On the band's 10th album, Dave Matthews taps into his gentler side with the wisdom and grace afforded by age.

Dave Matthews Band: Walk Around the Moon

Walk Around the Moon

The most famous lyric in “Crash Into Me,” Dave Matthews Band’s breakout love song from 1996, was a mistake. After recording several takes, Matthews added a throwaway line as a joke: “Hike up your skirt a little more and show your world to me.” It made the final cut, of course, and the song would forever be read as a tale of lust rather than desire. “It’s the song of a 26-year-old or 25-year-old,” he recently told GQ. “Now I’m a 56-year-old, and that changes what you want to sing about.” These days, Matthews is more concerned with impermanence as liberation and themes that distill the long-running mindfulness of his music. On Walk Around the Moon, the band’s 10th studio album, he turns those subjects into surprisingly pretty odes, tapping into his gentler side with the wisdom and grace afforded by age.
If you’re expecting the classic attributes of Dave Matthews Band—crunchy grooves, dueling horns and violin, Matthews’ imitable, guttural singing—then Walk Around the Moon will come as a surprise. In the five years since they released the dull but optimistic Come Tomorrow, Dave Matthews Band have seen their children pack their bags for college, the George Floyd protesters strive for justice, and the world confront the precarity of health. With big change comes thankfulness for anything that’s stayed reliable; that might explain the comparatively restrained approach on Walk Around the Moon. The band forgoes its most flamboyant instrumentation and scales back to a grounded, almost meditative, core. With the bulk of the album aligning with triple-A soft-rock, the quietness that permeates these songs gives their themes of reflection a chilling air: the sobering reality of the pandemic on “Singing From the Windows,” learning to forfeit control on the trumpet-dotted “The Ocean and the Butterfly.” Seven members round out the lineup, the most at any time in their history, but the group has never sounded so reserved.
Past and present iterations of Dave Matthews Band freely intermingle on Walk Around the Moon. As always, Matthews confronts death and loss, but there’s a sense he’s learned something new about it this time around. A handful of tracks have been massaged for years on the road or pulled from the vault: “Monsters,” a wistful, bass-forward dose of nostalgia, is nearly a decade old. They’ve been playing “Break Free” live for 17 years, the late LeRoi Moore living on through his work as a composer and lyricist on the soulful track. Bootleggers’ enthusiasm aside, these two songs are highlights for the band as storytellers; revisiting your former self with acceptance, and potentially forgiveness, is hard, especially if you’re prone to embarrassing one-liners.
At 40 minutes, Walk Around the Moon is a brisk reverie—and their shortest album ever. That cutoff means their zesty solos are shorter and moments of all-in instrumentation are subtler. When they do go for it, Dave Matthews Band might be having too much fun. Sandwiched between two heart-on-sleeve acoustic numbers, “After Everything” goes from alt-rock ham to neo-soul pastiche as abruptly as a jumpscare. You could hold it up beside enjoyable parodies like “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room” or Beck’s “Debra,” if only it was actually obvious that Matthews and Arthur “Buddy” Strong’s back-and-forth groans are caricatures. After all, this is the same band that picked “I Did It” as a single and ended “Pig” with 30 seconds of scatting. Call it brainwashing or a coping method, but by the third listen, my hate subsided and I started singing along. There comes a point in every Dave Mathews Band album where you have to embrace the cheese.
On Walk Around the Moon, the band works on picturesque choruses and tight-knit, tender songs that stand on their own. Tumpets, saxophones, and Hammond organ sway like wheat stalks in the title track. “It Could Happen” is a deceptively rich pop ballad for parents about the miracle of watching your kids grow into tiny, functioning people, with sweeping violins that go straight for the tear ducts. Even the chunky, Cake-like riffs that open “The Only Thing” are concise, the driving force that opens the chorus wide for Matthews’ falsettos. Swapping the cold, clean production of their 2010s albums for a warmer, more intimate filter, Walk Around the Moon sounds closer to his solo music than it does the band’s old hijinks, but a closer look shows Dave Matthews Band trying on a new, sleeker look.
To the delight of those with faded fire dancer decals on the back of their Jeeps, Matthews embraces uncoolness the way any experienced parent would. Every song whispers mature, late-era album giving a sly, all-knowing tone to his words. “Madman’s Eyes,” a spin on Arabic pop-metal with Matthews taking up sitar and Jeff Coffin playing a nasally melody on tárogató, offers an apolitical denunciation of mass shootings and our glossy-eyed acceptance of them. “I’m afraid, can’t lie,” yells Matthews, like he needs confirmation that he’s not the only one feeling helpless. During “The Only Thing,” he breaks down the factors that cause us to idealize anonymity: your first experience of public humiliation, the regret of paralyzing indecision, the realization that time is slipping away. It helps that Matthews sings like the grim reaper’s hourglass is permanently in view, each falling grain of sand creating space for forgiveness. “If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t believe it,” he later sings in “It Could Happen,” his voice tinged with disbelief and gratitude. Like the rest of Walk Around the Moon, it sounds like Matthews is reflecting on how he got to this point in life, amazed that 30 years later he still gets to do this with his friends.


Newly signed to Mike WiLL’s label, the Atlanta rapper offers an unsparing chronicle of his come-up on this smoky, sinister major-label debut.

Edgewood

Trouble was 23 when he broke out in 2011 with “Bussin,’” a gun anthem intense enough to spark nightmares. The video, with its close-ups of back tattoos, war-grade weaponry, and stone-faced gangsters, feels like an A&E drama condensed into a compact three-minute song. It’s the type of clip you watch once and never forget. Since then, Trouble has been popping up on tracks with Young Thug and Gucci Mane, releasing occasional mixtapes, and generally buzzing around the edges of his city’s explosive rap scene. At times, it’s felt like his music career has been secondary to the broader project of his larger-than-life persona.
Edgewood, Trouble’s long-coming debut, is a reminder of what a compelling narrator he remains. Named for the Atlanta projects where he grew up, and executive produced by Mike WiLL Made-It, this album is an unsparing chronicle of Trouble’s come-up. Cohesive and gothic, and flaunting some of the most effective, layered production of Mike WiLL’s career, Edgewood takes the over-excited hyper-realism of “Bussin’” and ages it like whiskey, giving life to a smoky, sinister, and polished image of Trouble as a seen-it-all Atlanta godfather.
Signing to Mike WiLL’s label, as Trouble did this year, brings a few obvious benefits. Edgewood flaunts guest spots from Fetty Wap, Quavo, the Weeknd, and Drake; polished artwork and promo materials; and flawless mixing that provides pockets for Trouble’s swirling southern drawl to move around in. Throughout, his perspective remains sharp. He is jaded and cautious, snarling and dismissive. “Try to tell my young’n stiffen up, he trust niggas/Been burned by that bullet, I know not to trust niggas,” he spits on the standout opening track, “Real is Rare (Edgewood) / The Woods,” and you can almost see him shaking his head. He doles out advice in every verse, and he recounts past capers with chilling composure. On “Bussin,’” he was barking in self-defense in the face of imminent war. On Edgewood, the battle is over, and he’s assessing the damage.
Edgewood is as much Mike WiLL’s album as it is Trouble’s. The beats here are part haunted house, part trap opera, and part Atlanta rap history lesson, going back to the melodic bounce of D4L on “Selfish” and the moaning menace of pre-prison Gucci Mane on “Knock it Down.” Mike WiLL is an exceptional crafter of pop-rap, as evidenced by Rae Sremmurd’s success, but on Edgewood, he gleefully returns to the gloomy, menacing sound that broke him into the industry.
“Pull Dat Cash Out” blends the sound of a woman’s distorted voice with ATLiens-era OutKast synth work, while on the surprisingly engrossing Weeknd collaboration “Come Thru,” Mike WiLL breaks out jack-in-the-box keys and infuses them with a bass-heavy bounce—letting Trouble spit-off one liners (“I was duckin’ bullets, shootouts, me and my guys design your porch”) and giving room for the Weeknd to land some House of Balloons-era vocal runs. Mike WiLL’s value as an executive producer lies in the fact that he pushes Trouble only to the edges of his comfort zone. Throughout, he prioritizes the album’s cohesiveness and sound over breaking Trouble into the mainstream. Even the big name collaborations—the somewhat limp Quavo and Fetty Wap feature “Rider” and the mostly-successful, abrasive Drake cut “Bring it Back”—work in service of the whole project.
Edgewood documents its Atlanta underworld with immersive, almost suffocating realism: the various skits throughout the album detail the minutiae of trap life, capturing iPhone clicks, voicemails, stray gunshots, and music playing next door. Trouble’s tales of trap life are nothing new to the Atlanta rap canon, but while classics like Jeezy’s Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation: 101 toasted the act of hustling one’s way out of the trap (“I used to hit the kitchen lights, cockroaches everywhere/Hit the kitchen lights, now it’s marble floors, everywhere!”), Edgewood finds Trouble stubbornly staying put. “How could you blame it?/It’s all I done seen runnin’ around wit my crew,” he muses on “Krew / Time Afta Time, “ but he needs no one else’s approval. This is a judgment-free account of life in an overlooked, liminal space, and its tone is neither celebratory nor mournful. Rather, it’s a cryptic affirmation of an old adage: Sometimes, everything you need is already in front of you.


The minimalist composer trades his usual chamber ensemble for the comparatively monochromatic tones of the Farfisa organ.

