cream. The back half of the album alternates between the ignorable and unforgivable, from what is (a somewhat fun stomper “Mountain of the Sun”) to what should never be: “The New Day” features Josh singing about watching a child grow in a garden, seeing her bloom so she can “be a woman soon.” None of this lysergic-sexual thinking is within the band’s grasp, they are just swatting at crusty platitudes and copy-pasting old mythos hoping no one notices that they are too small, too inept to even put forth one meaningful, specific, original idea.
But for as retro as Anthem of the Peaceful Army may seem, in actuality, it is the future. It’s proof of concept that in the streaming and algorithm economy, a band doesn’t need to really capture the past, it just needs to come close enough so that a computer can assign it to its definite article. The more unique it sounds, the less chance it has to be placed alongside what you already love. So when the Greta Van Fleet of your favorite artist finally lands on your morning playlist, spark up a bowl of nostalgia and enjoy the self-satisfied buzz of recognizing something you already know. It’s the cheapest high in music.


The Miami rapper is still bringing you into his world of opulence and hustlers’ theme music, but the view is more refined.

Richer Than I Ever Been

Fifteen years into his career, Rick Ross has etched out a space in rap where he sounds comfortable without being complacent. The rhythms of the average Rozay song are pleasantly predictable: allusions to a drug-dealing past at odds with his history as a corrections officer, the occasional rags-to-riches stories, and descriptions of designer loungewear and weed strains that would make Wiz Khalifa blush, all set to beats that are either as deluxe and elegant as tailored suits or as sweaty and bouncy as the clubs in his Miami hometown. His gruff voice lends theatricality to his music, rendering even his most emotionally detached songs as opera-ready tales. He’s certainly the only rapper who can count Jazmine Sullivan and former Cocaine Cowboy Willie Falcon as album guests, as he does on his eleventh project, Richer Than I Ever Been.
Ross is as capable and self-aware as ever, serving familiar scenarios with a zeal largely missing from 2019’s Port of Miami 2. Richer features little of the chest-thumping bravado of Teflon Don or the rap insider score-settling of Rather You Than Me. There’s no event song or hidden adversary to put a finer point on Ross’ progress since his last album or his latest book; all we get is the progress, theme music to hustle and motivate. In this way, the album is standard Ross fare—the kind he’s released since 2014’s Hood Billionaire—with a milder bite. He’s still bringing you into his world, but the view is more refined, mahogany paneling and cigars in easy chairs instead of bottle service.
While Ross’ voice is a powerful instrument, his delivery is often more malleable than he gets credit for. The pomp of his music can mask the overt left turns in his narratives: Take the second verse of “The Pulitzer,” which starts with a funny throwaway line (“They say that the floor is facetious/Fat boy just keep fillin’ the bleachers”), then dives into stories about friends serving prison sentences and his own habit of self-medicating with Percocet before ending in the same money pit the song started in (“Gettin’ money, it’s still Boobie gang/No colors, no flags, just let the toolie bang”). Ross can go from smirking about owning 100 cars on “Rapper Estates” to the hushed delivery of “Marathon,” where he raps, “First I had to teach myself, then I started teaching wealth/No longer am I seeking shelter,” like a therapy patient after a critical breakthrough. He rarely sounds like he’s reading a list of accomplishments from a teleprompter, even when that’s exactly what he’s doing.
The sense of familiarity throughout Richer ensures that no song is bad, but there are also fewer standouts. It’s not autopilot, but we’ve seen these locales before. Thankfully, the production and guests keep things lively enough. Producer Bink! offers up a minimalist mid-tempo shaker on “Warm Words in a Cold World,” which teases out Future’s most elastic guest verse since Young Thug’s “Sup Mate.” Timbaland’s wailing shuffle on “The Pulitzer”—and Lyle Leduff and Don Cannon’s skipping drums on “Wiggle”—put some strategic pep in the album’s step. The rest of the project’s energy comes from Ross’ newfound eye for rising talent, with verses from DreamDoll (“Wiggle”), Yungeen Ace (“Can’t Be Broke”), and Blxst (“Made It Out Alive”) accenting the legacy-building in his lyrics.
A big part of Ross’ appeal lies in how he makes his luxe lifestyle feel attainable. He’s already proven it doesn’t matter if he’s lived out the stories he tells or not; he’s perfected the art of selling Rick Ross in the way that only the world’s most renowned Wingstop franchisee could. Richer Than I Ever Been is far from Ross’ most vital album, but few rappers can make what amounts to a status update feel like you’re right next to him, living out the story brick by brick.

