Swedish star follows her Youth Novels with another record that captures the complex, contradictory, and intense yearning of young adulthood.

Wounded Rhymes

To date, Lykke Li's biggest exposure was her song "Possibility" appearing on the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack. From a producer's standpoint, her inclusion was a no-brainer: Not only was her debut titled Youth Novels, but it captured the intense yearning of youth, which is also an aim of the Twilight series. Few indie artists seemed as well poised as Li to vocalize Stephenie Meyer's heroine's point of view. As the singer herself told Pitchfork recently, "I like that age when you feel misunderstood and still believe in the pure idea that love conquers all"-- perhaps the most concise and astute explanation of that franchise's appeal.
That is, however, only one aspect of Li's considerable appeal. As vampire franchises go, she has much more in common with Buffy Summers than the shrinking Bella Swan: Li can kick serious ass, yet even at her toughest, she nurses a persistent desire for a normal and secure life, which-- if her second album, Wounded Rhymes, is any indication-- involves intense love, great sex, and weird dance moves. Li proves a rich and compelling character in her songs, which are dark but also complex, contradictory, and, thank goodness, still rough around the edges.
Like Joss Whedon's show, Wounded Rhymes is an album of stark, scintillating contrasts: between fantasy and reality, between the powerful and the vulnerable, between the brash and the quiet, between the rhythmic and the melodic. Audacious anthems jostle next to heartbreak ballads like "Unrequited Love", with its simple guitar and shoo-wop backing vocals. Dense, busy numbers give way to emotionally and musically stripped tracks like "I Know Places". "I'm your prostitute, you gon' get some," she sings on "Get Some", a come-on so blunt that it's become the talking point for this album. As a single, the song brazenly grabs your attention, but in the context of this album, alongside such forlorn songs, it becomes a desperate statement, disarmingly intimate in its role-playing implications but also uncomfortably eager to shed or adopt new identities to ensure a lover's devotion.
Rather than adjust or reconcile them, Li lets all those contradictions ride, having grown more comfortable in her musical skin. While there are no highs here quite as high as Youth Novels' "Little Bit" or "Breaking It Up" (and no low nearly as low as "Complaint Department", though "Rich Kids" comes pretty damn close), there is a sense of cohesion missing from that debut, as well as an understanding that a record can be a document of a particularly tumultuous time and place. To write these songs, Li spent long months in New York and Southern California, spending a great deal of time alone in the desert. The result is depressive without being depressing, dark without being bleak, as it rejuvenates, refines, and redirects her eccentricities.
The biggest moments on Wounded Rhymes take the form of slower ballads, whether stripped down like "I Know Places" or grandiose like "Sadness Is a Blessing". But they gain their power in contrast to the more upbeat tracks like opener "Youth Knows No Pain". Dropping some of the coy affectations of Youth Novels, Li proves a surprisingly dramatic singer with a powerful voice and strong phrasing, able to render the emotional pain of "Sadness Is a Blessing" as somehow exultant-- a transcendent state of being.
Like any good vocalist, she knows when to bow out and let the music speak for her. "I Know Places" cuts off early to set up a long, dreamy coda that acts as both a quiet promise of escape and an album intermission that sets up the penultimate "Jerome", which seems to synthesize every single emotional and musical urge on the album. Both ballad and banger, the song sheds its elements until only the thunderous heartbeat rhythm remains. That moment bleeds into the finale, "Silent My Song", a nearly a cappella closer that swells and fades dramatically. "No fist needed when you call," Li sings. "You silent my song." It's a devastating statement, yet ultimately an untrustworthy one: She has harnessed her heartache and her happiness to amplify her voice, not to lose it.


On their latest album, New Zealand's Trust Punks leave behind jangly pop for a plunge into acidic post-punk, while their lyrics cast a jaundiced eye at a crumbling society.

Double Bind

When first introduced, Auckland, New Zealand’s Trust Punks were a sum of their parts. A melding of jangle riffs to a subtle but present darker undercurrent, they were in debt to the less pristine parts of the Flying Nun sound (understandable, as the band did arise from the ashes of indie rockers Grass Cannons). Since the release of their debut Discipline in 2014 though, Trust Punks underwent a transformation. Their eyes narrowed as they took in their surroundings, their worldviews darkening with strains of pessimism and disdain. Their new album Double Bind now reflects all of that, filled with newly discovered distortion, off-kilter melodies, and affirmation of post punk as the new core of the band.
It’s all right there in the startling, disorienting lead single “Leaving Room for The Lord,” which offers the band's best impression of the Fall at their most agitated and pulls it off.  Lead singer Joe Thomas opens it literally shouting “Post punk!” as brittle, metallic guitar riffs bounce off one another and the rhythm section pounds into an off-balance vortex. “Good Luck With That,” with its relentless charge and fuzzy angular guitars, sounds like the Feelies covering 100 Flowers. “Pig” draws so much from Wire’s 154 that it feels like it could be a lost song from that session, rediscovered and remastered. The album ends with “Bank of God,” which pulls from This Heat’s “Health & Efficiency” and stretches some of the catchiest melodies on the record into a nearly nine-minute jam that eventually fades to pedal-warped static.
Like This Heat did, Trust Punks are using dissonance to cloak their dive into political and social critique. Double Bind is filled with heaved bile at the world these New Zealanders have inherited. “Good Luck With That” is a takedown of the prison industrial complex; “Paradise/Angel-wire” touches on antipathy towards immigrants, ending with a sample of an Australian government agent telling refugees in need of help to go back home. Songs like “Riding It Out” are more opaque with their targets, but even those cases lines like “Cut the guilt out of your veins to make the world a safer place” are delivered with such vivid anger they feel specific.
Ultimately, Double Bind’s flaws only appear when the album holds itself back and revisits older territory. “The Reservoir,” with its lackadaisical strumming and glockenspiel-filled chorus, completes the cycle of the band’s debt to post-punk predecessors Women. It is a good song, but feels like something the band would have done in their past. The same goes for the penultimate track “Beneath the Commons,” a five minute guitar and vocal swirl that nearly manages to bring the whole momentum of the album to a screeching halt. Drawing so much from their past style, it can’t help but betray that Double Bind is a transitional record. It’s one filled with great, art damaged ideas as the band plunders from the best, but the band is still grafting new influences and ideas into their system, seeing what sticks and what is rejected.


Dan Boeckner is over a decade into his career, and he’s spent most of it playing in bands (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Divine Fits) whose appeal was at least partially based on their interpersonal dynamics. In his new band, he's out front on his own.

EP1

Dan Boeckner is over a decade into his career, and he’s spent most of it playing in bands whose appeal was at least partially based on their interpersonal dynamics. He was the lapsed paladin writing woolly Bruce Springsteen homages along mana-crazed warlock Spencer Krug in Wolf Parade, a band whose contributions to the halcyon days of '00s indie rock are now rather underrated; his work in Handsome Furs with ex-wife Alexei Perry hung on the implied sexual tension between his chugging riffs and her icy, frenzied synth lines; and as the co-leader of Divine Fits, he pitted his raw, heart-on-sleeve growl against Britt Daniel’s cooler, detached yelp, and ended up stealing the album’s best moments. Given that rich collaborative history, Boeckner’s first EP with his new band, Operators, makes for a slightly disconcerting listen: for the first time in a long time, he’s alone at the front, a lead voice who’s spent his career defining himself against the voices of others. Based on the short and tidy EP1, Boeckner isn’t going to dramatically change the formula that’s won him fans and critical acclaim now that he’s the only one steering the ship. Its five songs are an extension of the gruff, melody-driven rock he’s been making for a decade, granted an electronic bent and license to hit the dancefloor.
Operators’ sound is clearly derived from a long-running line of smart, populist bands that blurred the boundaries between electronic and rock music: New Order’s mechanical precision and sturdy rhythms, Depeche Mode’s ambitious, dramatic stadium goth, and the ragged, crate-digging electro of the DFA label’s early period. These influences have always been present in Boeckner’s music—Handsome Furs was synth-pop, just set in an alternate timeline where the Soviet Union became the dominant world power, and Wolf Parade deployed vintage synths with wild-eyed glee—but they’ve never been as explicitly rendered as they are on EP1. The EP’s sprawling penultimate track, “Ancient”, is a good example: Boeckner is backed up by synths that misfire and slowly rise before cresting and plummeting—it’s a drop, real and earned—into a filthy, swaggering little groove. It’s a show of good faith on Boeckner’s part: it’s one thing to pay lip service to the idea of bridging contemporary rock and dance music, and quite another to actually get people moving. He seems honestly invested in the concept. There’s a welcome physicality to the music, too, helped along by the reliable contributions of Divine Fits drummer Sam Brown and keyboardist Devojka. These songs gobble up space and hit hard.
The qualities that help EP1 hang alongside Boeckner's other, more prominent work are its unabashed sincerity and total investment in the idea of relevant, visceral rock music. Perhaps the EP's heart-on-sleeve pursuit of greatness isn't a huge surprise, given the band's creative core—we're talking about a guy whose finest moments are ripping, raw songs called "This Heart's on Fire" and "My Love Is Real"—but either way, it's endearing. Rather than feeling born out of boredom or trend chasing, EP1 radiates a reverence for its major influences, and a real excitement in its brightest, loudest moments. When the lurching, buzzing "Book of Love" splits open with a minute left and births a gorgeous, spiraling keyboard melody, you can almost see the band grinning and launching into their parts with renewed vigor; the same feeling is generated when lead single "True" first falls into its lockstep groove, or when the band kicks out the jams on the aforementioned "Ancient". Their joy is infectious, and it helps paper over some of the EP's cheesier moments. The repeated question "Who put the ancient code in your bones?" on "Ancient" might be the goofiest lyrical query this side of "Are we human or are we dancer," but it's easier to forgive when it's delivered with energy and enthusiasm. That's what makes this first effort from Operators a worthwhile exercise: it's a chance to hear a veteran like Boeckner taking mild risks and having fun.


Shackleton’s first solo full-length in nine years is stripped of some of his customary idiosyncrasies, but it remains heady, beaded-curtains, incense-in-the-air music, filled with occult mystique.