Species

As Bing & Ruth, composer and pianist David Moore aims for quiet grandeur. His music attempts to capture the essence of transcendent experiences, like the glorious, humbling feeling of being dwarfed by the immensity of nature, or the calm, gauzy moment between consciousness and sleep. He falls into the lineage of minimalists like John Luther Adams, Terry Riley, and Gavin Bryars, composers that evoke the personal revelation of existential beauty, and there are moments in Moore’s discography that live up to that spiritual and emotional ambition. Moore sets himself apart from contemporary minimalists like Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro, and Kara-Lis Coverdale in his steadfast dedication to a sense of pensive beauty over all else. Rarely has he let darkness or discord seep into his work.
On its surface, Species, Bing & Ruth’s fourth album, feels like a tonal and stylistic break from the relentlessly wide-eyed posture of Tomorrow Is the Golden Age and No Home of the Mind. On those albums, Moore’s piano was the most consistent element; over strings, winds, and tape delay, he made the instrument billow and ripple, causing simple chordal patterns to feel momentous. The vast majority of the sounds on Species were made with a Farfisa organ, a relatively compact keyboard that creates a warm, buzzing tone. Philip Glass frequently used the instrument, and it was notably featured on Steve Reich’s Four Organs. Trading the timbral menagerie of an expanded chamber ensemble for something more barren and monochromatic, Moore is occasionally forced out of his comfort zone into abstraction and dissonance. These forays can feel like a significant artistic leap, but complacency flattens some of this music, occasionally exposing the emptiness of certain compositional habits that, in the past, he’s been able to dress up with lush arrangements.
In some instances, Moore has translated the basic template of earlier Bing & Ruth albums into this new sonic landscape. One of his most recognizable compositional tics is the juxtaposition of slow-moving chordal patterns with quickly flowing arpeggios, and on the piano, with its expressive dynamic range, the trick can be entrancing. This is still the dominant mode on Species, but on Farfisa it plays out as a reenactment of Reich and Riley, awakening only a shallow sense of optimism rather than the metaphysical wonder elicited by those pioneers. In several cases, like “Badwater Psalm,” Moore picks a simple melodic phrase, couples it with a dramatic chord progression, and does little else to craft a journey for the listener. Intensity is a crucial component of the best minimalism, but it appears on this album only in fits and spurts.
“The Pressure of This Water,” which appears late in the album, is its most interesting piece. At its center is a modal arpeggiated pattern that is woven into revolving, slowly moving chord clusters that repeat for the duration of the composition. With each repetition they seem to melt further into each other, certain tones elongating and stretching beyond their original parameters. Halfway through, a swell of bowed upright bass emerges, fixated on a cyclically dissonant low pedal note, causing the originally celestial chord progression to feel claustrophobic as it uncomfortably unspools. In its last 90 seconds, the piece dissolves into the solemn ease of an open fifth, resolving. It is a remarkably beautiful moment, one made even more entrancing by the tension that preceded it.
In a statement accompanying the release of Species, Moore describes writing the album as a process of losing himself in the oceanic expanse of Point Dume, near Malibu, and “finding a nothingness so big it must contain everything.” But sometimes this nothingness just points right back to itself, vacant and hollow. One of the most impressive aspects of Bing & Ruth records, Species included, is Moore’s insistence on recording his ensemble live. In moments where this technique is especially apparent—like when Moor’s breathing is audible on “Live Forever”—we are reminded of the presence and complexity of the humans behind the music, which cultivates nuance and depth. These moments are a reminder that the most beautiful parts of life aren’t the most placid or consonant, but those in which the tangly mess of being a person becomes revelatory.

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On their second EP, the Atlanta trio swirls post-punk, drone, and math rock into self-described “deconstructionist pop.”

floral print EP

Atlanta rock trio floral print want you to know they’re not interested in writing songs that follow familiar patterns or linear progressions. Even their Bandcamp tags, including “bipolar” and “happy sad,” are direct—if somewhat crass—indications of their intent to present contrasts as compliments. For the most part, floral print’s self-titled second EP—which follows 2017’s full-length debut, mirror stages—satisfies their capriciousness. Frontman Nathan Springer, keyboardist/drummer Paul DeMerritt, and bassist Joshua Pittman swirl post-punk, drone, and math rock into self-described “deconstructionist pop” that grants them the flexibility to shapeshift through a collaborative songwriting process born primarily from jam sessions.
Opener “six pillows” introduces the EP with multiple false starts, repeatedly curling in on itself and revving back up again. Even as a series of tight drum fills takes over, it sounds as though floral print are stumbling over their own feet. But as the song progresses, it begins to invoke the victory of standing up again after each fall. “You’ve been fucking with my head/In a good way,” Springer sings, suggesting floral print might be trying the same trick on you.
A sparse slowcore intro gradually gathers speed on lead single “i go down on the breeze,” before crashing into a single-word chorus of noisy guitars: “Carry!” Springer yells to a partner who’s drifting out of reach, “He won’t need you the way I do.” As the track fluctuates in tempo and time signature, the lyrics are equally disjointed: “I can't stand when you fall/Keep it all on track, let the reel of film recall/Break my hands, yes I do/It's not a lie if I can see right through.” Alone, each line feels like the beginning of a separate thought; strung together, they make even less sense.
Though there are fascinating rhythmic intricacies in floral print’s songwriting, the EP rarely accomplishes the profundity it seems to aim for. “Pardon my ailment/I can’t love you… I wanted to show you all the things that we could be/If you were patient with the cutting parts of me,” Springer sings on closer “viridian,” stifling some of floral print’s most vibrant instrumentals with a self-incriminating admission of undateability. Promising when not obscured by artificial depth, floral print presents the case for an ardent young band in pursuit of something greater than themselves. They’ve yet to clue us in to what that might be; maybe they don’t know, either.


Another holiday mixtape, this courtesy of one of rap's more theatrical MCs, doesn't reach the highs of Teflon Don, but its scope remains pretty epic.

Ashes to Ashes

Chances are Rick Ross and Barry White never met. But in a lot of ways, the two are kindred spirits. As two big dudes with booming voices and theatrical appetites, Ross and White have both taken what should've been limited styles and managed to transcend anyway, just by pushing those styles way beyond excess. White could make arenas ooze just by bellowing the word "love" over and over; Ross can emulsify car speakers just by roaring about all the drugs he's almost certainly never sold. And on "Even Deeper", a track from his new Ashes to Ashes mixtape, Ross sounds almost as comfortable on the smooth orchestral funk ripples of "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby" as White once did, with White's disembodied voice showing up to egg him on.
Ashes to Ashes comes on the heels of last year's Teflon Don album, the moment when Ross pushed his own zero-subtlety bark to insane levels of charismatic absurdity. Beyond the singles, Ross albums used to be grim trudges, but Teflon Don just about burst with indulgent decadence, Ross sharing million-dollar tracks with A-list guests and slurping up every minute of it. And it also had the identity-bending anthem "B.M.F. (Blowin' Money Fast)", rap's song of the summer. Ashes to Ashes is a free mixtape dashed off on Christmas Eve, in anticipation of yet another new album that's supposedly lurking just around the corner, and it's no surprise that nothing on it reaches the facepunch immediacy of "B.M.F." or the chiffon luxury of "Maybach Music III". But for a dashed-off mixtape, the scope remains pretty epic.
Ashes to Ashes has famous guests (T.I., Ludacris) and big producers (Boi-1da, Lex Luger), and its sonic depth and serious mastering job are enough to push it way beyond most mixtapes. But the mixtape's best moments come directly from Ross himself. Here, he continues to conjure hilariously larger-than-life ways to let you know he's spending more money than you are: "I'm still ballin' like I'm Bo Diddley! I park the Caddy in the living room!" On "Retrosuperfuture", he claims to be "skateboarding aboard the Pan American," and the image of Ross skateboarding anywhere, for any reason, is pretty amazing. Even Ross' dumbest moments are fun. On "John Doe", he says he's "jumping niggas like a chess piece," and unless he's talking about the knight, I'm pretty sure he's thinking of checkers. And on the chorus of the very first song, he rhymes "cell phone" with "iPhone"; he's almost certainly the only big rapper currently working who could get away with that.
The tape moves from bangers to slick, more meditative tracks before returning to bangers, and it might work better if it were all bangers, all the time. Ross knows he's onto something with "B.M.F.", and he sounds more urgent and alive over churning minor-key trunk-slams than over just about everything else. But other than one godawful chorus from the Chester French chump, the whole thing comes off slick and professional-- more than enough to tide the world over in the brief period between Ross albums. And it ends on a deliriously high note: "Another One", an early glimpse of Ross' new Bugatti Boyz duo with Diddy, one of the only guys alive who can match Ross in sheer, infectious money-zest. These two sound just awesome together, Diddy inhabiting Ross' flow and Ross relishing his violent punchlines just a little bit more. This guy is just having fun with us now.


Reissue of the debut LP from Jello Biafra's agit-punk group.

Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

Dead Kennedys were one of the most influential bands in the history of punk rock, blending twisted humor, in-your-face political ranting, and aggressive, spastic music, and paving the way for countless imitators. Their debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables was originally released in 1980 on the UK label Cherry Red, and has since been re-released by several other labels, including IRS, Alternative Tentacles, and Cleopatra. The newest reissue-- the special 25th anniversary edition-- features the original artwork and a bonus 55-minute DVD documenting the making of the album as well as the band's early years.
The packaging here is fantastic: The once grainy, indistinguishable burning police cars that don the cover now appear in much sharper detail. For the original pressing, the band requested the flames look orange, and as a result, the entire cover was printed orange on white. After that pressing, strict black and white was used, and most versions looked like something produced on a gas station copy machine. The tri-fold digipak offers a pull-out replica of the original collage/lyric sheet, featuring newspaper clippings, advertisements, and political diatribes all infused with the bands usual biting sarcasm and bizarre humor. Ronald Reagan grins out at you despite his drawn-in Hitler mustache and the fact that someone has written "sex" all over his face. The label from a can of salmon with Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle pasted over it sits above a marching line of breakfast foods. You could spend an hour looking over the double-sided poster and still miss things.
Unfortunately, there are no bonus tracks. The original 14 songs are here; the album is still barely over a half-hour long. It is remastered, but considering that this is a 25-year-old debut recording by a punk rock band, don't expect it to suddenly sound impeccable. It is what it is, and the group's amateurism showed more on this record than on subsequent ones. Even some of the songs fall prey to the band's younger, less focused outlook. "Kill the Poor", the album opener, is fun to sing along with, but at its heart it's a generic rock song hiding behind satirical lyrics and low-fi production. The final track is the ill-conceived cover of "Viva Las Vegas", which seems tame after the 13 originals that precede it.
There are several classic DK tracks here though, most notably "California Über Alles" and "Holiday in Cambodia", both of which still sound powerful and fresh. The opening bass notes of "Holiday in Cambodia" are some of the most sinister sounds punk rock ever produced. Of the lesser-known tracks, "Drug Me" is one of the band's faster songs, and it strongly hinted at where the band would head with their next EP. "When Ya Get Drafted", "Let's Lynch the Landlord", and "Your Emotions" all show off the group's ability to blend upbeat, light-hearted music with sinister satirical lyrics.
Over the years, the Dead Kennedys' lyrics and vocals have recieved the most attention. Jello Biafra's over-the-top warble is instantly recognizable, and no one used sick and twisted humor to deliver such serious messages-- many are still applicable today -- with the same level of skill. "Chemical Warfare" predicts bio-terrorism that hits too close to home, or perhaps I should say too close to the country club. "Holiday in Cambodia" mocks the poor little rich kid who thinks he's got it bad with lines like, "You'll work harder with a gun in your back/ For a bowl of rice a day."
The bonus DVD offers little for the serious fan, mostly interviews with East Bay Ray, Klaus Flouride, a couple of radio DJs, and other people connected with the band in its early days. Little attention is paid to the actual creation of the album; most of the interviewees just find various ways to talk about how great it is. Included are six live performances, all filmed with the original line-up. Most of the footage here has been widely available, either on the Dead Kennedys: The Early Years Live DVD, or on various VHS tapes throughout the years. But these early performances are interesting if you've never seen Biafra's bizarre pantomime-style antics (or his obsession with green plastic gloves), but some clips just go to prove that watching any band try to entertain 20 or 30 people who seem completely uninterested can be painful-- even if the band went on to become legendary.

Cleopatra / Alternative Tentacles / Manifesto / Cherry Red / IRS


Over more than a decade and almost 300 records, Dance Mania staked its claim as ghetto house’s Motown, holding its own as the brash, DIY counterpart to more internationally-established, crossover-primed Chicago peers like Traxx and DJ International. Ghetto Madness, Strut’s second Dance Mania tribute, digs deep for gems from the label’s mid-'90s heyday.

Various Artists: Dance Mania: Ghetto Madness

Dance Mania: Ghetto Madness

Dance Mania’s appeal is often summed up in terms of its raunch. That part’s crucial—the sleazy shout-alongs, the implied physicality of its focus on rhythm above all else, the moment when enough repetition elevates music about dancing and fucking from hedonistic to transcendental—but there’s more to the scrappy, prolific house label than the dirty stuff. Over more than a decade and almost 300 records, Dance Mania staked its claim as ghetto house’s Motown, holding its own as the brash, DIY counterpart to more internationally-established, crossover-primed Chicago peers like Traxx and DJ International. Sure, the stuff that hewed a bit closer to house’s disco roots got the European licensing deals, but Dance Mania’s deep, familial roster got the overcrowded projects of Chicago’s south and west sides, the ones Parris Mitchell immortalized on 1995’s "Ghetto Shout Out", where guys like DJ Deeon and Jammin Gerald were DJing Kraftwerk, gangsta rap, Ron Hardy, and their own bedroom recordings. The music was raw, explicit, often escapist, and made do with the resources available, and as such, its apparent simplicity was often deceptive. In as much as anything can be about shaking asses, Dance Mania made music about shaking asses. But as the buttcheek-thinkpiece industrial complex should suggest, for better or worse, it’s never really just about shaking asses.
Last year’s Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997, released via Strut, marked the first official compilatory survey of the label, and it arrived on the heels of Parris Mitchell and owner Ray Barney’s 2013 announcement of Dance Mania’s re-launch. (It shuttered gracefully in 2001; the label’s commitment to musical risk-taking had always relied on the financial success of its primary role as a record distribution hub, a foundation that crumbled in the late '90s as the independent retailers it serviced began to disappear.) That compilation focused on the label’s most essential tracks, documenting straightforward but formative early work like Hercules’ 1986 "7 Ways", the label’s second-ever pressing, as it grew leaner, rawer, and lewder by way of flirtation with acid, hip-hop, and techno. These are records that never crossed over into the mainstream in any significant sense (beyond the errant Daft Punk shout-out) but often sell for thousands of dollars on Discogs today, thanks to a recent surge in popularity among primarily European collectors. It’s a familiar paradox for Rust Belt dance music innovators looking to keep their legacy alive: if financial viability is at all a priority, artists risk a loss of crucial context as they invest in outside markets.
Contrary to the pulp extremism of its title, Ghetto Madness, Strut’s second Dance Mania tribute, homes in on subtler, deeper-digging gems in the label’s sprawling catalog. Where Hardcore Traxx gave special attention to ghetto house’s formative years, Ghetto Madness sticks primarily to Dance Mania’s mid-'90s heyday, by which point the label had found its niche and dug deep, its dogged prolificacy speeding up to match the steadily increasing BPMs. The tracks are brittle, matter-of-fact, mostly percussive, and often devoted to giddy mythologizing of the city’s myriad pleasures. But Ghetto Madness also makes a case for the deeply meditative nature of these tracks at their best, and proves the bawdy shout-outs that have become ghetto house’s calling card are hardly representative of the genre as a whole. Tracks like DJ Rush rarity "The Reactor" and DJ Deeon’s "1112" are entirely non-vocal, closer to straight-up techno than any of the label’s earlier jacking anthems or hip-house workouts. Compared to the hyper, in-your-face instructionals of some of Tyree Cooper’s late-'80s singles, soul-sampling album highlight "Nuthin' Wrong", originally released in 1995, feels strikingly restrained. There’s subtlety here. And along with horny entreaties for girls to shake their shit, there’s real community outreach, too: DJ Milton’s "House-O-Matics" celebrates the Chicago dance crew of the same name, effectively an after-school program as much as it was a performance team.
From a strictly commercial standpoint, Europe’s new generation of Dance Mania fanatics with disposable income would be reason enough for Strut’s second DM reissue in two years. But in the context of house music’s renewed relevance on the global pop charts, the commitment to Dance Mania homage takes on a special poignance. At a glance, house’s most visible torchbearers in 2015 are, for the most part, precocious, white British boys often not yet old enough to legally get into the American clubs they sell out. With the commercial success of festival-primed EDM acts and the increasing reliance on overseas touring for house’s pioneers, some have wondered if house still matters in its hometown of Chicago. But doubting the movement’s persistent relevance in its hometown ignores a fundamental truth: House never left Chicago, it simply changed forms. Steadily evolving over its three decades of existence, house has appeared as disco re-routed through MIDI, motivational hip-house, warp-speed juke, and abstracted footwork. The legacy of Dance Mania’s insouciant, trail-blazing ghetto house is preserved in the city’s flourishing juke and footwork communities as much as it lives on through the label’s second life; Ghetto Madness is just a reminder.


On a bittersweet and impressionistic solo album, the former Walkmen member confronts the joys and humiliations of a life devoted to music.

The Bear

Life is long and rock stardom is fleeting. If you’re lucky enough to make it to middle age, you might hear a song from a past life and scarcely recognize yourself. Stephen Malkmus once wandered into a bakery and struggled to place a Pavement B-side inexplicably resurrected by a streaming algorithm. There’s the legend of Steven Tyler hearing an Aerosmith deep cut in a drug-addled haze and suggesting the band cover it. (“It’s us, fuckhead,” Joe Perry supposedly admonished him.)
Walter Martin tells a story like that—well, not like that—halfway through “Easter,” the melancholy centerpiece of his sixth solo studio album, The Bear. Over rustling guitar and the plaintive whine of a lap steel, Martin describes the experience of hearing his old band—presumably the Walkmen, in whose ranks he served 13 years—on the radio. “But I didn’t recognize my old friends/And I didn’t recognize myself,” Martin sings in that croaky, endearing voice that tends to imbue his songs with a certain sincerity. The kicker is that Martin frames this story not with sadness or nostalgia but with gratitude: “I thanked the Lord I’d found that I was someone else,” he sings.
Martin has been someone else for nearly a decade now, since the Walkmen entered hiatus and he abandoned all pretensions of coolness by making a debut solo record for kids. Few indie veterans have activated aging-dad-songwriter mode more gracefully. Martin’s first few solo albums were full of funny, family-friendly folk singalongs about zoo animals, art museums, and trips to Australia, but 2020’s The World at Night, inspired by the death of friend and ex-bandmate Stewart Lupton, carried a more wistful tone. The Bear follows in that spirit. Martin’s songwriting is bittersweet and reflective, full of musings on music and family and an uncertain future. He imbues the material with a deeper sense of himself, even as he is less concerned than ever with letting listeners know what exactly he’s singing about.
A warmth radiates from The Bear, which is impressive since the record opens with an ambling wintry tale called “Hunters in the Snow.” Much of the material was written in a one-room schoolhouse in upstate New York, with only a stove for heat, during that first Covid winter. Some of this warmth stems from Martin’s fondness for the tone of vintage gear, a holdover from his Walkmen days. The twinkly piano that pitter-patters into the foreground on “Baseball Diamonds” is reminiscent of the wobbly piano sound on Walkmen classics like “The Blizzard of ’96” and “We’ve Been Had,” except here it’s played by film composer Emile Mosseri, whom Martin reached out to on a whim after hearing his work in Minari.
There is a trebly glow to everything. The dominant sound is Martin’s own guitar: light fingerpicking on a 1955 Gretsch, a lovely, faded sound that complements his unpolished voice. Given how much old-fashioned care went into these recordings, the only disappointment is his overreliance on stagnant and familiar folk melodies. Martin can write a rich, slow-burning tune—“Easter” and “The Song Is Never Done” are proof—yet he burdens the otherwise moving “Hiram Hollow” with a traditional waltz melody that sounds like it was recycled from an old Pogues song. “Not My Mother,” with its meandering, loping gait, feels similarly flat. Yet Martin’s charm and self-deprecation always shine through, as he confronts both the joys and discontents of a life devoted to music. “The Song Is Never Done” is a highlight about his life’s work aspiring to write the perfect song. (“No, it’s not this one,” he clarifies midway through.)
In an explanatory pamphlet that accompanies the vinyl, Martin admits that his instinct has often been to write songs as directly as possible to keep live audiences engaged. On The Bear, he tried to let that go. “I let myself write more loosely, like a painter or something,” he writes, and it pays off; songs like “New Green” and “Easter,” with its veiled references to early-pandemic anxieties, are impressionistic and open-ended.
Ironically, Martin’s least direct album proves to be his most revealing and memoiristic. There’s a wonderful moment in the title track where he condenses the story of his entire adult life into one 90-second verse. He recalls a dream that he was in a “mid-level rock-and-roll band,” crisscrossing the country’s “shithole nightclubs”; when it ended, “I was bald, broke, and 39”; after that came marriage, child-rearing, and raising chickens, “out here where the buffalo roam.” You can learn a lot about Martin from this verse, and not just his life’s trajectory. His friendly-raconteur approach to songwriting, his self-effacing humor, his weathered voice, his optimism and disinterest in fronting as cool—it’s all there. I suspect that, if he were to hear it playing in the wild 20 years from now, he would recognize himself.