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After the crushing intensity of Hospice, the Antlers return with a more refined and sophisticated LP that still forges a powerful emotional connection.

Burst Apart

Brooklyn's indie scene can feel like a series of bands each trying to be hipper than the next, but thankfully nobody told Pete Silberman. In the dog days of 2009's deadbeat summer, the Antlers frontman emerged from his bedroom with his third LP, Hospice. On it, he unfashionably embraced hackles-raising choruses and concept-album ambition, and he pushed the button on emotional nuclear options: abortion, cancer, death, all that fun stuff. Now a trio, the Antlers have claimed the influence of "electronic music" for Burst Apart, a typical omen for a typically "difficult follow-up album." But while Burst Apart sheds the PR-bait bio and Arcade Fire aspirations that made its predecessor a word-of-mouth success, it's still tethered to a magnanimity and expressive clarity that makes it almost every bit as devastating.
Lead single "Parentheses" didn't do much to show their hand; it's pretty misleading out of context. Sounding like a higher-BPM "Climbing Up the Walls", the knockabout electronic percussion and tweaked piano ripples rightfully marked some connection to the post-OK Computer, pre-Kid A application of Mo' Wax and Warp textures to alt-rock song structures. But the aggression in Silberman's falsetto and the gnarly guitar distortion are revealed as total outliers, and Burst Apart can actually be seen as Hospice turned inside out: Where before, long swathes of calm white noise linked emotive outcries, Burst Apart moves patiently through luxurious downtempo tones belying some serious romantic disturbance.
Those well-versed in dream journal interpretation could gather that from the mere title of "Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out" (a common symbolic manifestation of sexual frustration). After all, Burst Apart does open with "I Don't Want Love", a heartbreaking wallow in a numbing hangover from a singer who previously seemed doomed to feel too much. Its glistening melody at least helps it scan as pop, but "Parentheses" and "Every Night" feel cut from the same cloth as the Walkmen's "The Rat", holding onto sanity with white knuckles, sexual congress seen as mutually assured destruction.
Aside from those, Burst Apart's atmosphere is nocturnal and desolate. Foreboding death-crawl "No Widows" fears for vehicular disaster; brief flickers of light are allowed full exposure on the gorgeous, incantatory centerpiece "Rolled Together", whose brushed drum work and silvery guitars could be heard as a studiously completed homework assignment on Agaetis Byrjun. Meanwhile, the tender, nearly beatless balladry of "Hounds" and "Corsicana" are wholly the Antlers' own and painfully pretty to behold-- however depressive Silberman's lyrics, one can simply revel in the zero-gravity synth and vocal moans and feel some sort of uplift.
Shame that it makes Burst Apart's missteps all too egregious. This isn't the sort of record that calls for a show-stopping power ballad, but we get one anyway with "Putting the Dog to Sleep", where needlessly histrionic vocals and an overwrought doo-wop progression come off more like last call karaoke than a fitting closer. If nothing else, "Putting the Dog to Sleep" helps point toward the Antlers successfully making Burst Apart more about their growth as a band than a gripping backstory-- for all of Hospice's raw power, it didn't leave much to the imagination, and it either hit you right in the gut or not at all. The Antlers won't hold your hand through Burst Apart, which will inevitably make it more of a grower, but stick around-- it's all the more affecting for how it allows you to pick your own stumbling, lonely path.


The career of Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita seems, at times, to represent a rebuke to the notion of vibraphone as a supporting instrument. On Apologues he's joined by a cast whose massed whorls act as painterly, accommodating foils or accents to Fujita.