Departing Like Rivers

Shackleton’s work is so diffuse and so challenging that finding an entry point can be like feeling out a foothold in a sheer granite wall. His last solo full-length, 2012’s Music for the Quiet Hour/The Drawbar Organ EPs, sprawled to more than two hours. His earlier work, astonishing as it often is, still reflects the dubstep roots he would eventually shed in order to make his best and most unclassifiable music. And his recent output has been mostly in tandem with other artists: an album of goblin chants with Anika, a free-jazz excursion with Polish clarinetist Wacław Zimpel, a collection of eccentric prog-dub poetry with opera firebrand Ernesto Tomasini. All of this stuff is profoundly idiosyncratic and rarely makes for an easy listen; none of these albums could really be said to be “representative.” It adds up to one of the most daunting catalogs in electronic music.
Departing Like Rivers, Shackleton’s first solo album since Music for the Quiet Hour, feels like a re-introduction. It traverses seven tracks in 63 minutes, hardly a casual commitment but a lot easier to experience in one sitting. More subdued than most of Shackleton’s work, it bypasses a lot of the potentially alienating moments that sometimes result from his determination to go out on a limb. The hokey spoken-word passages that tripped up Music for the Quiet Hour are mostly absent, and there’s nothing as potentially divisive as Tomasini’s gravitas-laden quaver. But if some of the fringes of Shackleton’s sound have been shaved away, the center is intact, pulsing like the heart of a malevolent sun about to go supernova.
This is heady, beaded-curtains, incense-in-the-air music, heavy on bells, hand drums, and far-off metallic scrapes. The air is always thick with the residual decay from a struck cymbal or gong, and something is usually droning ominously in the background. A litany of apocalyptic sampled voices (“the sky is about to burst”; “overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth”) gives the music an occultist, Coil-like mystique. The producer claims to have incorporated bits of old British folk songs into these tracks, and though you’d need an encyclopedic knowledge of the Child ballads to pick them out, something still seems ancient about this music, as if Shackleton has opened a portal to the foggiest parts of Britain’s past.
A sense of something faintly unwholesome lingers. The sequencer at the end of “Something Tells Me / Pour Out Like Water” is tuned so strangely that the notes seem to curl like wilted flowers, and the bell that tolls in the background signals the arrival of something dreadful. When another sequencer shows up at the end of “Transformed Into Love” and begins slipping out of time with its counterpoint, it’s almost humbling to see how even that most rigid and mechanical of instruments can’t help but get caught in Shackleton’s undertow. The hand drums lumber on, as if soundtracking a grueling march to the battlefield; the bass attacks the music from all sides, and they rarely work together to drive the music forward. One element floats atop the other like oil and water, and yet everything is absorbed into a vast, pulsating orb of sound.
The 13-minute “Something Tells Me / Pour Out Like Water” starts the album mid-sentence with a jolt of bass like a door slamming behind the listener, and from there, there’s nowhere to go but forward. In the frequent absence of a groove, the music maintains momentum through its linear structure, and it plays like an arcane ritual unfolding in real time, each step performed precisely in sequence. On first listen, you might simply marvel at all the sounds on display. After a few more spins, the underlying structure of what initially seems like an amorphous suite becomes more obvious. “Something Tells Me” and “Pour Out Like Water” blur together at first, but once the initial effects on the brain wear off a bit, you can stand back and see them as two separate pieces separated by a yawning void of metallic noise.
Why not just split “Something Tells Me / Pour Out Like Water” into two six-minute tracks instead of one 13-minute monster? I suspect Shackleton just liked the impact of that 13-minute runtime. Grander, proggier, more forbidding: these are always positives in the Shackleton universe, and whether you prefer Departing Like Rivers to his earlier work depends on how much your interest in his music has to do with the challenge it offers. Departing Like Rivers can feel a bit like The Shackleton Reader, compiling all the best bits of his last decade of music into a (comparatively) quick and easy package. It’s the best album to recommend to newbies, but there’s the risk that a first-timer will decide it’s the only Shackleton they need, which would be a shame.

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Weezer (The Black Album)

In 1998, two years after Pinkerton debuted to poor reviews, Rivers Cuomo retreated to a one-room bedsit beneath a Los Angeles freeway. He painted the walls and ceilings black, and on the windows, he layered black bed-sheets over thick fiberglass insulation. Devastated by the negative response to Pinkerton, and frustrated by an unproductive spate of rehearsals, he withdrew from his band, and then from the world. For months on end, he hid in his unlit bedroom, depressed, never going outside, never speaking to another human being. “I’d start to have some of the darkest thoughts and fears and feelings,” he said. “I’d think, ‘Man, maybe I’m never going to get out of this.’”
Similar stories abound of songwriters so adept at articulating sadness they became suffused in the feeling. These stories don’t often end happily. But Cuomo is a marvelous anomaly: he emerged from his depression, sought help via psychotherapy and meditation, and reunited with his band to create, over several decades, an immense body of work. The only small wrinkle in this narrative is that body of work is famously reviled among fans and critics alike. On this latest album, Weezer reflects on their own capricious history, using a blunt force the likes of which they’ve never deployed before.
Actually, “blunt” might be an understatement: Cuomo chants, “Die, die, you zombie bastards” a dozen times. It’s a forceful rebuke of Leslie Jones and her ilk. When, on the same track, he sings, “Music saved my life,” the platitude lays plain an ugly truth: Weezer’s masterpiece was produced during a period of painful dysregulation and remains mired in racist bigotry. Fans who clamor for a second Pinkerton are propping up an emotionally stunted corpse; Mitski is shoveling loam onto his grave. Throughout Weezer (The Black Album), Cuomo pleads with listeners to follow him past Pinkerton, and out of that dark apartment. “I lived my life,” he sings, “and that’s much better than hiding in a hole.”
Weezer’s foremost lyrical priority, then, is to shuck the expectations of their perennially disappointed fanbase. The band attacks this project from every angle: cynical sneering at the pressures of commercialization (“Can’t Knock the Hustle”), wistful longing for artistry without an audience (“High as a Kite”), and the aforementioned open death threats of “Zombie Bastards.” The production, too, rarely bears even a passing resemblance to the power pop that first endeared Weezer to listeners. They’ve enlisted TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek to draft a set of soundscapes that range from bossa nova to Blink-182. In an era where recommendation engines swaddle listeners in cozy familiarity, it’s refreshing to see so much stylistic variation from track to track.
But this striving for the new and different comes at a cost. There’s no emotional throughline on The Black Album, no grand statement that continues from one track to the next. The songs never blur together, but they also don’t tell a story as the sum of their parts. A sense of tonal whiplash ensues, and the album’s highlights are best enjoyed in isolation. “Byzantine” goes down like a bubbly flute of champagne, a sweet, slinky narrative of infidelity spilling out over a laissez-faire lounge beat. On “The Prince Who Wanted Everything,” co-written with rhythm guitarist Brian Bell, Cuomo sings knotty lines like “all the courtiers will genuflect,” clearly relishing each and every syllable that clicks between his teeth. And “I’m Just Being Honest,” a genuinely hysterical ode on the pitfalls of constructive criticism, lands like Weezer doing a spot-on Lonely Island parody of themselves: “I listened to it, but halfway through it, I had to quit; your band sounds like shit.”
Elsewhere, The Black Album stumbles when Cuomo opts for universality over specificity. “Living in L.A.” smothers its interesting ideas under broad brush strokes. “Piece of Cake” is a shallow, plodding re-tread of the White Album stand-out “Do You Wanna Get High?” The album’s final track, “California Snow,” borders on disastrous: over skittering, “Sicko Mode”-esque drums, Cuomo spits, “This is the definition of flow! Nobody cold as this!” and then he sings about cocaine for three and a half minutes. Cuomo’s songwriting on substance abuse, once so direct and delicate, sinks to maudlin depths here; the invocation of Judas in this song’s bridge can’t match the bruising betrayal conveyed in, “You cleaned up/Found Jesus.”
In recent months, Weezer’s been focused on light-hearted, crowd-pleasing viral videos: Finn Wolfhard donning a wild glam-rock mullet to play a teenage Cuomo, Weird Al suiting up in bowl cut, cardigan, and Buddy Holly glasses. At first blush, the band’s new video for “High as a Kite” appears to be more of the same, with Cuomo wearing a red sweater and greeting a crowd of pre-schoolers for a taping of “Mister Rivers’ Neighborhood.” But as the band’s performance gathers steam, the dark subtext beneath the song’s optimism reveals itself. Smiles slough off the toddlers’ faces, giving way to wobbly pouting. Their parents knit their eyebrows, weary, visibly distressed by the rock’n’roll carnage unfolding. The final shot all but defines the current moment of Weezer: The audience has cleared out entirely, leaving a vast expanse of empty black seats and bare black walls. On the soundstage, Weezer stands triumphant in the wreckage, soaked in light.


A collection of the late soul singer’s covers of songs by Janet Jackson, Prince, and others reveals her remarkable ability to reinterpret classic sounds while refusing to be relegated to the past.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Rendition Was In)