The Australian singer-songwriter eases up on her customary digital glitches, manipulated vocals, and sudden cuts for a warm record about the difficulty of forging intimacy through technology.

katie dey: mydata

Katie Dey’s best music has long fixated on the ways humans fail to connect. On the handful of records she’s released over the past half decade, the Australian singer-songwriter has meditated on fear, loss, heartbreak, and the deep loneliness of isolation. Her 2019 album solipsisters was intentionally named for the philosophical idea that nothing exists outside one’s own mind. She acknowledged in interviews that while the record makes references to other people, to “you” and to “we,” other characters were purely hypothetical. “It’s really all just about me, because I was so totally alone while I was writing these songs,” she said. "You end up talking to yourself a lot if you’re isolated."
Dey’s digitally manipulated vocals reinforced these themes even as they obscured the literal meaning of her lyrics. The songs, while beautiful, were full of harsh glitches and sudden cuts—testaments to the troubles of forging the bonds of a relationship through technology. Sometimes intimacy can feel just out of reach.
For her fourth solo record, mydata, Dey examined similar themes but with a decidedly more  optimistic attitude. She’s said that the record is directly about an “internet relationship,” but rather than focusing on feelings of distance and isolation, Dey expounds on the love and companionship that the internet can allow physically distant people to experience. “I was trying to prove to myself, maybe, that a conversation is still a conversation,” she has said. “That sex is still sex.”
Accordingly, the storm clouds of glitches and distortion have parted a bit—the connection is better, so the message is clearer. “bearing” most explicitly addresses the strange joys of internet-mediated relationships, describing the warmth you can feel just from seeing a loved one’s username pop up, or the ruination of well-kept sleep schedules just to try to spend more time with one another across vast distances. It’s a simple song, which only underscores the sentiment. Over a few burbling synth lines, Dey sings with a voice full of hope and yearning, a striking contrast to the chaos and turmoil she once wrung out of her digitally twisted compositions. Even on the record’s more intensely arranged moments, like the orchestral swells that fill "happiness," she leaves a lot of space for clarity—stripping away the fuzz and ornamentation to allow a closer glimpse at the core that’s always lived at the heart of her songs.
There are still suggestions of stormy times—the record opens with a song called “darkness” that discusses a desire to hold onto a lover’s “suicidal ideation”—but it doesn’t dwell in those moments. Every cloudy passage is soon followed by a dizzy synth passage or a Technicolor swell of strings. Sometimes mydata offers a tenuous sort of hope, but it’s hope nonetheless.
In the time since mydata was finished, the rest of the world has had to consider a lot of the same questions that Dey poses throughout the record. Forced inside, separated from the rest of the world from circumstances outside of our control, we wonder: What do commitment and community look like when you can’t sit in the same room as the people you care about? What is love without touch? Dey’s records once posited gloomy answers to these questions, miring themselves in the dark spirals that can result from long periods of seclusion. But mydata is different; it suggests the possibility of perseverance, connection, and kindness to oneself and others. Dey finds peace in knowing that this kind of love is just as real as any other.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On the follow-up to 2018’s warm, naturalistic Zebra, Alexis Georgopoulos veers in the opposite direction, constructing a glassy paradise out of ’80s-inspired drum machines and analog synths.

New Pleasures

Many miles separate Eden from utopia. The former sprouts, green and abundant, from untouched soil. Utopias, the work of mere humans, are simulacra of perfection, cast in streamlined shapes and buffed to a blinding gloss. On his 2018 album Zebra, composer Alexis Georgopoulos, aka Arp, sowed an organic paradise out of lustrous synthesizers and tactile percussion. It felt warm and breezy; even when it was blanketed in electronic tones, you could practically feel the wood grain on the plates of his softly struck marimba. On New Pleasures, Georgopoulos rejects Zebra’s naturalism. Instead, he peers ahead, crafting a sleek, machine-operated sanctuary out of plasticky drum machine patterns and jagged synthetic textures. Mallet instruments and fretless bass infuse the album with mild warmth, but Georgopoulos seems more interested in icy, detached soundscapes. If this is a picture of our silicon future, it’s an often airless one.
New Pleasures is the second installment in Arp’s Zebra trilogy. The first chapter, winding and sun-drenched, felt like gliding along the water, snug in an inflatable raft, through unfamiliar but idyllic terrain. The new record also suggests forward motion, but it more closely resembles speeding through a freshly paved tunnel late at night: smooth, propulsive, and illuminated by a cool fluorescent glow. Georgopoulos returns to his beloved collection of analog synthesizers throughout New Pleasures, coating clacking drum machines with a metallic sheen. His choice of instruments enhances the album’s retrofuturistic ambience, particularly on the title track—a neon-lit, sci-fi joyride that layers spiny bursts from a Prophet 5 and Moog Model D with fretless bass and 808s. His lattice of synths is intricate and dynamic, but it’s Georgopoulos’ drum machines and percussionist Lautaro Burgos that supply the real meat of the track. Padded Linn patterns and delicate marimba ground the muscular, Phil Collins-sized beats that punctuate the song, evoking a high-gloss update of ’80s tech noir.
New Pleasures emphasizes just a few key sounds, like a painting rendered in a minimal color palette. Each detail is carefully arranged, but the ultimate effect can at times be too polished. It’s easy to listen to, yet unlike its predecessor, New Pleasures tends to fade into the background, enticing listeners to space out. Occasionally, a gorgeously mixed drum passage or keening synth penetrates the haze: Opener“The Peripheral” is lifted by chattering mallets and an effect that sounds like seltzer bubbles exploding in Dolby.
Little gems like this reveal themselves in each meticulously recorded track. Georgopoulos designs the closing “Cloud Storage” exclusively from such precise granules. It feels somehow astral and earthly all at once; synths sway like searchlights beaming across the sky as marimba and programmed chirps burble beneath. It’s one of the record’s sparsest pieces, inviting in its spaciousness. “Cloud Storage” is the more intimate companion piece to “The Peripheral”; the conversation between the two cuts suggests a more vulnerable, quietly adventurous album than many of the songs in between.
Some songs are less nuanced: big, primary colored blocks of sound that don’t always encourage further inspection. Take “Traitor (Dub),” with its silly, rubbery synth melody. It’s artificially funky, like an episode of Soul Train broadcast live from Chuck E. Cheese. “Sponge (for Miyake)” is similarly entrenched in ’80s pastiche, its bright, springy keystrokes evoking a low-stakes chase scene. Though both songs disrupt the album’s placid surface, they jut out at odd angles, inviting a head scratch rather than a closer look. Georgopoulos is superb with minutiae—brief washes of static, a curiously undulating synth line—but the overall arc of the record feels flat. He is fully equipped to construct bold new sonic edifices, but on New Pleasures, Georgopoulos too often settles for the skyscrapers we already know; shiny, but ordinary.


Second solo covers EP from the Decemberists leader, this record collects interpretations of traditional folk songs arranged and recorded by 1960s folk troubadour Shirley Collins.