Apologues

Think of Lionel Hampton’s bright streaks enlivening Charles Mingus’ late 1970s vamps, the sly warmth Teddy Charles brought to Miles Davis’ Blue Moods, the titillating sonic vertebrae various members of Tortoise added to albums like TNT and Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Such is the lot of the vibraphone, that of a supporting instrument regularly submerged by voices, guitars, strings, horns, and drums. The career of Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita seems, at times, to represent a rebuke to this notion. While collaborative releases with German experimentalist Jan Jelinek and from his El Fog solo project filtered his lithe performance through a sieve of effects, the two albums Fujita has issued under his own name—2013’s Stories and 2015’s Apologues—promote a soaring classical purity, as though by rejecting electronic interference, he’s learning how to stay out of his own way.
By turns jaunty, shrill, and subdued, Stories found cellist Arturo Martínez Steele and Tangerine Dream violinist Hoshiko Yamane accompanying Fujita. The pair return for Apologues, joined by accordion player Motomitsu Maehara, snare drummer Masaya Hijikata, French horn player Tomonobu Odai, clarinetist Yoko Ozawa, and flautist Mio Suzuki. The collaborators’ massed whorls—tender, nuanced—act as painterly, accommodating foils or accents to Fujita’s playing, which invariably conveys a startled, improvisatory sense of wonder.
Awe and sorrow wash through opener "Tears of Unicorn" in equal, alternating measure, as strings saw-circle a series of melodic constellations so impeccably gorgeous that they ache; blink and you’ll miss the fleeting quote of "London Bridge Is Falling Down". As Fujita metes out tight, teasing trills on "Moonlight", strings yawn as woodwinds pipe along in harmony. "Puppet’s Strange Dream Circus Band" and "Flag" introduce perceptible jolts of urgency, with the former favoring a courtly, in-the-round gait and the latter’s sleeting tones and orchestral sweep midwifing a thrilling friction. An outlier, "Beautiful Shimmer" swaddles a spare Fujita motif in waves of reverb.
A pristine dream magic seems to inform Apologues—the fluid serenity of the music projects a lulling, murmured unreality that suggests that the album is a figment of the listener’s imagination even while it is in play. It’s not whimsy exactly, but an anesthetizing innocence primed for comfort and nostalgia alike—savvier, music-box sweetness summoned into being by a vibraphonist.


Merge's remastered reissues of Bob Mould's early-1990s post-Hüsker Dü records Copper Blue, Beaster, and FU:EL are wonderfully presented documents of a punk legend starting over creatively and emotionally and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.