In 2002, Sharon Jones and Daptone Records co-founder/bandleader Bosco Mann claimed that they were suing Janet Jackson over the song “What Have You Done for Me Lately.” The label issued a press release accusing Jackson of copyright violation and alleging that her 1986 hit single was actually written in 1969 by Jones and Mann: “The original recording, ‘a much raunchier version,’ had been only a regional hit on the soul scene in the early seventies and had fallen into relative obscurity by the time Jackson had recorded her pop version fifteen years later.” It just so happened that Daptone was selling a 7" single with Jones’ version on the A-side and the Dap-Kings’ instrumental on the B, both of which are convincing in their analog production and gritty groove.
Never mind that Mann (aka Gabriel Roth) was born several years after he allegedly co-wrote the song. The name of the law firm—Dewey Cheatham—revealed the whole thing to be a clever hoax engineered to promote the single, taken from Daptone’s first full-length release, Dap-Dippin’ with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Nearly 20 years later, their cover of Jackson’s hit is less significant for how it sounds than for the way it pitched Jones as an artist removed from time and wronged by the music industry. Which wasn’t too far from the truth: Jones, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2016, had been working day jobs and singing in wedding bands for decades before making her recording debut (singing backup for Lee Fields) in the mid 1990s. She brought to that session, just as she would to Daptone, a stylistic approach and set of techniques from another era, and Jones spent the rest of her life not just defining retro soul for a new generation, but defying the retro part of that label.
Covers were always a significant part of Jones’ repertoire, a means of connecting her to the past and also linking the past to the present, and that gives Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Rendition Was In) the weight of a career retrospective. It might even reveal more about Jones than a greatest-hits collection would, emphasizing her decisions about which songs to sing and how to sing them. She had remarkable range vocally and stylistically. While her take on “What Have You Done for Me Lately” ultimately sounds uncharacteristically tentative, turning Jackson’s icy staccato into a rhythmically limp hook, she had more luck with subsequent covers, navigating established soul classics and usually holding her own against the originals. She conveys a sense of staunch determination on Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me,” as though she’s not the one who needs saving. And she strips the breathless singing and lush production from the Marvelettes’ “Here I Am Baby,” replacing them with a rawer vocal and a sinewy guitar groove. It sounds like you’re sitting in their practice space with them.
But the non-R&B covers—the songs that make her and her band push themselves—are more daring and perhaps more satisfying, in particular “This Land Is Your Land” (included on the digital version but not the vinyl). Originally released as the B-side of her 2004 single “What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?,” it’s become one of her signature tunes, a work of democratic funk conveying both patriotic pride and civic outrage, especially when she gets to the verses typically omitted from Woody Guthrie’s song. Less popular but just as powerful is her reimagining of the Wailers’ deep cut “It Hurts to Be Alone.” (Often credited to Bob Marley, it was written and originally sung by Junior Braithwaite.) The Dap-Kings wisely downplay the Trenchtown pulse and teen romanticism of the original, giving it a loose, late-night sway to match the adult regret and restraint in Jones’ voice.
Just Dropped In similarly reveals much about the business of being in a band and running a label—like how Jones and Daptone supplemented their albums and tours with extracurricular projects. Many of these covers weren’t chosen by the band, but commissioned. The band recorded Stevie Wonder’s “Signed Sealed Delivered I’m Yours” for a bank commercial, and their reading is straightforward right down to the electric sitar. Similarly, they did a note-for-note cover of Gladys Knight & the Pips’ 1964 single “Giving Up” to use as a Dr. Dre sample, although it was ultimately discarded. These songs sound a bit too faithful to the originals, and you wonder what the band could have done with them if they’d been given more freedom to cut loose or open them up to other possibilities.
Seven years and innumerable shows after the Janet Jackson hoax, Jones recorded another iconic hit by another idiosyncratic ’80s artist. Punchy and provocative, her cover of “Take Me With U” was a standout on Spin magazine’s 2009 Prince tribute Purplish Rain, showcasing what sounds like a completely different band. They drive it like they stole it, adding a sharp guitar motif to frame the action and a corkscrew baritone sax riff to push the song along at a frenzied clip. There’s nothing tentative about Jones’ performance, which is forceful and agile as she navigates the tricky rhythms, and her delivery of the line “you’re sheer perfection” nearly out-raunches the song’s auteur. It doesn’t have all the baggage of previous covers, but it stands out for the sheer joy they take in upending pop history.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the ’90s alt-rock band’s debut, a tender and sincere record that made the band famous while they grappled with tragedy.

New Miserable Experience

The guitarist who wrote the album’s biggest songs isn’t on the cover of Gin Blossoms’ New Miserable Experience, but the tour van he once poured sugar into the gas tank of is. By the time the band had finished their long, uncertain climb to the top of the charts, they’d fired Doug Hopkins, and he spent the rest of his short life rueing their success and decrying their betrayal. He’d founded the group and written half their album, including the two achingly personal hits that made them famous. They were profiting off of not only his work but his experiences—his suffering, fuck-ups, and humiliations.
New Miserable Experience went on to go quadruple platinum, and the album cover was just the last in the endless series of do-overs and recalibrations it took to make the record such a sleeper hit. A first pressing of the CD featured uninspired artwork of the Arizona desert, a nod to the band’s roots in Tempe, Arizona, a college town far off the music industry’s radar. The revised cover, while similarly junky, was at least more personal, reflecting the band’s faces in the windshield of the van in which they’d logged years on the road while they waited to see if their long-shot record deal with A&M would pan out.

By 1992, that deal was looking like a bust. A first attempt to record a full-length had failed, yielding instead only an EP of usable material, Up and Crumbling, which was released in 1991 to little notice. The sessions for New Miserable Experience had also been a debacle, largely because of Hopkins’ worsening alcoholism, and the meager sales and lackluster reviews that greeted the album upon release suggested A&M had funded another flop. But the label, likely sensing the opening created by the zeitgeist-shifting success of Nirvana a year earlier, remained committed to breaking their single “Hey Jealousy,” an incongruously upbeat romp about a fuckup drunkenly trying to reconcile with an ex under the guise of needing a place to crash. A&M commissioned three videos for the song, each with a vastly higher budget, before one finally passed muster with the gatekeepers at MTV.

Perhaps it was fitting that it took a few tries to make the “Hey Jealousy” video stick, since the song itself was a redo. The band had recorded it years prior on their 1989 independent release Dusted, in a far more shambolic form that belied their early debt to the Replacements, with a blitzing cadence and a basement punk band’s sense of rhythm. That they buried the song as track 9 on the back of the record suggests they hadn’t fully realized what a gem they’d written. New Miserable Experience producer John Hampton certainly did. Spruced up with a slower tempo that accentuated the euphoria of its riff and the sting of its lyrics, the song’s major-label makeover crunches, sparkles, and soars. It’s such an undeniable hit that you have to wonder why it took so much arm-twisting to make programmers play it.

New Miserable Experience beefed up the band’s guitars just enough that Gin Blossoms could pass as part of the early-’90s modern rock boom, although at its heart their sound was a throwback to the crystalline jangle of ’80s college rock, with a heartland tinge that felt old-fashioned in the wake of grunge. Their true differentiator was the blue-eyed lilt and unabashed softness of frontman Robin Wilson, an uncommonly tame singer during an era of furious, loud ones. Compared to the cage match roars of Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Chris Cornell, Wilson sang as if he was serenading a baby bird he was nursing back to health with an eye dropper.

Yet that tenderness, that wimpy sincerity, was key to the friction at the foundation of their sound: Their guitars were pretty and their vocals were sweet, but they sang about the kind of hard living mostly found in Charles Bukowski novels and old country songs. Ahead of acts like Third Eye Blind and Matchbox 20, Gin Blossoms had recognized a market for deceptively sordid minivan music. That lived-in, flaws-and-all realism elevated them over most of the flood of tame, light alternative and post-grunge bands that followed in their wake—bands like Tonic and Sister Hazel, which never had the same understanding of how a pleasant song can still capture shittiness and moral ambiguity.
The hard-fought breakthrough of “Hey Jealousy” is the kind of story that A&R loves to tell, one that reinforces the idea that with a little patience and persistence—and, yes, an expertly deployed promotional budget—a deserving song can find its audience. But there was far uglier behind-the-scenes work involved in launching Gin Blossoms, too. Midway through the sessions for New Miserable Experience, the label concluded that for the band to have any chance at functioning, Hopkins had to go. The group had been recording at Memphis’ famed Ardent Studios, where their idols Big Star had recorded their holy trinity of albums, and Hopkins was cracking under the pressure, drunkenly flubbing solos in futile pursuit of a perfect take. His tremens had become so violent he could no longer play sober.

Hopkins’ condition had made touring untenable, as well. “Doug was like having this big anvil you had to drag around with you,” Wilson later recalled. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we gotta go to the gig? Well, I gotta go pick up my big anvil.’ And then when the gig’s over, it’s like, ‘Oh shit, I can’t leave yet. I gotta go get my anvil.’” The specifics of Hopkins’ dismissal and its aftermath vary depending on the account, but they’re all ugly. The feud between the guitarist and his former bandmates played out in public; once Hopkins was kicked out of a Tempe club for punching Wilson in the face. In the detail most likely to cast the band as villains, they pressured Hopkins to sign away a chunk of his publishing royalties to the guy they replaced him with. Hopkins needed the $15,000 or so they owed him, so he did. “I understand why they fired me,” he lamented in a 1992 interview, “but did they have to get so fucking cold and ruthless about it?”

The cruel ubiquity of “Hey Jealousy” tormented Hopkins, who was consumed by depression and resentment as the single flooded the airwaves. When he received a plaque in the mail after the song went gold, at first he hung it proudly—what musician doesn’t dream of a gold record?—but two weeks later he smashed it. The song itself, Hopkins insisted, he’d never cared about that much; he barely remembered writing it. That wasn’t the case, however, with the album’s follow-up single.

Another showcase for Hopkins’ vividly dejected storytelling, “Found Out About You” didn’t disguise its melancholy behind sugar rush guitars. A chronicle of being utterly wrecked by a philandering girlfriend, its anguish was front and center, alongside a foreboding churn to match the paranoia of its whispered rumors and nagging thoughts. In an echo of “Hey Jealousy,” “Found Out About You” also includes an uninvited visit to an ex’s place, but this time the scene plays out not as romantic comedy but horror: “You know it’s all I think about/I write your name, drive past your house/Your boyfriend’s over, I watch the lights go out.” Hopkins was proud of the song and had dreamed it could be a hit, but not under these circumstances. Any further success for his old bandmates was just more salt in the wound.

In December 1993, just as “Found Out About You” was taking hold on the radio, Hopkins bought a gun and killed himself. His family had understood he was nearing the end—both his mother and sister had used their last visits with him to say goodbye—but his former bandmates would never have the chance to make peace with him. He died despising them. At his memorial service, a woman approached Wilson with a final message from Hopkins: He wanted the band to know it was him who’d poured sugar into their gas tank.

The band didn’t talk about it much at the time, but the guilt and the grief must have been unbearable. Their success would always be shadowed by Faustian reminders of their loss. It couldn’t have helped, either, that so many of Hopkins’ songs were about the very addiction that killed him. He foreshadowed the end within the first lines of New Miserable Experience’s opener, “Lost Horizons”: “I’ll drink enough of anything to make this world look new again/Drunk, drunk, drunk in the gardens and graves.” Those are heavy words to sing night after night.

Hopkins hadn’t been Gin Blossoms’ only songwriter, and they proved that they could write hits without him—maybe not smashes, but solid hits. Wilson and guitarist Jesse Valenzuela drafted “Until I Fall Away,” a wistful ballad soothed by blissful guitars, while Wilson penned the radiant “Allison Road,” whose sunny jangle was the album’s most explicit callback to early R.E.M. Both deftly balanced bubblegum and pathos, the work of songwriters with a deep understanding of how to make a pop song stick without cloying. But on their 1996 follow-up album Congratulations I’m Sorry, its title a nod to the circumstances of their success, it was clear they were working around the absence of their ace. Where the great songs were supposed to be, there were merely good ones.