Colin Meloy: Colin Meloy Sings trad. arr. Shirley Collins

Is this going to be a regular series? After releasing an EP of Morrissey covers last year, Colin Meloy has recorded a six-song covers EP of traditional songs originally arranged and recorded by 1960s folk troubadour Shirley Collins, again to tie in with a solo acoustic tour. Collins lacks the cache of Moz, but Meloy's not playing Devendra to her Vashti. Colin Meloy Sings trad. arr. Shirley Collins is no revival attempt; the purpose of this release appears simply to show Meloy's affection for these songs. As if undaunted by the prospect of reinventing well-known songs like "Everyday Is Like Sunday", he lovingly plays them with a little more humor and a lot more care, and as a result, the EP sounds like more of a direct extension of his day job than a mere tour souvenir.
Collins proves ideal to Meloy's treatment: During the 60s and 70s, she drew on traditional English music as well as contemporary folk to create a revered body of work. These six songs are so suited to Meloy's idiom that they rarely sound like covers. While I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend at least checking out her originals, Sings Shirley Collins doesn't require any knowledge of its source material the way Sings Morrissey did. That was a one-note release: Once the novelty of hearing an indie pin-up boy covering the ultimate indie pin-up boy wore off, that EP was archived on the CD rack, a gem for Morrissey and Decemberist completists alike but a curio for everyone else. But ...Sings Shirley Collins has a leg up on its predecessor from the word go: Collins is Meloy's kindred spirit. Her sassy wives, errant wanderers, death-scared sailors, and duplicitous thieves could be the same vengeful mariners and lovelorn barrow boys who inhabit Decemberists songs.
Meloy fills these tracks out lovingly, eschewing the austere voice-and-guitar setting of Sings Morrissey for an arsenal of bells, banjo, electric guitar, and plucky percussion. The songs remain spare and the mood intimate, but the music feels less imitative and more inhabited. On opener "Dance to Your Daddy", bells ding a soft melody to echo Meloy's vocals, reinforcing the song's evocation of parental tenderness-- an obvious choice for the dad-to-be. "Charlie" is a little more upbeat, with a banjo bolstering the jaunty chorus. Carson Ellis, Meloy's girlfriend/partner and the artist behind the Decemberists' distinctive album covers and merchandise, makes a brief appearance as a spirited wife-to-be who throws her suitor's expectations right back at him: "I will marry you but I won't do your washin' or your cookin'," she sings, proving a perfect foil-- Cher to Meloy's Sonny.
Nothing else is quite as upbeat or as charming as "Charlie", as the album takes a slightly darker turn with the death song "Barbara Allen" (which Meloy, like Collins, pronounces "Barb'ry Allen"). A metronomic rimshot and a sharp electric guitar stomp out a death march, as if ticking away life's remaining minutes, while Meloy sings of love and mortality, bending up the end of his lines as Collins did nearly 40 years ago. "Cherry Tree Carol" continues that funereal pace, dragging a little. It probably doesn't help that Meloy replaces the burbling church organ of Collins's original with an electric guitar that glides around the song's firmament. As if losing energy, the final two songs are the EP's barest: "Turpin Hero" is a cautionary tale of thievery and trickery, and "I Drew My Ship" is a short a cappella number that might have worked better as the EP's opener, offering a friendly introduction to Meloy's re-creation of Collins' world. In fact, as well chosen as these songs are for Meloy's vocal range and persona, the sequencing does seem slightly off: Listening to these six tracks, I kept thinking I might rearrange them somehow, but of the many possible iterations of the tracklist, none that I devised seemed any better or worse than the official order. It's a quibbling criticism, but this puzzlement prevents the EP from fully realizing the seemingly ideal combination of singer and source. Nevertheless, Sings Shirley Collins is an enticing addition to what could become a very fruitful series.


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 definitive Lil Peep experience with his breakthrough 2016 mixtape.

Hellboy

It was difficult to know Lil Peep. You could say he was sad or depressed. He had a lot of tattoos. He sang and rapped about drugs. He died tragically young.
People knew Gustav Åhr, though. “He gets paid to be sad,” Peep’s older brother Oskar told People on November 17, 2017, hardly more than a day after Peep died. “It’s what he made his name on. It’s what his image was in a sense.” That image made you think you knew Lil Peep as someone who willingly revealed his pain and struggles in his music. How could the kid who sang, “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself,” be anything but deeply inconsolable? But Oskar also added, “He was not as sad as people think he was. It’s frustrating as someone who remembers a happy brother.”
Uploaded to SoundCloud in September 2016, Hellboy is the masterpiece of Lil Peep’s lifetime. The mixtape is filled with suicidal declarations, rampant drug use, and moments of delight and impulse. All the while, Peep hid the reasons for his behavior from the listener. “I ain’t gonna lie, I’ma keep it real/I don’t wanna tell you how I feel,” he sang on “Fucked Up,” at once revealing and concealing the truth. Hellboy paints the portrait of a young person who is bursting open with emotion, trying to share his experiences as vividly as he can while covering all the formative scars that still ache. It’s callous, brazen, and indulgent, the sound of someone testing out the entire spectrum of feeling for the very first time. It is an artifact that brings you as close as possible to Lil Peep.
Hellboy arrived two disproportionately long years ago, before emo trap was marketable and mumble rap was canon. The top rap song at the time was DRAM and Lil Yachty’s “Broccoli,” which sounds ancient now. This is not to say that Lil Peep single-handedly invented a genre or door-busted his way to the top of the industry. Even a nascent underground sub-genre like emo trap had its forebears: There was the Swedish “Sad Boys” cloud rapper Yung Lean—who, by 2016, had transitioned into the auteur portion of his career—and the mysterious graveyard rapper Bones, who finagled his way onto an A$AP Rocky album before retreating back into the darkness of the web.
But Hellboy stood out because it is extreme and obvious, a record that tells you exactly what it’s about. The songs can be defined broadly: “Drive By” is about recklessness; “OMFG” is about depression; “The Last Thing I Wanna Do” is about regret and pain. Peep made big songs with a central idea that he could fill with color, in lieu of conjuring moments or people or places. They don’t develop, so much as orbit around a theme. He didn’t complicate his songwriting. The chorus of “Fucked Up,” for example, starts, “I’ve been all the way fucked up/Girl, you got me fucked up/One chance and I fucked it up.” There was no need for excess when he made the consequences of his music so steep.
Amid the clear communication, however, were clues that Peep’s mind was impossible to penetrate. “You don’t even know what I been through,” the tape begins, with Peep rapping flatly over a bass guitar lifted from the Christian metalcore band Underoath, as if to suggest that the full story is not worth the time. That line feels like an invitation into his psyche, but he’s telling you that you will not know him. You cannot. It speaks to his barrier, a built-in defensive nature. If you’re going to engage with him and listen to his art, you’re going to do so on his terms and accept what he provides.
Still, the truth in Lil Peep’s songs matched with Gustav Åhr’s reality. “I suffer from depression, and some days I wake up and I’m like, Fuck, I wish I didn’t wake up,” Peep told Pitchfork in January 2017. He sang as much on “The Song They Played [When I Crashed Into the Wall]”: “I don’t wanna die alone right now, but I admit I do sometimes.” In that same interview, Peep said he didn’t want to take anti-depressants. “I just like smoking weed and whatever other drug comes my way,” he offered as the alternative. That intake indifference shows on “Cobain,” when Peep raps, “Sniffin’ cocaine ’cause I didn’t have no Actavis.”
The brilliance in Hellboy comes with how Peep juxtaposed his desires with his reality. The tape exists in a constant state of flux between Peep’s superego and his id, as on “Interlude” where he asks, “Two racks on my new shoes/Why the fuck I do that?/Tell me, why the fuck do I do that?” What are we to believe when he sings, “I just fell in love with a bad bitch/Told me that she love me too, baby, I’m not havin’ it.” Peep could be impetuous but maybe not overly serious; expensive footwear and reciprocated love are both distressing and perhaps funny or even boring to him. Instead of deliberating toward a solution, he communicated his uncertainty.
The through line in Hellboy’s confusion is Lil Peep’s voice, which reveals pain when he declares numbness, and joy when he claims ennui. He was not a classically gifted singer; his vocals were always a bit distorted, typically bathed in reverb instead of the more en vogue Auto-Tune warble. Whether on pitch or not, though, Peep sounded perfect. Nothing resonates with me more than when he sings, “Leave me to bleed” on the title track. He doesn’t sound like someone who’s asking to be left to waste away—he sounds rich and fulfilled, satisfied with his expression of strength in a dark moment.
Hellboy was a breakthrough in Peep’s discography in part because he just made everything louder. His vocals are at the very front of the mix and he could perceive the tiniest changes in tempo or key or mood to direct the song with his icy wail. Hellboy also utilized samples more expertly than on previous Lil Peep releases. Yes, Peep basically redid “Wonderwall” and the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” at different points on his previous tape, 2016’s Crybaby. But on Hellboy, producers including Smokeasac and Nedarb handled the source material with greater care. Instead of simply repeating the originals, the beatmakers reconfigured them into Lil Peep’s world. It was still apparent, however, that the beats were constructed around a sample, no matter how obscure, unidentifiable, or historically insignificant.
Fitting these samples into Lil Peep’s signature sound meant stripping away the saccharine sentiments of emo and pop-punk, rendering them darker but more fun—less woebegone and more destructive. On the opening title track, a whiny Underoath track is transformed into a Berliozian funeral dirge—melodramatic, bombastic, and jubilant in its self-righteousness. The guitars on “Gucci Mane,” sampled from Japanese post-rock band Toe, twinkle while Peep sings about “cocaine in your bitch brain.” Hellboy amplified the internet’s tendency to flatten the scope of music history: Toe have nothing to do with Avenged Sevenfold, who have nothing to do with Aphex Twin, but they’re all sampled here. They become pieces of sound, whittled down to a single element and recontextualized for this album. It feels like no coincidence that barely two years later a rap interpretation of Sting’s “Shape of My Heart”—a schmaltzy and unfashionable song—is able to become the No. 2 song in the country.
The way Lil Peep sampled and sang and drew from alternative rock music initially stirred ire from hip-hop and indie fans, no matter how much that discourse was washed away in the wake of his death at age 21. He made music that was, at times, intentionally uncomfortable, and part of Hellboy’s appeal is in its brazen ugliness. He said things like, “Coke in her nose, and my dick all in her butt.” And yet, he could sing these words tenderly—like on the mellow “Girls,” where he says, “They try to get me mad/I try to make ’em sad/So they fall in love with me/Yeah, girls I can read ’em like a book”—but the sting was still there.
So when I listened to Lil Peep, it was for these contradictions. The songs were an alchemy of major and minor key whose narrator sang of his cheer and suffering. He sounds at his most relaxed singing, “Nobody wants to talk to me, but everyone wants to walk with me.” And there are countless times when he opposes himself, asking a woman on “Hellboy,” “Please just hold me one time,” and then telling her, “You’re the same as my ex, fuck you.” There was a joy in figuring out how this all fits together.
I felt grief when Lil Peep died, but I still don’t know how to process it. It’s weird enough to come to terms with the death of someone who you never met, especially when that person’s music told you, “And as long as I’m alive, I’ma die, baby.” The video I watched most after Peep died was a clip where he sang his friend Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s opening verse on “Absolute in Doubt,” from Crybaby. The video humanizes Peep in a way that Hellboy never intends. Singing someone else’s words, he sounds shaky. It feels like peering into the apprehension that informs the self-loathing gusto of Hellboy.
Peep was deliberately dark but also didn’t necessarily take himself seriously. Agony and weariness lived side by side. Hellboy is at times hopeful and boastful, but also hopeless and dry: “I’ma die, I ain’t even 25.” It is at once a high-stakes affair of life and death and also an opus of intentional nothingness. The record begins with a sample from a Hellboy cartoon. “Can this be him? The one I have waited centuries to see?” the character asks. “Can this be him, this Hellboy?” It’s a question left unanswered.