Sugar Reissues

The first time Bob Mould heard My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, he was touring the UK as a solo act in late 1991. He'd walked out on a Virgin contract that had paid for two very good solo albums, and booted a management team that had, unbeknownst to him, traded his publishing rights for tour support money. While in the UK, he'd played some new demos for Alan McGee, who'd loved Mould's prior band Hüsker Dü since first hearing their blistering speed-punk cover of "Eight Miles High" about six years earlier. McGee ran Creation Records, which had just released Loveless. Abbo, the tour manager of Mould's opening act, played it for Mould while driving between gigs in a rental car. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This was the record I thought was never going to be made," Mould remembers. "I was still wet from performing, we were racing to get back to London, and the whole thing was a religious experience. No one spoke a word for the entirety of the record."
Loveless reimagined the sort of fearsome, sustain-heavy guitar squall that Mould had plumbed from the depths of his righteous soul with Hüsker Dü. Suddenly, ear-splitting walls of guitar were cool again, and Mould quickly formed a new band (bassist David Barbe and drummer Malcolm Travis), and found himself with a record deal. Creation put out Copper Blue in September 1992 (Ryko handled the U.S. release) to great sales and universal acclaim. NME (who along with Melody Maker had started calling the music of MBV's myriad spawn "shoegazing") voted it their album of the year. It finished seventh in that year's Pazz & Jop poll, on its way to selling 300,000 copies.
It makes sense that it would take something as game-changing as Loveless to push Mould back into the three-piece DIY-punk lane. With his first band, he'd helped invent the American stuff that was eventually labeled "alternative." The difference in rock music between 1987 and 1992 might have seemed infinitely vast at the time, but Mould was one of several solid links between the two moments. Punk had "broken" in 1991 (Mould is in the documentary, and was in the running to produce Nevermind), and "Smells Like Teen Spirit", made by a band whose drummer worshipped Hüsker Dü, had more or less invented the Modern Rock radio format that Sugar would soon slot into. One branch down on the family tree is the Copper track "A Good Idea", which Mould calls "an unconscious homage" to the Pixies' "Debaser". The Pixies, whose "Gouge Away" provided the template for "Teen Spirit", and who had in 1984 recruited its own bassist by running an ad for someone whose influences combined "Hüsker Dü and Peter Paul & Mary." It was as if Mould had never left. He was right in the thick of the musical legacy he'd helped build, dialoguing with his peer/descendents not by virtue of the instant nostalgia model of current vintage, but because one of the most prolific songwriters of his generation had a bunch of new ideas.
They were very good ideas. Copper is as impressive as any post-Zen Arcade Hüsker Dü album, adapting the approach he took with "Makes No Sense at All", "I Don't Know For Sure", and "Could You Be the One?" for the Alternative Nation, many of whom (myself at 15 included) were completely unaware of his prior band. (I remember a Hüsker/Sugar version of the classic "did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?" joke going around at the time.) A ferocious power-pop record, Copper is guided by Mould's unerring ear for melody and unrivaled nasal yelp that gives his lyrics an extra bit of acidic punch. The purest Sugar comes here via "The Act We Act" and "Helpless", two huge pop-rock anthems in the mold of Cheap Trick's "Surrender", but slowed down a beat, drenched in murky grunge fury, and bathed in a hiss of sustain and ride cymbal. "Helpless" rides its giddily ascending verse melody without need for a chorus, and "Act" opens the album with an impossibly dark riff that wouldn't have sounded out of place on an early Sub Pop compilation.
Thing is, I'd estimate about half of Sugar's fan base would argue that Copper's best two songs-- "Hoover Dam" and "If I Can't Change Your Mind"-- haven't even been mentioned yet. With its jangly chords and lyrics devoted to attempting to get inside someone else's head, "Change" could've fit fine on Rubber Soul with only a few slight alterations. On the expansive "Hoover", Mould pays reverence to the pristine 60s pop of the Beach Boys and the Left Banke, and the studio trickery of Revolver, with a lyric that begins by considering the vastness of the universe, and ends with him spinning down to the center of the earth, which he admits "keeps me feeling warm at night." The recorded version is built with synths and harpsichords, but the song sounds just as good as pure punk, evidenced by two fierce versions on the 1992 and 1994 live sets included in the reissue package.
During the recording sessions for Copper, Mould kept some songs aside, labeling these darker, unfinished cuts "B" songs to Copper's pop-driven "A" material. They would become the Beaster EP, released seven months after Copper to capitalize on what had become a groundswell of hype around Sugar, abetted by MTV playing "Mind" in semi-regular rotation. Far from leftovers, these tracks were more like transmissions from Mould's id rather than his ego. Or, as Mould said: "I was out of my fucking mind with white-hate-light-energy-noise." Uniformly gloomy, even grim at points, Beaster marks Mould's return to his Black Sheets of Rain approach, with a fierceness he'd not shown since New Day Rising. The album is bookended by the woozy, MBV-influenced "Come Around" and "Walking Away", and peaks with the titanic 12-minute midsection punch of "Judas Cradle" and "JC Auto". Those last two rank with anything on In Utero in terms of sheer force-- Travis' opening drums for "Auto" sound like nothing less than Bill Rieflin's booming trapwork for Ministry-- and of course sacrilegious content (the album was titled as a nod to Easter and released to coincide with the holiday. No one's ever accused Mould of not having a sense of humor). Beaster is the one recording that the fantastic Merge remasters do the most justice-- it's louder, deeper, and better than ever.
By early 1994, Sugar was the most successful band Mould had ever been involved with: "two or three times bigger than the highest points of Husker Du," he estimates. Copper was selling like crazy, and the band had just finished an exhausting world tour. The band was now subject to hype, and the recording, release, and publicity for FU:EL were a tumultuous process, to put it lightly. Mould remembers watching coverage of Kurt Cobain's suicide on CNN during the initial sessions. Depressed and unable to get the right sound, he scrapped everything and started over. On top of this, leading up to the release of the album, Spin ran a feature on Mould centered around his homosexuality-- something that had been an open secret since his early Hüsker days, but which now gave him entirely new sets of questions to answer.
With "Gift", "Gee Angel", and "Your Favorite Thing", FU:EL contains three of Sugar's best songs. "Favorite" in particular is as wonderfully evocative of modern rock radio in 1994 as R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", Liz Phair's "Supernova", or Pavement's "Cut Your Hair". (Though at the other end of the spectrum, the album's retro-kitsch cover art is redolent of that period's unfortunate postmodern pastiche fashion trends.) On the whole, though, FU:EL sounds a bit tired, if not grumpy. "Panama City Motel" is a weary tour narrative (which bites its acoustic chord progression straight from "Jane Says"), and "Granny Cool" is just plain bitchy. The band wouldn't make it through the subsequent tour in one piece.
In his biography, Mould confesses that his life and health were rejuvenated in the early 2000s through his public immersion in San Fransisco's "bear" subculture, and DJing Blowoff-- "this sexy gay dance party"-- in his adopted hometown of Washington, D.C. In the broader scope of his career, however, it's one of a few such moments when Mould's artistic muse, impulsiveness, and pride took him in a productive new direction. The acrimonious break from Hüsker Dü was the first, and leaving Virgin to form Sugar was second. There have been few more critically and commercially successful relaunches than Mould's. The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL (which contain two live sets and all B-sides from the era, plus oral histories of all three releases) gain a little extra shine in this context. They're a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend, starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.