Gin Blossoms broke up shortly after, in part to belatedly process the shock of everything they’d been through. Then they got back to it. Since regrouping around the turn of the century, they’ve carried on as a workhorse touring act, sharing ’90s nostalgia packages with bands like Everclear and Sugar Ray and headlining county fairs and gatherings like Canton, Ohio’s Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Festival Ribs Burnoff or the Mid-South Great Steak Cookoff at Southland Park Gaming and Racing—wherever masses are charring meat outdoors, there’s a chance Gin Blossoms could be there. It’s not a bad living, really. There are acts with bigger audiences, greater stature, and more recent hits, but in truth the average working band would envy playing for dependable, appreciative crowds as consistently as Gin Blossoms still do.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the band’s gutting backstory—aside from the sheer, gobstopping sadness of it all—is how divorced it is from the popular notion of the group. These days the band will talk about Hopkins with any journalist who asks, but no matter how many times or how vividly it’s told, his story never sticks: Every article about his death always presents it as new information, a lurid piece of trivia you never knew about an act you never thought much about. It’s as if the bitter details cut too harshly against their docile image to become lore. If listeners rarely consider them as a tragic band, it’s because it’s much more gratifying to think of them how they’re most widely known—as just the Gin Blossoms, a group unburdened by expectations of coolness or relevance, whose meek demeanor disguises some undeniable riffs, and whose signature earworms, despite decades of exposure, somehow never seem to burn out. Some bands are defined by their tragedies. Others simply carry on in spite of them.
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The expanded reissues of albums from R.E.M.'s I.R.S. years continue, as the brilliant follow-up to Murmur is augmented with a 1984 live show.

Reckoning [Deluxe Edition]

Given their vast and varied catalog, it's sometimes easier to imagine R.E.M. as a discography than to picture them as a flesh-and-blood band. Ironically, it may be R.E.M.'s insistence upon operating as a fully democratic entity that has allowed them to shapeshift so completely and convincingly. Whether crafting a subdued folk song or an over-the-top glam rock stomper, R.E.M. have always embraced their chosen approach completely, even if it means former drummer Bill Berry laying low for an acoustic number or singer Michael Stipe handing off a lead vocal to bassist Mike Mills. On their sophomore LP, Reckoning, those polymorphous tendencies find root as palpable, electrifying, yet-unexplored potential. And with this aptly named reissue, Reckoning finally gets the "Deluxe" treatment (and much-needed remaster) that it deserves.
This comes as no surprise; the "Deluxe" reissue of the band's debut full-length, Murmur, was revelatory, breathing astonishing new life into a 25-five-year-old album. Greg Calbi's expert remastering job cleaned up the album's notoriously murky sonics and revealed previously unheard detail and force.  This newfound clarity made Murmur seem much more purposeful, lifting the proverbial veil on an album made by record nerds who understood the common ground between the Soft Boys, Gang of Four, and the Velvet Underground. Reckoning couples the energy of Murmur with the experience of a group that has spent a few years touring and recording, documenting that crucial moment when a band's ideas and ambitions are overtaken by the unique chemistry of its players.
Finally, with this remaster, "Harborcoat" makes for a fittingly explosive opener. Many of the best songs on Reckoning follow the formula set forth on this debut track: a methodical verse followed by a sly turnaround into a cathartic chorus. Bill Berry's drum parts are at times virtually indistinguishable from song to song, and Michael Stipe tends to sing verses and choruses in the same respective registers. But Reckoning is far from formulaic-- instead, it is host to a kind of determined minimalism, each song building via subtle variations in performance and instrumentation. "Discipline" is not a word that gets thrown around a lot when discussing rock music, but it is key to Reckoning's success.
Case in point: As with countless songs written before and after it, "So. Central Rain" takes up the simple phrase "I'm sorry" as its chorus. But the combination of Stipe's strong-yet-unmistakably-fragile voice, Berry's nervous drumming, and the melodic interplay of Mills' bass and Peter Buck's guitar imbue these well-worn words with remarkable force and meaning. For all the arty, pretentious gestures the band was given to, Reckoning shows that they were not afraid to embrace the universal, to transfigure clichés rather than ham-fistedly avoiding them (see also "Everybody Hurts").
As with its predecessor, Reckoning finds R.E.M. touching upon different styles while working within a fairly consistent aesthetic. The latter half veers a bit towards Americana, without sacrificing any of the momentum built over the album's stunning opening tracks. Slight embellishments go a long way towards highlighting the band's versatility-- a propulsive piano line in "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" elevates the homespun whimsy of Stipe's voice, and hand percussion on "Time After Time (Annelise)" hints at the more understated turn the band would take with Fables of the Reconstruction.
The live disc included in this reissue (a 1984 performance at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom) demonstrates how well these songs work without any such production flourishes. While the raw energy of the live show included in the Murmur reissue is toned down a bit, it is fascinating to hear the band grow more sure-footed in both performance and arrangements. It is also interesting to hear how the band's live approach seems to have been absorbed back into their studio recordings; Stipe's trademark live vocal tics are present throughout Reckoning.
Declaring Reckoning to be R.E.M.'s "best" album sells short just how many different kinds of great albums R.E.M. have released. But, more so than any other R.E.M. record, Reckoning is unified and energized by the very restlessness that has driven the band to explore so many different ideas and identities. It is this paradoxical engine of transparency and mystery that has made the band so unique, regardless of the particular approach they choose to take for a given record. Any way you look at it, this is R.E.M.


With tightly packed bars and adaptable, uncanny flows, the Atlanta rapper’s latest is precise and loose at the same time. Pi’erre Bourne and Coupe’s beats are showcases for his originality.

Rich Shooter

Many of the game-changing Atlanta rappers who’ve emerged in a post-Gucci Mane world have traced a similar career arc: Future, Young Thug, and 21 Savage each stood out as distinctive voices, with unpredictable flows and endless mixtape tracklists that gradually distilled into a more chart-friendly container over time. Atlanta’s younger generation, from Lil Baby to Lil Keed, owe their existence to the experimentation of their elders, but many of the city’s newer stars have adapted to a mainstream pop vernacular more quickly. Young Nudy stands out in this regard: He’s remained singularly committed to himself, uninterested in making playlist-baiting earworms, and frequently eschewing features where other rising artists thirst for them.
Between more chart-oriented, guest-focused albums like Sli’merre and Dr. EV4L, he’s stood alone on projects like Anyways and Faded in the Booth. In an era when artists so often speak of hip-hop as a stepping stone to larger stardom, Nudy looks more like a rapper’s rapper, primarily a lyricist and vocalist, despite existing in a subgenre that’s frequently misconstrued as somehow anti-lyrical or “post verbal.” While other rappers are thinking in singles and playlists, Nudy still paints in bars and mixtapes. His delivery is more like a palette or moodboard than a clear transmission, a spectrum of emotions that come through in the way he compresses, stretches, and shapes his words.
At times his voice is incredibly directed and driven, at others closer to what skeptics might decry as mumbling. But that occasionally more restrained, less enunciated register gives him a kind of mystique: a quiet crooner with a hat tipped down low. He regularly credits 21 Savage as a formative stylistic influence, and there’s an obvious lineage, but Nudy’s bars are considerably more dense, and the sometimes quieter register forces you to pay attention. Tracks like “Battlefield” and “Bodies on Bodies” showcase his talent for intricate, tightly packed bars, delivering multiple mini-rhymes within a single rhyme in a ping-ponging, sing-song flow. He’s precise and loose at the same time, unloading words composed to piggyback off one another yet energized and organic enough to feel improvised.
Nudy is the kind of rapper who benefits from close collaboration with regular producers—he needs artists who know him and trust his instincts, rather than skewing to formulas or presets. The beats on Rich Shooter are largely supplied by Pi’erre Bourne and Coupe, but the circle also includes frequent collaborators 20Rocket and Mojo Krazy, as well as jetsonmade, the beatmaker behind the familiar drum patterns of most of DaBaby’s hits. Though Pi’erre Bourne has become an auteur in his own right, he and Nudy are a perfectly matched team, both with a sound that’s boundary-pushing but still accessible. Bourne’s beats are like subtle ensembles, an automated backing band that enhances the ambience but never overwhelms it. The Future-assisted “Trap Shit” is built around a wiry high-pitched synth line, but beneath it lie inscrutable layers of feedback and noise, cradling the beat like barbed wire.
Coupe-produced tracks like “How They Label Me” and “Bodies on Bodies” weave in gentle strums and background riffs, but the guitar gives Nudy’s aching verses a gentle bluesy flavor rather than pushing them into rap-rock territory. Though the lyrics are often dark and painful, Nudy’s voice has a lightness that’s augmented by his fondness for softer instrumental elements, which at times almost approach indie pop, like the gliding synths of “I Can’t Change” and gentle keys and clean guitar line of “Addicted.” Though he takes shades of horrorcore from 21 Savage as well, Nudy is more than capable of sillier modes. “How I Eat” sees him slide into a squeaky, helium-addled flow, while “Green Bean” has a vaguely chiptune-like beat.
Nudy’s fond of contrasts and subtly ironic juxtapositions, like “We Do Not Give Up,” which jolts you to attention with a round of machine gun fire before breaking off into a Future-like tropical pop number that’s nonetheless a heavy story of beef turned violent and comrades locked up. The album’s features are evenly split between Nudy’s ATL elders—Peewee Longway, Gucci Mane, Future—and his own peers he wants to put on, like 21 Lil Harold, 2FeetBino, Cristo4L, and 4L Quan. Listen to a run of Nudy’s solo tracks and you’ll become accustomed to residing in his universe; the guest appearances remind you how unique and uncanny he is, an aerosol-huffing space alien compared to the deeper and more classical drawls of Peewee and Gucci. As the title of “Can’t Clone Me” puts it bluntly, while Young Nudy might share stylistic DNA with the godfathers of Atlanta trap, he’s a true original, evolving too quickly to ever copy.

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The Atlanta label home to Migos and Lil Yachty overstuffs their new compilation with lackluster raps from stars who seem to be stuck in a loop.