The backside of Nick Drake's headstone, wedged deep into the earth of Tanworth-in-Arden's parish church graveyard, reads: "Now ...

Made to Love Magic

The backside of Nick Drake's headstone, wedged deep into the earth of Tanworth-in-Arden's parish church graveyard, reads: "Now we rise and we are everywhere." The words were penned by Drake in 1974; 30 years later, they seem jarringly prophetic.
Like nearly all prematurely buried cult figures, Nick Drake is reinvented each time he is rediscovered. In 2000, the sheepish, astral musings of "Pink Moon" became synonymous with backing a Cabrio convertible out of a house party, sparking an unlikely boost in record sales and propelling Pink Moon towards platinum status nearly 26 years after Drake's death. But with each well-intentioned revival of interest, Nick Drake slips further and further out of reach, hopelessly martyred and codified, superceded and consumed by his own tragic context. Nick Drake has become: the 26-year-old prophet, the diffident enigma, the tortured precursor to Kurt Cobain, the fallen hero, the folksinger-as-folksymbol, the self-sacrificing patron saint of lonely, disaffected teenagers-- the One who died for our sins.
Even now, being indoctrinated into the cult of Drake is stupidly easy. Line the unbearably poetic circumstances of Drake's death (swallowing a fatal handful of anti-depressants, either deliberately or by accident) against the soft melancholy of his tiny canon, and witness a very specific kind of bedroom deity being birthed: Drake's three proper studio records form a bulletproof triumvirate, synergizing to create an impossibly satisfying (and telling) arc, riddled with prescient pull-quotes and expectedly dynamic emotions. Given the irrefutable magnificence of what he left behind, it's always seemed perfectly logical to assume that every single thing Nick Drake ever did should be worth piles of attention. And really, who wants to know if it's not?
Thus, it's only appropriate to approach each new Drake compilation with a bit of honest trepidation, and to be anxious about the sullying of an otherwise pristine recording career. Nick Drake wrote, recorded, and released three records between 1968 and his mysterious death in 1974, but the subsequent permutation of capitalistic yearning and superfan desperation saw Drake's discography significantly (and mercilessly) puffed up by a handful of dubious posthumous releases. Some of these efforts have been worthwhile (the excellent Time of No Reply, which rounded out the first reissue of the Fruit Tree box, and Heaven Is a Wildflower, both released in 1986), some renegade (the widely distributed Tanworth-in-Arden Home Recordings and Second Grace) and some completely superfluous (1994's sloppy Way to Blue, which unapologetically regurgitates, unchanged, ten of Heaven Is a Wildflower's fourteen tracks). In 1994, Drake's pioneering producer, Joe Boyd, promised Mojo: "Everything releasable has been released."
Compiled by engineer John Wood and former roommate Robert Kirby, Made to Love Magic is a footnote, a hiccup, a voyeuristic peepshow. It is not a revelation. Completists will revel in the resuscitation of rare/unheard tracks, including two Cambridge-era dorm demos ("Mayfair", "River Man"), outtakes from the Five Leaves Left sessions ("Joey", "Clothes of Sand"), remastered stereo versions of the mono mixes that appeared on Time of No Reply ("Rider on the Wheel", "Black-Eyed Dog", "Hanging on a Star"), two tracks with strings re-orchestrated and re-recorded by Kirby ("I Was Made to Love Magic", "Time of No Reply"), an early rendition of "Three Hours" (with Drake backed by an anonymous flautist and percussionist Rebop Kwaku Baah, later of Can and Traffic), and even causal fans will be anxious to hear the recently discovered Drake original, "Tow the Line." Recorded just four months before Drake's death, "Tow the Line" has been loudly touted as the last song Drake ever committed to tape, and his pale, listless vocals do little to detract from the artist-on-the-edge theatrics so implicit in that tag-- the song would fit neatly on Pink Moon, its frail lyrics and stark strums easily maintaining the fatalistic mood of Drake's final record.
"Tow the Line" may be Made to Love Magic's big selling point, but it's hardly the only attraction: Robert Kirby's sprawling new string arrangement on the title track, while conceptually awkward (and vaguely disingenuous), proves a marked improvement over the maudlin squealings available on previous versions. Still, Kirby can do little to stop "I Was Made to Love Magic" from sounding like a ridiculous, fawning homage to Walt Disney, all maudlin, unconvincing swoons and gooey swells, with Drake goofily crooning the song's title.
Despite the best intentions of its creators, Made to Love Magic feels disjointed and weird, and even the most mundane of improvements somehow still seem contrived-- the new, stereo mix of "Black Eyed Dog" shatters the stark precariousness of the original, wherein Drake, barely singing, howled blankly: "I'm growing old/ And I don't wanna know/ I'm growing old/ And I wanna go home." Bolstered by a thick and ominous slathering of tape hiss, the bootleg version of "Black Eyed Dog" violently suggested, however inadvertently, that Drake might not make it all the way through the song-- and that tension only ever added to its morose appeal. In some ways, Made to Love Magic nobly attempts to strip Drake of his signifiers, and to cut him loose from his cross. But broadcasting Drake's comparably mediocre drippings won't alter his deification, at least not significantly. All it really does is muddy up the water a bit.


A lot of what you need to know about Montreal duo Chromeo is built right into their name. The "chrome ...

She's in Control

A lot of what you need to know about Montreal duo Chromeo is built right into their name. The "chrome" tips us off to their penchant towards flash, veneer and the artificially formal, while the "romeo" lets us know that real lovermen lurk behind the curtain, and that it's their human fingers tweaking out this analog bling. The word's not necessarily coincidental proximity to "Cameo" also helps locate them as spiritual contemporaries to the electro-funk of the 80s. Some of this aesthetic sounds familar, sure, but as grade-A pastiche artists, Chromeo wear familiarity well.
Consisting of lifelong friends Dave 1 and P-Thugg, Chromeo was formed at the behest of Turbo Recordings head Tiga, who was already a fan of their work within local hip-hop circles and wanted to hear them try something electronic. The liquid funk workout of "You're So Gangsta" followed. Featuring a rubbery keyboard lead, a coattails-to-the-wind saxophone solo and an accompanying remix from Playgroup's Trevor Jackson, the single fell perfectly in sync with the burgeoning Vice City-inspired 8-bit revival.
She's in Control, the duo's ensuing full-length, is an 80s-plundering scrapbook of talk boxes, gloopy synths and digital funk that, for all its contrivances, proves Dave 1 and P-Thugg to be extremely keen-eared dilettantes. From the slightly unpolished quality of the recording to its carefully gated drums, the album doesn't simply appropriate the plasticky elements of the decade so much as it marinates in them.
Were its hooks not as strong, She's in Control would probably come across as mechanical and calculated, but its many bright spots elevate it above being just a shrewdly timed exercise in cultural re-appropriation. The punchy "Me and My Man" opens the record with a slap-funk bassline and a flurry of canned beats, while P-Thugg heads the haters off at the pass through heavily treated vocals ("You think it's irony/ I wish you'd try to see/ That I need someone to set me free") before being drowned out by a barrage of percussion. Even better is the album standout "Needy Girl", a bright-lights-big-city cruiser that's equal parts Hall & Oates and Mantronix. The aforementioned "You're So Gangsta" makes an appearance, as does the rubbery funk of "Destination: Overdrive", which houses a glorious instrumental hook and features an impressively gaudy abuse of the vocoder.
Admittedly, things do drag a bit during the latter half (especially on the aimless "Mercury Tears", which grinds itself into the ground with an ill-advised guitar motif), but even most of Chromeo's misfirings have something interesting behind them. Opulent in all the right ways, She's in Control has the good sense to wear its gimmick proudly.


The singer’s debut album is an intimate, soulful project that spotlights her versatile voice and the experimental touches that give the album its unique texture.