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 Adele’s earth-shattering 2011 album, granting the British torch singer entrée into the pantheon of iconic pop vocalists.

21

The green room was full of Adeles, nails all long and painted, hairdos puffed into the singer’s signature beehive. The BBC had corralled a cluster of impersonators into an experiment; they thought they were at an audition. But the real Adele was among them, disguised, plastered in a fake nose and chin, joining in on their jokes about how long it was taking her to release a new album.
It was 2015, and for years, Adele had been everywhere. Signed to the British label XL at age 18, after a track her friend uploaded to MySpace gained attention, she released her debut album, 19, two years after graduating from the lauded BRIT School. It went triple platinum in the U.S. and catalyzed an almost feverish mass adoration. She pouted on the cover of Vogue, she belted on SNL, she swept the Grammys, she soundtracked James Bond. Adele never seemed to cast herself as an archetypal pop star—in interviews, she was giggly and crass, and often deployed what critics and fans called a “cackle.” In one of the few declarations of her pop supremacy, she held out on releasing her 2015 album, 25, to streaming services, a move then only wielded by artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The gamble worked: People bought her physical records in droves, with such a fervor that some thought maybe Adele had single-handedly saved the industry.
While her first album garnered Adele international attention, her 2011 follow-up, 21 catapulted her into the Guinness Book of World Records—21 is reportedly the longest-running No. 1 album by a female solo artist in the history of U.S. and UK charts. The album cemented her legacy as an artist who could make once-in-a-generation milestones out of her music. 21 is filled with colossal songs, elegant and glistening, bending but never breaking under the heft of Adele’s voice, which sounds like Amy Winehouse mashed with opera. (Adele said that she owed “90%” of her career to Amy Winehouse, before a concert on what would have been Winehouse’s 33rd birthday.)
Beyond the similarities to Winehouse, though—the gritty, growled vocals that could stretch into big belted notes, often over jazzy piano—Adele seemed like a pop star flung out of social or temporal context. She swirled together soul and pop and jazz; Adele said she turned to country while writing the record. She revered Etta James as a kid. The first concert she went to was the Cure, with her mom, and her cover of “Lovesong” on 21 quivers and crawls, hovers above a scratch, one of the more subdued tracks on the album. “She takes you to places other artists don’t go to anymore—the way they did in the 70s,” Beyoncé said about her. Adele crafted her songs intentionally to be timeless—“I want to sing these songs when I’m 70 fuckin’ years old,” she told Vanity Fair.
Maybe too much credit has been given to Adele for ushering in a resurgence of the ballad—Bruno Mars’ grating “Grenade” had been climbing the charts around the same time—but there was something baffling about hearing her on the radio slotted between the hyperactive neon rush of the Black Eyed Peas and Katy Perry. A year before 21, Kesha released her glitter torpedo of an album full of breakups, blackouts, and tirades over texts. The trope of slickly calibrated female self-destruction, almost always conveyed through performative partying, would radiate throughout pop over the next decade, but never breach Adele’s songs. This is also what differentiated her from Winehouse: on 21 especially, she is desperate to tear down so much, but always protects herself.
21 isn’t exactly a concept album, but it collects the songs Adele wrote at that age, centering around the dissolution of what she would call a “rubbish relationship.” She wrote 21 over a three month period, usually when she was wasted— “I was completely off my face writing that album,” she told Vanity Fair, “and a drunk tongue is an honest one.” She would go through two bottles of wine and chain-smoke while writing the lyrics, then look back at what she’d scrawled down in the morning. The emotional intensity scarred her. “How I felt when I wrote 21, I wouldn’t want to feel again,” she told The New York Times a few years later “I was miserable, I was lonely, I was sad, I was angry, I was bitter. I thought I was going to be single for the rest of my life. I thought I was never going to love again.”