Various Artists: Control the Streets, Volume 2

Control the Streets, Volume 2

Quality Control, the label that brought us Migos, Lil Yachty, City Girls, and Lil Baby, is looking to reassert its authority. A lot has happened since they dropped the first Control the Streets in 2017. That was the year Culture swept America and Yachty became a brand. On Vol. 1, the title seemed like a commandment: The label was planting its flag and asserting its dominance. With Vol. 2, it sounds more like an attempt at crowd control, like trying to wrangle a disinterested mob.
It doesn’t help that Quality Control’s once-promising roster has mostly scattered to the winds. After following up their biggest-ever album with a bloated, underwritten snoozer, Migos split for three bad-to-mediocre solo albums between October of last year and February of this one. Lil Yachty was brainwashed by the Funk Flexes of the world into abandoning melody and joining the cypher. The wave that City Girls were riding in the aftermath of Drake’s massive hit “In My Feelings” died down; one member is currently serving a two-year sentence for credit card fraud and the other has come under fire for homophobia. The label’s brightest remaining prospect, Lil Baby, is still trying to prove he doesn’t sound like a one-dimensional Young Thug clone.
As a result, the sequel has the reek of desperation. Migos are trapped in a loop: They keep doing and saying the same things, recycling their flows, winding up in the same situations. “Everybody know that I’m trappin’/Everybody know that I’m gettin’ it,” Quavo raps on “Stripper Bowl,” and that’s the problem. Yachty raps exclusively about getting blowjobs and how broke his haters are. Which is fine, but does he have to sound so lifeless? Everyone on the roster suffers the same problem; their raps are completely unimaginative. The Migos party trick of constantly rearranging their flows is no longer an effective diversion.
The most colorful performances are delivered by outsiders: Megan Thee Stallion takes City Girls’ finesse rap to the next level on “Pastor,” comparing the money she squeezes out of her suitors to paying tithes. Tee Grizzley, with the home court advantage (on a Helluva beat that sounds absolutely Detroit), dunks on Yachty again in a rematch. On the “Intro,” Gucci Mane outshines the four QC stars, claiming he signed Hoodrich Pablo Juan just because he had designer drugs. DaBaby and Gunna take turns showing Offset up; Young Thug is like a peacock amid pigeons.
But of course, on an all-star project spanning 36 tracks, something or other is bound to work. It’s largely well-produced, thanks to an assemblance of elite talent, including Metro Boomin, Southside, Pi’erre Bourne. Murda Beatz, Wheezy, Mustard, Tay Keith, and many others. There are a couple of good performances here and there, but no choice cuts, just songs left on the cutting room floor during sessions for recent solo albums and filler tracks from lower-ranking artists on the QC roster. The longer the comp goes on, the more obvious it becomes that nothing is happening.


The Bronx-based Dominican crew offer a more lighthearted take on the drill sound with their debut EP.

Sie7etr3 EP

Drill music is having a moment in New York City. Brooklyn’s Sheff G, Fivio Foreign, and the late Pop Smoke pulled beats from up-and-coming UK producers such as 808Melo and AXL Beats to capture the sounds of the streets far from the borough’s third-wave coffee and artisanal mayo shops. But uptown in the Bronx—light years away in the NYC universe—a crew of Dominican rappers have put their own spin on the genre defined by urban grit and grime.
Spitting Spanish flows over sparse beats from Latin producers, the Sie7etr3 crew’s take on drill is decidedly more light-hearted than their forebears in Chicago or their peers in Brooklyn. They still shoot low-budget crew videos on the block, and they’re certainly not immune to gangster tropes, but they’re also more likely to be smiling than mean-mugging, and have been known to brandish Nerf guns in place of Glock 9s. The 8-track Sie7etr3 EP is a succinct intro into the world of its namesake E 173rd St, and very likely the most danceable drill music you’ll ever hear.
Those buoyant rhythms are the most compelling element of Sie7etr3’s music. The synthetic horns and bells on tracks like “Colombiana” and “Brazilera” lend the productions an inherently Latin flair, giving them a loose sense of movement you won’t find in Chicago or London. Sie7etr3 is new enough that their style is still evolving; early songs like “Wini” and “Wili” evoked a shadowy mood belied by all the smiling in their videos, but newer tracks like the opener “Kili” display a newfound refinement that hints at untapped potential.
Posse cut “Tili” stands out as the EP’s strongest, featuring four crew members flexing their individual skills and styles over a bouncy piano melody that represents the crew’s most sophisticated production to date. And while the group’s de facto leader Chucky73 holds down the closing verse, it’s Dglo73 who shines here, showing off his range as both an AutoTune crooner and a rapper. Sie7etr3 is essentially a showcase for the budding label of the same name, but also a vehicle for Chucky and Fetti031, its two most evolved lyricists. Both have deep, compelling voices. But while Fetti’s monotone drone perfectly suits the medium of drill, Chucky’s limber flow and lyricism hints at greater potential as an MC, using the repetitive drill beats as a platform to show off his nimble-tongued delivery.
Latin trap’s biggest stars—Bad Bunny, Ozuna, Anuel AA—all hail from Puerto Rico, but the style was pioneered uptown in New York’s clubs, by Dominicans, which makes Sie7etr3’s viral successes that much more satisfying.  And as strong as it is, the Sie7etr3 EP offers only a glimpse of the crew’s potential, a tasting platter of the hip-hop the Bronx is serving up in the new decade. There are certainly better rappers, in English or Spanish, but you would be hard-pressed to find a crew having more fun.


Mixing metal and noise with ritualistic howls, the Indonesian duo’s seventh album is a thrilling, at times ecstatic serenade to the collapse of civilization.

Alkisah

The end of the world has always lurked in Senyawa’s explosive mix of metallic bombast, ritualistic howls, and industrial-strength clamor. But the seventh album from this Indonesian duo is genuinely apocalyptic. Alkisah—which means “Once Upon a Time”—tells a linear story of Armageddon, from civilizational collapse to failed attempts at rebuilding to a final, mass-destruction doomsday. As singer Rully Shabara barks out mushroom clouds and instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi hammers heavy beats and heavier chords, using tools he built himself, everything seems to crash and implode around them, as convincingly cataclysmic as the best CGI blockbusters.
Yet somehow Alkisah is nowhere near morose. The constant pressure in the duo’s playing—every note here feels like it has to happen as soon as possible—mines the tension of global emergency. As a result, the music’s dark detonations are more likely to keep you on the edge of your seat than sink you into gloom. In many spots, the duo sounds genuinely ecstatic: The pummeling rhythms of “Menuju Muara” reach exertion-induced euphoria; “Alkisah I” wrings epiphany from one repeated chord; and closer “Klimat” paints judgement day as a frenetic uprising of earthquakes and prayers. For Senyawa, the world has to end with a bang, not a whimper.
Such explosions come from the musical friction between Shabara and Suryadi. The band’s name means “chemical compound,” and many styles interact throughout their songs (no wonder 44 different labels decided that Alkisah fit their catalogs). It’s as if they’re two radioactive elements dumped into a beaker, causing a push-and-pull that resists one-person dominance. This stick-rubbing aura evokes Japanese prog-punks Ruins, grindaholic noise-rockers Lighting Bolt, and Beijing-based low-end riders Gong Gong Gong. But their strongest parallel is NYC post-punk pioneers Suicide, who similarly mixed invented instruments—namely Martin Rev’s keyboard/drum hybrid—with intense singing and ominous theatrics, drawing on musical antecdents while steadfastly standing outside them.
Senyawa create a similar thrill, triggering the feeling that you’ve heard these sounds before but never imagined them put together this way. Of all the genres the duo taps into, the forest-shaking doom of heavy metal is most responsible for giving the music its gravity. That’s especially true when things get lower and slower, as in “Istana,” which stretches howls across Sunn O)))-worthy bass rumbles, and “Kabau,” a meditative mesh of chords that comes off like a translated Metallica ballad. Lyrically, the latter track has a cut-and-paste quality, composed out of ancient proverbs from the West Sumatran language of Minang. But in action, the song flows smoothly upward, like a river scaling a mountain.
Grandiose images like that are easy to imagine when listening to Alkisah. Its rhapsodic tones and end-times themes suggest the duo is gravely serious. But Senyawa are not averse to humor—a few moments here indulge in over-the-top absurdity—and their narrative about humanity’s evaporation has an oddly hopeful bent, as if the end of civilization might finally unlock something greater than all of us. Perhaps that’s a futile hope, but when couched in the exhilarating waves of Alkisah, Senyawa make it actually sound possible.

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Once united in their status as industry misfits, the four-man supergroup has reassembled for a fan-service album that hinges upon a certain taste for bars.