Big for You

Zsela’s music is rooted in intimacy, a term that both describes a profound closeness and serves as a euphemism for, well, fucking. In the case of the Brooklyn-based artist’s debut full-length, Big for You, her portrayal of intimacy is firmly the former. That isn’t to say the album isn’t sexy, but that her music retains the tenderness of a blossoming crush and the feelings that swell when you realize you’re witnessing parts of someone that typically remain unseen. Listening to Big for You is a bit like doing that “36 Questions That Lead to Love” exercise with the 29-year-old singer. From the first second of her new record, she introduces (or reintroduces) listeners to her hypnotic, honeyed voice and reels them into mutual vulnerability with each subsequent word.
In 2019, Zsela’s debut track “Noise” had a nocturnal beauty to her brooding, contralto vocals, and in 2020, her Ache of Victory EP perked the ears of Sade-worshippers with its memorable lo-fi R&B, including the nostalgia anthem “Earlier Days.” (Zsela, née Zsela Thompson, has a musical pedigree; her father, Marc Anthony Thompson, is the neo-soul artist Chocolate Genius.) Since then, Zsela has chiseled away at her full-length while performing alongside Caroline Polachek, Arooj Aftab, and Cat Power. She once again taps producers Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, Kelela, FKA twigs) and Gabe Wax (the War on Drugs, Soccer Mommy), resulting in an eclectic, experimental album that straddles the worlds of alt R&B and folky indie rock.
The record is an exercise in presence, at times taking in deep pulls of oxygen, at other points folding into lyrical repetition or dropping surprises that leave listeners breathless. Zsela opens the slow jam “Fire Excape” crooning a cappella in her falsetto. Then, over a building funk bassline, she sings that she’s falling in love as day breaks on the fire escape. A moment later, a hose-blast of synths drenches her voice as she finds herself helplessly “falling down” into infatuation. It’s one of the most evocative vocal hooks (and earworms) on the album, and the boingy, sultry bassline brings to mind the more spartan pop-funk arrangements of Prince, combining the remixability of a club track with the hushedness of a coffee-shop confessional.
She seems to have found that if you want to be heard in a crowded room, don’t shout—get close and speak softly. The melancholy “Moth Dance” gradually lets out layers of musical fabric; Zsela repeats “I am alive” over and over at its end, finally with a quivering voice, like an affirmation that never really resonated until now. On “Lily of the Nile,” she reveals, in a husky stage whisper, that she “hitched a ride with the bride last night” as though she’s telling you a salacious secret. And “Not Your Angel,” a cheerfully breathy electropop anthem, treats lyrical obstinance as a flirting tactic and evokes the emotive, hook-forward baroque pop of Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass.”
Some endeavors are less engaging, i.e. the baby-voiced, whimsical “Now Here You Go,” which neither enhances nor shifts the scope of the record. It segues somewhat awkwardly into the spoken-word-driven “Easy St.,” a steamy, abstract mood board of jazz guitar (performed by acclaimed avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot) and meditation. “Watersprite,” a slow-moving composition, feels indistinct alongside the more rhythmic drive of the record’s first half. Still, at 10 songs in 33 minutes, the album never overstays its welcome.
Zsela’s at that special juncture in her career—the one before too many people get in an artist’s head, want a piece of their pie, want a credit in their liner notes—that generates a refreshing authenticity. Big for You captures that rare, fearlessly vulnerable lightning in a bottle. It’s a collection of hymns for those yearning for an “I love you”—or even just a text—back.


Produced with the National’s Aaron Dessner, the introspective Canadian singer-songwriter’s stately fourth album evokes an atmosphere of quiet loveliness.

All That Emotion

In 2009, Hannah Georgas wrote a song about hoping to run into an ex at a National concert. Like most of Georgas’s music, “The National” is both an internal monologue and an address, the things she thinks but would not say: “The other day someone mentioned your name/It brought back hurt and all your pain.” As the National became arena-rock stars, and the band’s Aaron Dessner a celebrated producer in his own right, Georgas found success in her home country of Canada, garnering multiple Juno Award nominations across three albums. In 2018, after a year spent recording demos alone, she and Dessner began to collaborate on a fourth. While the Dessner-ification erodes some of Georgas’s own artistic identity, All That Emotions is stately and well-made.
Dessner still produces with the intimacy of someone making music in their garage—it’s just that the garage is now an upstate New York barn whose exterior covers a Grammy-winning album, and the sound is usually recognizable as National-adjacent. Where Georgas’ lightly chaotic music previously matched her quirky lyrics about emotionless robots and naked beaches, Dessner submerges her words in soft drum machines and felt pianos, and Georgas tones down her performances to match. On “Just a Phase,” her melodies often anticipate or echo the guitar lines, content to blend into the sound. On opener “That Emotion,” the melodies are drawn-out and laconic, the delivery laid-back and unobtrusive.
The stylistic balance of the album tilts in Dessner’s favor, which can mean that All That Emotion sounds like Taylor Swift’s folklore sounds like Eve Owen’s Don’t Let the Ink Dry sounds like Trouble Will Find Me. The one-size-fits-all approach leads to the occasional clash, as on “Easy,” where Georgas’s modest soft-rock chorus sits awkwardly over fussy Dessner crescendos. Even then, Dessner and engineer Jonathan Low keep the production immersive enough that the discrepancies are easy to ignore. Georgas and Dessner’s most successful synthesis is tucked away at the end: “Habits” soars in a way that the rest of the album actively avoids. It’s still a classic slow build, but the harmonies and guitar squeals create the same feeling of intoxication that powers Dessner’s most lavish productions.
With Dessner handling the music, Georgas defines herself through her internal monologues. “I don’t want to hold on to you,” she sings on “Change,” positing that because “love is change,” there’s no reason to stay if a relationship becomes fraught. “Someone I Don’t Know” deepens the expected sentiment, willing an ex to become unrecognizable: “Someday I’ll get over you... You’ll become something I forgot.” “Punching Bag,” a song that somehow mixes the dread of Radiohead’s “Idioteque” with Alanis Morrissette’s garrulous “Front Row,” takes the tension to a logical extreme. Though Georgas sings about needing to “save” someone, the background lyrics reveal her ambivalence: “I take you for a walk to a place that means so much to me/And go for your hand to hold you and you pull away immediately.” It’s the only moment on the album that truly feels surprising.
By insisting on quiet loveliness in all aspects of its production, All That Emotion misses out on the weirder and more fascinating elements of Georgas’ older music. The Casio SK-1 Homestar Runner drums of “Bang Bang You’re Dead” or the distortion of “Enemies” would be welcome on this record. Though Emotion is refined, it also isn’t different from Dessner’s other production work—it’s still musically reticent, covered in fog. Its clarity originates in Georgas’ ability to process what she’s feeling, and spending 40 minutes in her head as she figures things out doesn’t feel suffocating. There’s always just enough reason, an poignant insight or an intricate guitar line, to stay.

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The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s charming third album is full of recurring worries, but her nods to ’80s synth pop and adult contemporary imbue the music with a sense of lightness.

Simple, Sweet, and Smiling

Around the middle of Simple, Sweet, and Smiling, Kacy Hill is wandering outside and staring at the moon. It’s midnight, and the 27-year-old singer has slipped out of a party while her companion remains there, just down the street. She wishes she could have stayed, but she is overwhelmed by anxious fixations: “I just overthink/Can’t shut up,” she sings delicately. It’s a familiar set-up for Hill’s songs, which often motion to her surrounding scenery as she negotiates restlessly with herself. “Six,” from her last album, saw her “high up in a canyon” talking to a stranger, struggling move on from an ex; the title track of Simple, Sweet, and Smiling nods to the city horizon—“a line that fades away/’Til the trees start to blur with the skyline”—as she wrestles over the desire to feel special. Fretting is in Hill’s nature: As she’s joked on Twitter, the two words that best describe her ethos are “ambient stress.”
Simple, Sweet, and Smiling, her charming third album, is full of recurring worries: about being stagnant in your aspirations and inadequate to the people you love, about being forever plagued by dread. At the time that Hill was writing this record, her father survived a heart attack, and her agoraphobic panic disorder returned. Amidst such heaviness, the concept of being “simple, sweet, and smiling,” became an unattainable aspiration: “It was this idea, in my own little world, of not wanting to be this weight in someone else’s life,” she said. As if to be tongue-in-cheek about the fantasy of it all, she appears on the album’s cover as a pin-up girl in front of a sunset backdrop, a tourist’s vision of paradise.
Accompanying this cheesy, blissful image is a more vibrant sound. In the past, Hill has veered toward muted, skeletal R&B; the songs on her last album, Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again, didn’t rely on that much more than atmospheric synths, the pitter-patter of a drum machine, and her wispy, light falsetto. Made with the assistance of her boyfriend, Jim-E Stack, along with the composer John Carroll Kirby and, on one song, producer Ariel Rechtshaid, Simple, Sweet, and Smiling delves deeper into Hill’s interest in 1980s synth pop and adult contemporary, maintaining a misty-eyed ease. You can hear this change on the new age-y lead single “Seasons Bloom,” about the sweet, palpable relief of seeing someone you love. It starts off minimal but, as if mimicking the transition from winter to spring, turns plush and buoyant at the chorus.
Songs like “So Loud” and “Easy Going” situate Hill within Carly Rae Jepsen’s zone of windswept pop; she leans toward soul on the piano ballad “Mochi’s Interlude,” and tries more acoustic instrumentation on “Another You.” Some palettes work better than others: While Hill’s voice is pretty, it’s not particularly versatile, and its standard delicacy feels ill-fitted on the funk-inflected “The Right Time.” Meanwhile, she sounds lovely on the rich and churning opening track, “I Couldn’t Wait.” “Oh how the night feels soft,” she sighs over vivid piano, guitar, and saxophone, the elements mingling like watercolors.
Throughout Simple, Sweet, and Smiling are references to the natural world—the morning sun and the sea, the clouds and the moonlight. (You even hear the crackle of thunder on “Caterpillar.”) To many people, the environment represents groundedness and simplicity, the very traits Hill hopes for. And while the album’s songs might reflect her continuous stresses—navigating a lover’s hesitancy, not being as successful as she wants—they still feel unfussy because of her honest and straightforward lyricism. In several songs, she is learning to make her world more still and manageable by asking for what she wants. “One day you’ll look back/And barely recognize that you/You’ve been talking to,” she sings on the closer, ever so reassuring.