If there’s an inflection of melodrama in these songs, it’s because of those high stakes. She sings in absolutes, then rushes to fill in the nuance. Adele wrote “Set Fire to the Rain” to be a camp anthem for a queer audience, but its sonic surcharge and all-or-nothing lyrics (“I was over/Until you kissed my lips, and you saved me”) are at home on the album, nestled between titanic high notes that roar over cinematic piano and pleas about love dying. Listening to the album in one go can feel a bit draining, the weight of all these grandiose melodies slumped atop each other. Adele aims to disarm; you’re left clutching at the wisps of synths that sometimes close out a ballad.
But the maudlin elements of the album also feel essential: they enable Adele to capture the specific sinusoidal hell of being 21, the emotional velocity that follows a first, serious love. There are refractions of her across the album—Adele Enraged, Adele In Love, Adele Avenging—as she tries to articulate identity through the shape of a lover’s absence. “I’ll be somebody different,” she begs on “I’ll Be Waiting,” “I’ll be better to you.” Much of the album shows Adele calibrating a relationship she’s experiencing with an inherited ideal of what love means. “If this ain’t love, then what is?” she moans on “He Won’t Go,” the question genuine, the prodding laid bare. She wrote “One and Only” as a fictional exercise, trying to imagine the conversation she’d want to have with a lover down the line, and it radiates with hope and expectation. “You’ll never know if you never try/To forget your past and simply be mine,” she belts.
To some critics, 21 was a “bitter” album, a “vengeful” one. What I hear more pressingly is a woman trying to form agency out of the murk of devastation.”I won't let you close enough to hurt me,” she sings on “Turning Tables.” Adele said that she wrote the haunting “Someone Like You'” “because I was exhausted from being such a bitch” with other songs on the record—but while “Someone Like You” is beautiful and clear and stirring, Adele’s at her most fun when she lashes out. The winkingly vindictive “Rumour Has It” shimmies and shivers under the smoke in her voice. I’d heard “Rolling in the Deep” maybe forty times over the years before it came on shuffle one day and cut me, the sting and curdled rage. “Go ahead and sell me out, and I’ll lay your shit bare,” she murmurs. The ferocity of these songs isn’t dulled or disguised or smuggled in through tidy pop formulas. She continuously wrestles for control and reaches for a vision of herself across time—before she waded into her lover’s life, or decades later when they’re old—and that device is less about her trying on someone’s vantage point and more about her trying to narrow down who she actually is.
On 21, she constantly moves between phases of a relationship, between dimensions of grief. “Only yesterday was the time of our lives,” she breathes in “Someone Like You,” a song about reaching out to an ex years after the end of their relationship and finding that he’s now married and content without her. “I lose myself in time just thinking of your face,” she sighs on “One and Only,” what she called the first happy track she wrote for the record. Her portraits of despair also involve surging between the past and present. “When was the last time you thought of me, or have you completely erased me from memory?” she demands on “Don’t You Remember.” Throughout the song, she struggles to cast herself as someone worthy of recollection, the last remaining way she can become a permanent fixture of her ex’s mind and life. Love is hitched to precarity in Adele’s world, always needing to be stated or defended or mourned.
Part of this, perhaps, stems from the broad narratives in Adele’s songs. The other forces of breakup tracks at the time, Drake and Taylor Swift, filled their songs with details: a red scarf left at an ex’s sister’s house, an apology for having sex four times in one week. Adele’s writing is allusive. She sings in generalities — hearts melting, last goodbyes, pleas to forgive unnamed sins. 21 asks for your participation. You’re meant to summon your mottled heartbreak to fill in some of the blanks, and tap into the sorrow and rage and remorse that quakes through these songs. “21 isn’t even my record,” Adele told Zane Lowe in 2015. “It belongs to people.”
Adele knew 21 would loom over her for the rest of her career. “My thing was, how do I follow up 21?” she said. “But I can’t, because it was so big, so many people took it into their lives. I can never live up to that again.” In the video of the BBC experiment, she watches as person after person tries on the character of Adele. She feigns nervousness—“I’m going to be sick,” she murmurs at one point, maybe a nod to her history of stage fright. But when it’s her turn to sing, it’s only an instant before the row of impersonators realize who she is. Their mouths flop open, cartoonish, and they touch each other’s arms. They join in and sing her words back to her, some starting to cry. Adele beams at them from behind the mic and stares at all these refractions of herself. She keeps watching them, transfixed.