The Last Ride

If you were listening to rap in 1996, you may have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Cesare Borgia. On “B.I.B.L.E. (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth),” the gobsmacking finale of Liquid Swords, Killah Priest cited the Valencian nobleman as the subject of a centuries-old hoax: “The white image of Christ is really Cesare Borgia/And uh, the second son of Pope Alexander,” he affirmed. On “Nature of the Threat,” an eight-minute secret-history lesson from his cult debut Soul on Ice, Ras Kass spouted a competing theory that Constantine I “commissioned Michelangelo to paint white pictures of Jesus/He used his aunt, uncle, and nephew.” By 1999, setting aside doctrinal differences, the two rappers had joined forces with Kurupt and Canibus—themselves hyper-literate occupants of hip-hop’s seedier outskirts—and announced HRSMN, a supergroup project based on Revelation’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Like Slaughterhouse a decade later, the HRSMN were united in their status as industry misfits. The group promised deliverance for listeners wary of Y2K armageddon and R&B-inflected crossovers—but a completed album was shelved and soon attained mythic status on rap message boards, Detox for the tinfoil hat crowd. Rumors of a reunion effort eventually petered out, and the HRSMN resumed erratic solo careers. But sometimes the arc of history bends toward conspiracy theories. Facing rising sea levels, a once-in-a-century pandemic, and an actual plague of locusts, the HRSMN has reassembled, incredibly, for The Last Ride. For any listeners still craving doomsday visions relayed in multisyllabic rhyme schemes, this record may be the ultimate fan service. Does Ras Kass rhyme “remarkable” with “unmarketable”? Yes! Does Canibus rhyme “give me space” with “Iditarod race”? Of course, he does! Is there a song about centaurs? You bet! Does Killah Priest insinuate that COVID-19 was a man-made bio-weapon? As surely as the pope is Catholic.
Appreciation of The Last Ride hinges upon a certain taste for bars. We’re talking bars like, “I smell the blood like Nosferatu/Inhaling visible death like CO2”; and like, “You somebody that I’m dying to meet/So I can spread your body parts on the street.” The songs coalesce around broad themes, which discourages the sort of free-associative punchline barrage you might find on Royce da 5’9 albums. Still, it’s curious to ponder that The Last Ride’s mishmash of disjointed pop-culture references, battle rhymes, and big words used for the sake of big words was once considered the apex of hardcore lyricism. It’s so over-the-top, so eager-to-please, that when Ras Kass lays a brick like, “Undefeated like the internet… Tossin’ salad with the vinaigrette/I get arugula with the intellect/Introspect, from where the street code and Islam intersect,” you want to pat him on the back and give him a gold star anyway.
An album comprised of five-and-a-half-minute eschatological posse cuts has every reason to be laborious. But Killah Priest floats over the drum patterns with his imperious preacher man flow, and Canibus packs more snarling, knotty verbiage into a few bars than most rappers do in their careers. The production is better than it needs to be, even if there’s hardly anything on The Last Ride resembling a melody. Over a rugged piano loop, “Centaurs” (they’re horsemen, get it?) has a pass-the-mic verve you only get from MCs eager to outdo one another; the understated snare on “Champion” lends the air of a schoolyard cipher. The quartet’s tales of relationship woe make “Love N War” a bit of a wild card, but the “Love Is a Battlefield” interpolation actually goes hard.
Ironically, it’s the supergroup conceit that holds the HRSMN back. What’s engrossing about Soul on Ice and Heavy Mental is how thoroughly they excavate their subjects’ beautiful, twisted minds; you could lock four geniuses in a room, but together they’d never create anything as vibrantly gnarled as Tha Streetz Iz a Mutha. The Last Ride is like one of those busy Renaissance paintings with a dozen events unfolding at once, heaps of cataclysmic images stacked on top of each other, entire songs’ worth of ideas packed into 16-bar sprints: “Apocalips Now” finds the MCs groping around for endless synonyms, yielding something akin to JAY-Z’s “Monster” verse. Kurupt is particularly bad in this setting—left adrift by the spacey percussion on “Morticians,” he resorts to a haranguing delivery and rhymes “elegant” with “elephant.”
It goes without saying that conspiracy theories carry a different weight than they did during the HRSMN’s heyday. When Ras Kass said AIDS was man-made in ’96, it was a barbed reaction to the U.S government’s indifference toward a virus ravaging poor communities; trafficking in COVID-19 lab-leak conspiracies lets those same institutions off the hook. But in the context of the mid-’90s—decades before alt-right podcasters could whisper in the president’s ear—Ras Kass and Killah Priest were at once offbeat entertainers and valiant soothsayers, conscious not only of ancient history but the ways in which that history was still playing out. They were young men immersed in scripture and civil rights texts, lavished with record deals for their ability to hold forth. Who could say that theirs wasn’t rare, precious knowledge?
The Last Ride should have been an event album—had it arrived 20 years ago, it might have featured appearances from GZA and Wyclef instead of Planet Asia and Wais P. That there was ever demand for this record points to a time when the major label rap landscape was weirder and wordier. But this is what you wish your favorite over-the-hill rappers would do in 2021: book studio time with a few like-minded vets and let it rip. If there’s a quaintness about lyrical vigilantes banding together against the onslaught of wack MCs, it’s because that battle was either lost or deemed irrelevant ages ago. But the HRSMN never conceded.

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The Chicago rapper’s collaborative album with Hit-Boy is confident and playful, balancing her lyrical prowess with more vulnerable, R&B-influenced material.

Hitgirl

Dreezy has always been a hard grafter with formidable potential. Arriving to the mic with authoritative braggadocio, vivid lyricism, and playful puns, her serrated raps and effortless wit reflected her earlier years studying poetry. Whether it’s her oft-celebrated feature on Hitmaka’s “Thot Box” remix, the reflexive “Spar,” or her razor-sharp loosie “Beatbox Bday Freestyle,” her true-to-form technicalities as a lyricist have granted her access to writing sessions with J. Cole and Kanye West. Still, it hasn’t all come easy, and she’s faced obstacles cultivating those moments of buzz into a holistic breakthrough. “Body,” Dreezy’s 2016 duet with Jeremih and her first song to reach the Hot 100, showcased her singing—elevating her profile while sidelining her rap talent. She’s attempted to rectify that in recent years, but with an inconsistent release schedule and few standalone moments, she never quite found her stride in the mainstream.
Her latest pivot aligns her with quintessential hip-hop producer Hit-Boy, known for sparking much-needed life into Nas’ latter-day discography. Their 10-track collaborative album, HITGIRL, marks Dreezy’s first as a newly independent artist. Big Dreez believes in the “hit girl” moniker wholeheartedly, declaring herself a “top five” woman in rap (and not five) across the menacing opener “They Not Ready.” Seamlessly slithering in and out of an array of flow patterns across three minutes, Dreezy’s sometimes subdued but foreboding cadence makes for a rousing listen. Although she’s mighty here, the faster flow wedged into short spells across her first and second verses leaves more to be desired.
Since her first viral release in 2014, a take on “Chiraq,” Dreezy has embodied the city that raised her. Following the same approach of personifying the city and tributing it, she throws “another one up for the South Side” on “Vibez.” Here, she draws upon both the good and the bad in a matter-of-fact drawl. “I’m from that city where catchin’ a body a way to get famous,” she warns on “Sliders.” This isn’t an admission made in shame but a vehicle to acknowledge her growth. It’s these moments of transparency that illuminate where exactly Dreezy’s ambition originates.
When she addresses romance and relationships, Dreezy speaks openly about her position and circumstances both in and out of the booth. Hit-Boy’s production throughout speaks to the pair’s growing synergy. On “Easy,” Dreezy’s vivacious delivery blossoms as she makes it known that she’s not afraid of men and she’ll stand beside peers of any gender and call out those who’ve wronged her. It’s a poignant display of duality that women such as Lil’ Kim and Trina have never shied away from: combating sexism in rap and romance alike as they maneuver across, around, or over men to achieve what they want. As she echoes that sentiment, Dreezy extends a bold lineage.
Hit-Boy’s years of experience with R&B titans (Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige) make him an ideal collaborator to draw out Dreezy’s melodic side. Both vulnerable yet authoritative, “21 Questions” evokes joy and innocence. “What if yo’ pops think I’m a thot? And mama says that she hate me?” she asks. Hit-Boy’s softer drums and synths allow the questions and what-ifs breathing room; the production drifts alongside Dreezy’s slackened flow as she siphons off self-doubt. She’s more than capable of holding her own in this lane of thoughtful, R&B-imbued hip-hop—a fact highlighted by a lifeless-sounding repeat appearance from Jeremih on “In Touch” that fails to muster the animated spirit of his 2010s features.
HITGIRL exemplifies a complimentary collaborative effort between a seismic producer and a seasoned rapper. Dreezy is able to experiment in sound, presenting R&B as another vehicle for her talent, but by no means her whole offering. Hit-Boy’s soundscapes are still enthralling a decade into his career and on HITGIRL, he provides something Dreezy previously lacked: a consistent instrumental canvas. Hungry for new approaches, Dreezy bets big on her ongoing quest for evolution.


Filtered through warped hip-hop beats and garbled samples, Damon McMahon’s self-produced sixth album is a characteristically oblique apocalypse tale about living for today.

Death Jokes

Amen Dunes’ music is persuasive, but it’s not always clear what it’s trying to persuade you of. Since the release of his confrontationally noisy debut album, DIA, 15 years ago, Damon McMahon has continually refined the remit of his sound—shaving away the haze, juicing the elements drawn from pop and classic rock—but kept the narratives relatively oblique. Listening to his last album, 2018’s Freedom, felt a little like trying to read a Great American Novel by holding it up to a reflecting pool: ideas about loss and familial ties cut through, even if entire sentences were tough to string together. It was a personal record, but rarely a clarifying one; you got the sense that McMahon would rather keep his lyrics obscure than boil down his ideas into something digestible.
The ideas on Death Jokes, his self-produced sixth album, are clearer. He is blunter and more forceful with specific meaning on this album than ever. Broadly, it is an apocalypse tale, in which humanity’s final moments on Earth are plagued by the same ills that have stalked us for centuries: hatred, greed, puritanism. Misunderstanding is a recurring theme, as is loneliness, specifically the kind that arises when the state fails to take care of its citizens. For all this pessimism, though, McMahon’s take on life, which he returns to again and again on Death Jokes, is simple and optimistic: “Some day we lose it/So use it.”
These ideas are filtered through warped hip-hop and rave beats, although the peculiarities of McMahon’s phrasing and melodies—his music is always surging or undulating, rarely taking a streamlined route—mean that Death Jokes sounds quintessentially Amen Dunes. Whether bleating over a sputtering 909 on the Lil Peep-inspired “Rugby Child” or singing an electro-reggae lullaby on “Purple Land,” McMahon is at a point in his career where he could never be mistaken for anyone else, and although Death Jokes is filled with odd details, like the minimal techno interlude “Predator” or the garbled lo-fi samples at the end of “Boys,” the muscular melodic lines that emerged on Freedom and 2014’s Love still come through.
That connection with the rest of McMahon’s music is welcome, because Death Jokes can be hard to parse, and would seem hammily provocative in the wrong light. It opens with a sample of a Woody Allen joke, and on the stunning, nine-minute penultimate track “Round the World,” essentially the final song before a track made entirely of samples, he sings about kids “getting stoned/On their phones/They’re so lonely and don’t know why.” But McMahon never seems like he’s tut-tutting or finger-wagging so much as appealing for forgiveness and generosity. On “Mary Anne,” a pastoral country ballad addressed to one of the women who sexually abused him as a child, he sounds compassionate (“In Purgatory, we both got lost/When we meet again, we will catch up love”) but terse (“I know you say who we are is the same/Well we aren’t the same.”) Other songs, like “Boys” and “Rugby Child,” are portraits of violent people driven by forces they can’t fully control. It doesn’t feel like McMahon is exalting victimhood, or condemning some vague concept of “cancel culture,” as much as trying to find shades of gray in an increasingly black-and-white world.
He says as much on “Round the World,” a fraying epic that blooms from resolute pessimism about society’s failings into a song that’s maybe not hopeful, but at least helpful. Its lyrics—about greedy strivers and curious old friends and mystical piano geniuses—feel like they were written by an old-timer parked at the pub, offering their stories to anyone willing to listen. And as anyone who’s had their ears chewed by an old-timer at the pub knows, there’s generally a kernel of wisdom nestled among the cantankerousness. On “Round the World,” it’s a simple maxim for living out the end of your days: “Here’s to keeping it old fashioned/You can skip your next life/When it’s all gone, you’re gonna wish you had some old fashioned around.” Put it on your tombstone—wouldn’t that be a laugh?


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 an underappreciated icon of new wave and his best album, a clinic in lean, sardonic, emotive pop songwriting.

Squeezing Out Sparks

There was a time when Graham Parker was hotly tipped to become a household name. This was the mid-’70s, after Bruce Springsteen had released Born to Run and every record executive under the sun was on the lookout for the next charismatic, revved-up folkie possessing a sizable vocabulary and the true spirit of rock‘n’roll. Parker fit this bill, sort of. He was spindly with a thinning hairline, archetypically British, and never took off his shades, which made him appear more nearsighted than cool. But he was also great. His dual 1976 releases, Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment, heralded the emergence of a street-tough soul singer with genuine literary chops. Here was a gas station attendant from the miraculously named working-class London exurb Deepcut, channeling the mystic-reverie of early Van Morrison and the comically embittered broadsides of Highway 61 Revisited-era Bob Dylan. Graham Parker was a force of nature.
Alongside his extraordinary backing band the Rumour, Parker was embedded in England’s pub rock scene, which set the template for British punk by stripping down and souping up the garage and folk rock of the ’60s—a functional bridge between the Faces and the Sex Pistols. He was endlessly compared to his ascendant contemporary Elvis Costello, with whom he shared an acidic wit and a simmering rage. If you had asked a knowledgeable fan or clued-in critic in 1979 whether Parker or Costello would have the more notable career over the long term, the wagering would have been 50-50 in either direction.
With the enthusiastic backing of a new label Arista and featuring the production of industry legend Jack Nitzsche, Parker’s fourth album, Squeezing Out Sparks, was a conscious attempt to consolidate his lofty critical reputation into a commensurate audience. Featuring a harder sound calculated to emphasize his connection to punk, the finished product seemingly succeeded by any conceivable metric. It was 10 lean and sardonic songs performed with razor’s-edge menace over 35 minutes, which back-burnered Parker’s reputation as a traditionalist and situated him at the head of rock’s Angry Young Man club.
It’s difficult to talk about Squeezing Out Sparks without first discussing the elephant in the room. “You Can’t Be Too Strong” is the kind of song you hear once and know you’ll never forget, and you definitely don’t know how to feel about that. This might be because you find the song deeply moving, or strange and mysterious, or strongly compelling or vaguely reprehensible; it might very well be any two or three of those options operating in tandem. Following the fireworks of the album's opening salvo, it’s stripped down and noir-blue: four verses of sliding doors and strange imagery landing on the achingly beautiful and frustratingly non-committal title refrain. It’s a song about abortion—or at least an abortion—an issue area where the cultural needle skips off the disc and the room fills with white noise. It looms over the album’s legacy like a Rorschach test.
There is a lot happening in “You Can’t Be Too Strong.” There is bracing language, some of which verges on Cronenberg-esque body horror: “The doctor gets nervous/Completing the service/He’s all rubber gloves and no head.” There is palpable, almost ecstatic relief: “I ain’t gonna to cry/I’m gonna rejoice!” And there is pained contemplation of what might have been: “Don’t give it a name/Don’t give it a place/Don’t give it a chance/It’s lucky, in a way.” What is not conveyed over the song's runtime is any clear conception of Parker’s own views on the matter. Like the fragmented story songs of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, “You Can’t Be Too Strong” seems to regard the termination of an unwanted pregnancy through a prism of evolving temperaments and perspectives, none given any particular weight over the other.
The chorus furthers this slippery game: Does Parker mean to say that life is a bitter furnace and no amount of armor is too much to endure it? Or does he mean: Yes, life is hard and you must be tough but not so tough that you might harm something innocent in your zeal for self-preservation? I’ve been listening to the song for two decades and I still can’t decide. I suspect he wasn’t sure himself. With the debate over reproductive rights reaching its polarizing zenith with the Supreme Court’s draconian ruling this summer, “You Can’t Be Too Strong” feels more resonant and disturbing than ever. For better or worse, few songs jangle the nerves quite so forcefully.
It's a bellwether for an LP that bristles with personal and political anxiety. The bracing and poignant opener “Discovering Japan” is all guilt-sick colonial-exploitation set to a killer riff, anticipating the Clash’s “Straight to Hell” by three years. “Local Girls'' is a poisoned confection anchored by a nagging hook landing someplace between “Under the Boardwalk” and “Under My Thumb.” Third track “Nobody Hurts You” ups the ante further still, with its escalating series of gag lines, half-issued threats, and general self-negation suggesting something like the Buzzcocks following a few more sessions of Freudian analysis than were absolutely necessary. Taken together it’s some of the most swaggering, riveting, catchy, and complex rock‘n’roll music ever issued.
As if punchdrunk from its own exertions, side one ends with “Passion Is No Ordinary Word,” a chugging bad-romance fantasia wed to a spiraling snakebite riff which warily backtracks from the every-aperture-open vulnerability of “You Can’t Be Too Strong” by claiming he was only kidding: “This is nothing else if not unreal/When I pretend to touch you/You pretend to feel.” It’s a great tune, but Parker as nihilist is totally unpersuasive; if anything, he cares too much. He's the bruised fallout from the collapse of hippie utopianism, a humanist confronted by an increasingly inhumane context. He won't get fooled again.
The second side is uniformly excellent, but it’s one of those LPs like Marquee Moon or Music From Big Pink where the level of bone-deep investment required of the first half almost inevitably renders everything that follows as an exhalation. “Saturday Nite Is Dead” is a deliriously funny bare-knuckle brawler that affectionately updates Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” with bad news. “Love Gets You Twisted” sounds like the Yardbirds and screws itself into a million different lyrical iterations on the titular conceit. But the closer “Don’t Get Excited” is ultimately perhaps the album’s most revealing moment with respect to Parker’s overarching temperament. An Irish goodbye to his own banquet, typified by if-you-don’t-love-me-then-I-don’t-care sentiments like “You try to reach a vital part of me/My attention span is dropping rapidly.” It’s one part J.D. Salinger and one part Johnny Paycheck, a strangely preemptive hedge on the brink of his own star turn. You can’t fire him—he quits.
Squeezing Out Sparks was so good that critics tripped over themselves with superlatives. It won 1979’s influential Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, prevailing over heavy hitters such as Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, and Costello’s Armed Forces. They were a great band making the right record at the right time—and then, nothing happened. Despite critical rhapsody and heavy promotion Sparks reached only No. 18 on the UK album charts and topped out at No. 40 on the U.S. Top 40.
Since then, Parker’s career has been a series of fits and stops. He’s made many records for many labels, some brilliant, some lackadaisical, but none of them less than interesting. Always a treasured favorite of influential fans, Parker has turned up in strange places, such as the time when Judd Apatow made him the MacGuffin for his 2012 mid-life crisis opus This Is 40. Apatow’s summation of Parker’s casting is both telling and poignant: “I knew I needed somebody who would be comfortable being in a movie playing someone who was having a lot of problems selling records.” Parker lives in upstate New York and still plays a killer live show. The enigma of his stalled trajectory lingers somewhat bitterly amongst his diehard fans, but in retrospect, it’s easy to understand.
As popular music, politics, and advertising began to blur in the artificial product-placement glow of the 1980s, Parker was going the other way, producing ever knottier and more nuanced story-songs which seemed to question the veracity of everything surrounding him. To say he was out of step with the onset age of pumped-up Cold War jingoism and runaway consumerism is to wildly understate the point. Whereas Springsteen would use gated drums and keening synths to smuggle his working-class ethos into a mainstream culture that frequently misunderstood him, and Costello adapted enough to produce chart-worthy confections in the spirit of the times like “Everyday I Write the Book,” Parker was never willing to tailor his sound to the moment. His well-known truculence when dealing with labels did not help in keeping his commercial prospects afloat, either. Squeezing Out Sparks quietly remains one of the great records you’ll never see on a consensus-driven best-of-the-decade list. If Elvis Costello wanted to bite the hand that feeds, Graham Parker chewed the whole arm off.
Fame is a weird destiny and so is obscurity. Both seem to recognize and claim their own. Given its low profile, a final irony of Squeezing Out Sparks is that its bleak landscape of back-stabbing political operators, avaricious grifters, and dead-eyed consumption is a prescient vision of the corporate-tech nightmare of today. Parker always knew the truth.


After 2019’s celebratory, cathartic album Resonant Body, this 20-minute EP cleverly subverts club convention in pursuit of higher states of consciousness.