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Yo La Tengo capture the feeling of post-traumatic calm on their latest album, assuring their status as a wry and comforting cornerstone of indie rock.

There’s a Riot Going On

Ira Kaplan witnessed the rock era from a close vantage: He watched the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan”; was picked up hitchhiking in the early 1970s by Arlo Guthrie; was a regular at punk institutions CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City; wrote for pioneering zine the New York Rocker; and with his wife Georgia Hubley as Yo La Tengo, he witnessed indie rock slowly coalesce and eventually corporatize. Since adding James McNew in the early 1990s, Yo La Tengo have singularly defined American indie rock, merging their sui generis suburban psychedelia with a record collector’s urge to re-animate rock history and a mordant sense of humor about the inherently silly nature of their chosen profession. So when an interviewer recently asked Kaplan why the band named their 15th album after Sly and the Family Stone’s epochal, deeply political 1971 LP, Kaplan’s droll reply was perfectly on-brand: “To run away from your question as fast as possible, I think a lot of the things we do just feel right and don’t get articulated.”
Such is the gestalt of Yo La Tengo, a band that, almost in spite of its members’ encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century music and penchant for irony, operates most effectively at the level of feel. Self-aware enough to know the innate arbitrariness of album titles while simultaneously acknowledging the subtle power of words and names to shape the rituals of listening, Yo La Tengo’s reticence to divulge it all is less rockstar mystique than generosity of spirit. Like so many of the band’s lyrics, words function as decontextualized mantras, short phrases to roll around in your mind while the music gradually cocoons you. There’s a Riot Going On is full of meditative lyrical repetition: “Blow on the fire/Ashes blow away,” “She may/She might,” “Sound asleep/Counting sheep/Dream away.” At a time when musicians are pushed to unpack and explain every last syllable they produce, it’s a relief for one to insist on the potency of musical affects over literal definitions.
The album’s release comes in the wake of some of most volatile street-fighting since Sly’s own heyday, with no guarantee that future flare-ups won’t rage on for longer, at greater cost. This fact is certainly not lost on the band, but, if this is your chosen interpretation, you know better than to expect Riot to respond in kind—what they offer is closer to a balm. Consider “Above the Sound,” in which Kaplan’s voice emerges following three-and-a-half minutes of buzzing tribal rumble to ask, in his characteristic philosopher’s whisper, “What if we’re too black and blue/To spot our latest bruise?” After a year-plus of low-level fear generated by push-notification trigger warnings, the trio suggests in the song’s title—repeated over and again—a form of sonic self-care. This specific post-traumatic calm is reminiscent of a recent episode of HBO’s “High Maintenance,” in which an enterprising weed deliverer and his network of New York clients consistently express shock about some recent calamity that goes unnamed. Maybe it’s the outcome of the 2016 election, maybe it’s another mass shooting—it’s never explained, we just see reactions, and then self-medication. Riot also evokes this feeling.
In his review of the band’s eclectic 2015 covers collection Stuff Like That There, Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman winkingly claimed that “Yo La Tengo were essentially the first on-demand music-streaming service,” due to their capacity to seemingly cover any song on a second’s notice. There’s more to the streaming metaphor than eclecticism, though: Such services are also used as mood-generating machines, trained to to facilitate calmness and sedation. In this view, Riot is possibly the moodiest Yo La Tengo album yet. It’s the least song-oriented and most monochromatic LP in the band’s catalog, without a Kaplan whammy-bar wild-out or a pop palate cleanser to be heard. In the center of the album is a 12-minute block of largely wordless ambience—the two-part rumination “Dream Dream Away” and the fluttering organ drone and staticky radio transmissions of “Shortwave”—that seems equally informed by their recent conceptual and soundtrack side-hustles. On Riot, Yo La Tengo sound more brooding than ever, which is saying something coming from the band that gave the world the 77-minute tone-poem, 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out.
Though it can feel a bit too calm and sedate, the album also reflects the group’s greatest and most instantly recognizable strengths. Their sound might suggest that they’re wound up in nostalgia, but that’s never been the case: They are able to tap into a performative naïvete. Whether through their coy reluctance to talk about themselves or their legacy, their self-mocking covers of a record store’s full of 45s, an unironic innocence distinguishes Yo La Tengo from their peers or predecessors, and it’s in full display on the album’s first quarter. There’s “Shades of Blue,” a sweet Georgia lullaby about the fugue state of romantic longing, “She May, She Might,” which recalls the frozen recognition that you may never really know the person you spend your life with, and the evergreen pleasures of endless courtship on “For You Too.”
Yo La Tengo’s gift for waxing on the indeterminacies of interpersonal relationships is their greatest gift as musicians, but there’s something about Riot that makes it feel like cold comfort. On Riot’s closer “Here You Are,” a message of resistance has petrified into something more menacing. “We are out of words/We’re out of time/Believe the worst,” they chant. Then, perhaps, an omen: “We had our run, we’re gone.” Is Yo La Tengo suggesting we’re past the point of healing? Or is the sentiment more autobiographical—does the 34-year-old band see the end of their own line coming sooner than later? I bet if you ask them, they’ll stare down at their hands and deflect the question, or crack a wry joke. Firm answers aren’t their thing.