She’s Calling EP

Maya Bouldry-Morrison has spent most of the past two years holed up in her New Hampshire log cabin, exploring the ritualistic nature of club music—the way it can lift you into heightened states of being, for example, or serve as an equalizer on a sweaty dancefloor. During that time, the DJ and producer, known as Octo Octa, released several projects born from her own spiritual experiences, some of which were more liberating than others. Since coming out as transgender in 2016, she has used elements of classic house and techno to engage with radical ideas around identity, freedom, community, and love. Her 2019 EP For Lovers meditates on intimacy, with slow-burning tracks inspired by deep, physical connection. And her celebratory album Resonant Body spins gleefully into rave’s open arms.
Her newest EP, She’s Calling, is the final piece of this transcendental puzzle and invites us to join her in journeying inward—to heed the calls of our inner spirits and seek a higher consciousness. It’s heady stuff to tackle in a little 20-minute disc, but nobody said psychedelic music must drag on. Besides, there’s something approachable about this tight, unstuffy format that feels digestible and just right.
It helps that Bouldry-Morrison is a master at nesting far-out ideas in the comfort of dance music. By grounding her expansive productions in the sticky stylings of house, techno, and UK rave, she’s able to coax us further into the depths of our subconscious. In her hands, even the most disorienting U-turns seem natural and exciting, like a detour you were destined to have. When the tracks eventually reach peak trip, they feel less like tumbling down a rabbit hole and more like uncovering a universal truth.
Of all the releases in this series, She’s Calling is the most eager to subvert conventional club frameworks. The songs burst with dizzying, mismatched sound effects—old-school record scratching, ecstatic acid squelches, and woodsy buzzes and chirps—and seem to zig-zag, fizzle, and balloon without warning. But there’s a reason Bouldry-Morrison has brought these disparate sounds together. When the smoky, strobe-lit warehouse shuffler “Goddess Calling” joins forces with what sounds like an Esalen drum circle, she uses shimmering, stuttering synths as connective tissue. As you listen to these two scenes seamlessly converge—skittering rave-y echoes into hypnotic tribal drums—the distance between them starts to dissolve. By spins four, five, and six, it feels like they’ve been connected all along.
On “Find Your Way Home,” Bouldry-Morrison hits the gas. With the charge and zeal of a deranged Uber driver, she picks you up in one place and drops you off across town. The joyride in between—an immaculate eight-minute blur of throwback breakbeats, distorted chanting, and lounge-y house, capped off by an engulfing acid breakdown—is remarkably smooth given the territory it covers, a testament to the meticulousness of her work. The song, written pre-pandemic, was meant to soundtrack her own inner journeys and help listeners access new psychedelic frontiers. Now, after a disorienting year in quarantine, it feels more like a tribute to our collective mental fortitude.
“Spell for Nature” isn’t billed as a song but an evocation—her summoning of a meaningful, mind-altering memory. Details are scarce, but we’re told the experience revealed something “enveloping and eternal,” a presence Bouldry-Morrison had always suspected was there. Using poetry to narrate this metaphysical interaction, she re-casts nature in goddess form. “There’s a light in the center of the woods/A bright fire seen through the trees,” she says over chiming piano. “You’ve been listening your entire life/She’s calling.” It’s deeply moving to hear the artist’s voice on tape—stripped back, undistorted, calm, a reminder of how far she’s had to go to get here. Committed to song, her experience is given new weight, transformed from a fleeting epiphany into an enduring personal affirmation.

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Fusing influences from improv and minimalist composition with its customarily exploratory post-rock, the L.A. band sounds more assured than ever: playful, funky, even willing to flex a bit.

Young Jesus: Welcome to Conceptual Beach

Welcome to Conceptual Beach

“Every record needs a thesis, needs a crisis or campaign,” John Rossiter croons on “Root and Crown,” the introductory single for Young Jesus’ fifth album, Welcome to Conceptual Beach. Over the past several years, Rossiter’s “Conceptual Beach”—an idea he has likened to his “internal landscape”—has taken on elements of all three. Rossiter initially used it as a fictional framework for personal journaling while he transitioned from Midwestern slacker to erudite Los Angeles bookstore clerk. He created a zine bearing the title during his first tour with the current Young Jesus lineup, in 2016, then used the name for an event series where attendees watercolored and discussed local politics over improvisatory jams—a proper incubator for 2017’s exploratory S/T and its muscular follow-up, The Whole Thing Is Just There. Both albums were collections of open-ended post-rock that teased a future masterpiece while challenging the idea of canonization itself. Welcome to Conceptual Beach marks a soulful fusion of their emo past and heady present, invoking art rock and improvisation while sounding like nothing else.
In the past, Young Jesus tapped into the spiritual and theoretical constructs of astral jazz and minimalist composition, but the sounds were outside of their grasp. Opener “Faith” is everything Young Jesus songs are—elliptical, brimming with ideas, about seven minutes long—and a lot of things they never were before: playful, funky, even willing to flex a bit. It’s Purdie shuffle and Pink Floyd, Auto-Tune croak and plaintive prayer, Santa Cruz acid rock and Laurel Canyon folk.
Both S/T and The Whole Thing Is Just There felt like products of an initial burst of unbridled creative momentum—the work of a band passionately pursuing new approaches to compositional form, but not always concerned with translating that excitement to people not in Young Jesus. In contrast, each song on Welcome to Conceptual Beach has an accessible core to which it can return, allowing Young Jesus to scrutinize their exploratory impulses without lapsing into fussiness or formlessness. Where most bands might use a chorus or bridge to signify a change in direction, Young Jesus decrescendo, leaving blank space for mindfulness. It’s at these points where the marathon jams, open-ended live shows, and philosophical woodshedding transform into telepathic communication, signaling where the song might go next.
Young Jesus consistently prefer to veer from established courses toward previously unexplored vistas: Rossiter modulates from mystical incantations to motivational speaking over the span of “Meditations,” harmonizes over breezy yacht rock in “Pattern Doubt,” and stumbles into a bustling jazz club during “Lark.” Occasionally, they’ll break down a jam into constituent parts and rebuild with slightly different angles: The melodic motifs and themes of decay and rebirth on “(un)knowing” reimagine Radiohead’s “Let Down” as dejected slowcore until Rossiter vows to grow wings with startling, octave-bounding vocal leaps. “Lark” remixes the regal procession of its first half into an elegiac post-emo coda, the type that once earned Young Jesus comparisons to American Football when no one really knew what to call them.
But Young Jesus’ most profound achievement isn’t that the album sounds more like jazz fusion than indie rock. Rather, it’s Rossiter’s continued willingness to reckon with all phases of his life through a lyrical vulnerability that’s rare in their headier and often instrumental influences. “I felt the only life’s the one you lead alone,” he confesses on “Magicians,” looking back on a painful period of living too deeply in his own mind. When he muses, “Every critic’s got some things they’re not proud of,” Rossiter includes and indicts himself; a typical interview finds him scrutinizing the relics of his aimless early twenties that remain on streaming services for posterity—for example, 2010’s Young, Innocent & Hairy, a reflection of getting shit-faced drunk and listening to Bright Eyes and the Good Life in his parents’ garage, bearing no resemblance to the guy who actually got signed to Saddle Creek.
Though Young Jesus’ trajectory is frequently viewed through Rossiter’s personal evolution, each member of the quartet shares a vision for continual learning: Respectively, they footnote interviews with reading syllabi, contribute to prestigious literary journals, and teach college courses on Sun Ra. “It’s not enough to hate the world we live within,” Rossiter screamed at the end of The Whole Thing Is Just There’s “Deterritory.” Now, in every expression of hard-won serenity, Rossiter reflects on the struggles he has documented for years, asking questions that were once seen as frivolous, insular, or even pretentious: How can music shared among a small community be a model for society? What is the purpose of art to begin with? Welcome to Conceptual Beach has the answer: to conceive of a better future by embracing the unknown.

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Working under his new alias DVA [Hi:Emotions], Leon Smart smears the edges of the human and artificial, the organic and the electronic, as if trying to sketch out the dimensions of a digital self.

NOTU_URONLINEU

Leon Smart might not quite have the profile of Hyperdub’s bigger names, the likes of Laurel Halo and Burial, but it’s hard to think of a figure more emblematic of the UK label’s mission to short-circuit the familiar rhythms and grooves of dance music. As DVA, Smart came up through London’s grime scene, producing for figures like Wiley and becoming a familiar face at Rinse FM, where he was an energetic presence at the helm of the former pirate station’s Grimey Breakfast Show. For all this, Smart’s own productions have increasingly shunned category, exploring a liminal space between grime, house and UK funky—a space that, for want of a better term, we might as well call Hyperdub music.
This is Smart’s first full-length album going under new handle DVA [Hi:Emotions], and it marks a break of sorts from what has come before. For one, there is a broad concept here—one encompassing, among other things, techno-futurism, corporate branding, and the interface between humans and machines. With this shift into conceptual territory comes a shift towards abstraction. These are not straightforward club tracks; Smart says he composed them in the dark, illuminated by the glow of his computer monitor—a process designed to emulate his early experiences as a music listener, headphones on beneath a duvet after lights-out. NOTU_URONLINEU is seldom functional, in that way that great dance music can often be, but it uses its conceptual grounding as a springboard to explore all manner of strange hybrids and surprising possibilities.
The album’s sound is initially rather alien—relatively sparse, often light in bass frequencies, and characterized by twitchy rhythms, synth washes and all manner of blips and whooshes that ping around in the high registers. It can be body-moving stuff—most obviously on enjoyable “DAFUQ,” a cartoonish melding of TNGHT-style horn blasts, dubstep lollops and angelic arpeggios. Elsewhere, tracks combine unusual textural and rhythmic motifs. “SUZHOU” and “B IT” contain fragments of familiar genres—the frantic repetitions of footwork, the glossy sheen of vaporwave—but wriggle free of any familiar niche. Sometimes a voice will float through the mix, dispensing corporate soundbites and endorsing a fictional product line called “Hi:Emotions” with uncanny-valley chirpiness. “Have you ever been lost in translation or misunderstood in emails?” asks one. “Have you had a friendship end over the tone of your texts?”
In the hands of some, this sort of conceptual conceit might be the seeds of a grim sci-fi dystopia; the robots taking over. But NOTU_URONLINEU explores its themes with delicate nuance, smearing the edges of the human and artificial, the organic and the electronic, as if trying to sketch out the dimensions of a digital self. “ALMOSTU,” featuring guest vocalists Rae Rae and Roses Gabor, is quiet storm R&B going out to a lover who may be merely virtual; while a particularly slippery eight-minute track titled “NOTU_URONLINEU” lines up slashing rhythms, blasts of modular synth slurry and an unexpected but delightful segment of Rhodes piano played by collaborator Danalogue that gives the track a twinkly jazz-funk flavor, like Herbie Hancock popping up in the middle of an Autechre workout. Throughout the track, a relationship drama plays out. “What’s wrong? I know something’s wrong,” it begins. It ends: “I don’t love you anymore.” It goes on to say, “I knew that wasn’t gonna sound good.”
NOTU_URONLINEU feels of a piece with recent concept-powered projects like Kode9’s Nothing or Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise’s modular project the Sprawl—a sort of speculative fiction in sound, mapping out a space of future possibilities. It feels somewhat embryonic in places, as if some of its ideas remain fragmentary or incomplete. But, importantly for an album grappling with ideas of identity, we never lose sight of Smart amidst his concept. Wait a few seconds after the album’s closing track (excluding the brief bonus song) and we’re beamed right into his studio, can hear him sniffling and exhaling as beats ping from the speakers and one of the album’s sales drones delivers a pitch: “Have you ever made up a song in your head but didn’t have the skills to execute it?” It’s tempting to imagine Smart posed this very question to himself, before rolling up his sleeves and resolving to do something about it. The result is a vision of a prospective future both strange and alluring, a journey through virtual spaces and experimental technologies that, at heart, feels human after all.