After a tumultuous label break-up, Valerie Teicher shakes off resentment and disappointment with an upbeat set of light, breezy dance pop.

Die 4 Ur Love EP

Tei Shi’s Valerie Teicher was having a rough 2020 even before the pandemic hit. She began the year still smarting from the November release of her sophomore album La Linda, a beguiling but doomed effort that underperformed whatever expectations she might have once held for it, the casualty of delays and her crumbling relationship with her former label. The album’s release was so botched that, for unclear reasons, its best single disappeared from its track list within weeks of its release, a reminder of how impermanent albums can be in the streaming age. Her last best chance at finding a wide audience for the record might have been a tour with occasional collaborator Blood Orange planned for this spring, but it was canceled in the wake of COVID-19.
Tei Shi’s new self-released EP Die 4 Ur Love, which she wrote over six days this January, simmers in heartache, abandonment, and resentment at her former label. “I was feeling really sad and pessimistic, and the music all came from this place,” Teicher explained. “I was feeling a sort of impending doom, and out of that came an EP loosely based around apocalypse.” That she wrote these songs just months before that sense of impending doom became global was just an unhappy accident—Teicher had even initially titled the EP Apocalypse, but after the world went into lockdown that seemed “too on the nose.”
Those are dark origins for an EP that turns out to be a very light listen. In the spirit of Robyn, Tei Shi’s preferred prescription for pain and disappointment is to dance her way through it, and even when she’s idealizing death—on “Disappear” she longs for “a pill that could make me feel nothing”—Die 4 Ur Love is far and away the breeziest, most upbeat project she’s ever recorded, a gleaming disco ball compared to the darkly shadowed, R&B-steeped art-pop of her 2017 debut Crawl Space.
Unfortunately, that pop-forward makeover doesn’t play to her gifts for mystique building. Teicher always scanned as worldly and sophisticated, cut from cloth closer to that of an actual pop star than the indie auteurs with whom she shares playlists. But that star quality isn’t nearly so novel when she’s playing on Top 40’s turf, and on Die 4 Ur Love she’s boxed in by the predictable rhythms of pop in its most down-the-middle iterations.
These five songs never sound anything less than polished—if nothing else, they prove she can create a decent facsimile of big-budget pop with a DIY artist’s pocketbook—but they never excite, either. Even the standout title track succumbs to anonymity; it’s the kind of easy dance song that Lady Gaga retreats to whenever her last project underperforms, all bombast and no risk. Every song is too obvious, devoid of the surprises and reveals that made her previous albums such enticing labyrinths. The peppy synth-pop shuffle “OK Crazy” and the Ryan Tedder-style ballad “Goodbye” both cloy in their sweetness.
Maybe these songs were just too rushed. Teicher said she worked quickly on the EP, out of an understandable drive to begin her fresh start after splitting from her label (the most personable moment on the EP is a shot at Downtown Records: “Got my freedom/Also I’m making a hit,” she smirks on closer “Goodbye”). And there’s some recent precedent for artists regaining their footing after creative missteps and industry mismanagement. After years adrift, Tinashe reclaimed control of her career and rebounded last year with her best album yet, Songs for You, a showcase for what a natural talent can do when left to their own devices. Teicher could make a record that good. She’s got the voice and the presence to do it, and now she’s got her freedom, too. But it’s going to require material a lot more ambitious than this.

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