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Assisted by the pianist Phillip Bush and her colleagues in the percussion ensemble Meridian, the American composer tests conventional notions of musical narrative.

Sarah Hennies: Reservoir 1: Preservation

Reservoir 1: Preservation

Much the way Paul Klee compared drawing a line to taking a walk, American composer Sarah Hennies’ Reservoir 1: Preservation feels like what happens when a percussion ensemble throws on its hiking boots. The 56-minute work, the first of three Reservoir pieces based on the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind, is scored for three percussionists, who shake, hit, and tease their instruments into vividly atmospheric shapes over a piano’s sparse, mournful melody.
The piano is ever present in Reservoir 1, its jazzy, sometimes jarring lines played with admirable restraint by Phillip Bush. But it is the percussion, performed by Hennies alongside her partners in the improvisational group Meridian, Tim Feeney and Greg Stuart, that stars. We are used to percussion playing a supporting role to the whims of melody, or serving as a tool for dancing. Here, though, it dominates, driving Reservoir 1's heady atmosphere as if indifferent to the demands of the piano's chords. This is percussion as a tool for expression, an end in itself rather than a means toward a wider goal.
The dramatic range achieved by such apparently limited means is impressive. Toward the start of the piece, shakers cut through the piano’s artfully dripped melody to inject urgency and life, their rhythms overlapping in a way that suggests the babble of hurried conversation. Later, percussive touches bring tension, echoing the nervous patter of rain on a tin roof as it builds to a storm. From there, Reservoir 1 dives into emotional extremes. At 26 minutes, a globular droning effect conveys drowsy serenity; five minutes later this has curdled into paranoia and violence, as blunt percussive blows strike malignantly, recalling percussionist Alasdair Malloy’s meticulous assault on a slab of meat for Scott Walker’s The Drift. Through all this, the piano drifts onward, discernible but somehow out of reach, the mysterious unconscious to the juddering passion of percussion’s conscious mind.
The constancy of the piano helps to hold Reservoir 1 together; its internal logic bonds the album into a coherent, satisfying listen. But Reservoir 1 is adaptable, too. Hennies has said that the idea behind the three Reservoir pieces—the second was premiered in spring 2019 by flautist Claire Chase and vocal performance ensemble Constellation Chor, while the third is intended to be a piece for strings—is that they will work together and individually. It’s also possible to cherry-pick outstanding moments from Reservoir 1’s well-rounded whole. I love the stumbling rhythm between bass drum and woodblocks around the 10-minute mark, which seems to delight in slipping out of frame, and the haunting scrabble at 44 minutes that echoes the ghostly cracking of an abandoned boat at sea.
The occasional frustration with Reservoir 1 is that it can feel like it would be better experienced live than on record. Meridian drift so far from typical percussive sounds over the 56-minute piece that human nature demands to know how this music is being made. But what the listener loses in understanding, they gain in mystery. Hennies has spoken of the importance of recordings in removing the visual associations that we have around music, with the sight of a cymbal being played, for example, automatically triggering certain assumptions. On Reservoir 1 the shape-shifting percussive palette is all the more gripping for its enigmatic origins, like a magic trick that must forever remain secret. Hennies’ work is an oasis of inscrutability, where ignorance is bliss and time slips by unhurried.


With cohesive production and lyrics that veer from tender to stoic, the Detroit rapper’s latest is his most meticulous project yet.

MOB

Since the release of FACE in January, Babyface Ray has checked into another class of rap stardom. Aside from FACE becoming the Detroit rapper’s highest-charting project to date—debuting at number 31 on the Billboard 200, nearly 100 spots higher than 2021’s Unfuckwitable—Ray was included in XXL’s 2022 Freshman Class and, just last week, made his late-night TV debut on the Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. His performance of “Masterpiece,” a standout song from his flashy and melancholic new album MOB, was backgrounded by a shot of the Detroit River, an emblem that amplifies the duality of Ray’s stories. He’s a rapper who’s traveled the world but can’t leave the house without a gun, offering advice to the youth while in the process of curbing a lean addiction. MOB follows these complicated leads, burrowing deeper into the troubled thoughts and labored fruits Ray has always explored in his music.
Ray’s raps typically glide with the efficiency of cold steel, but between forced features, uninspired beat changes, and some ultimately half-baked ideas, his major-label projects have all had a handful of shaky moments. MOB deads that trend, standing as his most meticulous project yet. There’s little fat and just enough experimentation to showcase what Ray does best: bring his world of opulence and tragedy to life with a stoicism that would send chills up Ghost from Power’s spine. On “Wonderful Wayne & Jackie Boy,” he compares his strategic movement to that of Golden State Warriors forward Klay Thompson and claims he’s ready to “knock his shit off, Mr. Potato Head” before praying that his karma “don’t come back on my daughters” one song later on “Rap Politics.” Ray’s deadpan is surprisingly malleable, bringing dimension to his boasts and confessions without losing his distinct sound. His tone rarely changes but still sells the danger of popping Percocets while driving luxury cars (“Brand New Benz”), the humor in comparing his misanthropy to Tommy Hilfiger’s racism scandal (“Crazy World”), and the glamour of hiring a personal shopper (“Nice Guy”) with equal skill. At any given moment, he’s as funny, menacing, or benevolent as he needs to be.
Ray’s persona is even more affecting when he digs deeper into his life. Attempts to stop his lean habit—and simultaneously judging others for indulging— come up several times, most notably on the intro to “Spill My Cup.” There are more mentions of his daughters, cousins, and nephew, all of whom he wants to spoil and prepare for a cruel world. These thoughts hit hardest on “Vonnie Skit,” an interlude that dwells on a conversation between Ray and his mother about how she gave up her dreams to raise Ray and his brother. Ray isn’t immune to feelings of remorse, but the tender streak on MOB gives its sadder moments the heft of diary entries from a capo scared enough of the future to start memorializing the past.
MOB’s stable of producers bring variety to the album’s sound without messing with its consistency. “Rap Politics,” “Crazy World,” and “Massacre” crackle with dark synths and 808s—courtesy of Shawn Ferrari, Space, and Sledgren, respectively—that jog next to the raps like a courtside cameraman would follow basketball players. Pooh Beatz and Topside continue to evolve the fast-paced Michigan sound with a handful of beats each. Pooh’s piano plinks and drum hits on “Masterpiece” feel like a stadium-ready R&B beat turned inside out and given a peppy skip; on “Wavy Gang Immortal,” Ray and guests Samuel Shabazz and King Hendrick$ trade heartfelt verses backed by Topside’s chilly vocal samples and keys that swirl like the eye of a snowstorm. Each beat impacts and peels off differently, but they all serve the same wistful tone that remains Ray’s sweet spot.
Every new Ray album has bits of incremental growth. He’s a little more thoughtful and a little more prone to flex that new Tesla and put on for the Motor City in the process. On MOB, Ray is more mature but unafraid to bask in what he’s earned, putting his skills to use on the most cohesive set of beats he’s rapped over since 2019’s MIA Season 2. In a recent profile with GQ, he admitted that he’s not competing with anyone in particular, just “trying to be the best for me right now.” What MOB proves is that good music and hard work can be their own self-fulfilling prophecy.


After years of recording and quietly releasing beatific folk music, the Bay Area singer/songwriter flexes her voice and vision on pop songs of complicated feelings and private anxieties.

Your Dog

Rose Droll makes music that could soundtrack a yoga retreat. The 10 tracks on her debut LP, Your Dog, feel like individual breathing exercises. Her vocal range—from whisper-sung refrains to all-out shouts—mirrors a pranayama, a series of breathing techniques that transitions from panting to extended exhalation. Your Dog crisscrosses low-budget electronica, soft bedroom pop, folk-punk, and even a little hip-hop, stretching Droll’s limbs as a producer, percussive polymath, delicate vocalist, and deliberate lyricist.
Your Dog is Droll’s first LP, but she has been floating around the Bay Area scene for almost a decade, quietly recording airy, beatific folk music. Dig into her catalog, and you’ll find tiny wellsprings of plaintive plainsongs and careful harmonies. Rather than conjuring closeness, the production of her lo-fi bedroom pop has often imparted a sense of depth. On the 2017 EP Photograph, fingerpicked guitars drift in the distance while melodies linger like mere suggestions.
Not so on Your Dog, which begins with a guttural incantation—full-bodied and low, somewhere between a sigh and a shout. Though tempered by sparse xylophone hits and lolling guitars, her holler is an immediate break with her once-hushed coos. She continues to shapeshift, playing the parts of a savvy poet and a scorned seductress. On “Hush,” a whisper-sung cypher cuts short a pitch-shifted rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.” The song twists around Droll’s verses, her gliding cadence and breezy tone suggesting a cross between Norah Jones and Digable Planets. There’s surprising rap battle bravado here, too: “So baby when you gonna give a fuck? It doesn’t cut it to rely on luck.” Just as you’ve caught up with her lyrical hopscotch, though, the beat disappears, revealing another child’s tune, “Ring Around the Rosie.”
If her previous releases were wistful, they were at least sonically linear. But this record sees her playing with the predictable patterns of songwriting. On “Boy Bruise,” spoken-word bits, staccato shouts, and magnetic chants nest between the lyrics, bursting out momentarily as though coming from a music box. Not every experiment with form is so successful. “Cat June” drags as it pits sheepish declarations against painfully slow raps. But when it works, like on the neo-R&B track “Fat Duck,” Droll is an electrifying shape-shifter—bratty one moment and sweet the next, reminiscent of Miya Folick’s frenzied energy.
Droll’s emphasis on rhyming at all costs sometimes creates the effect of simplistic campfire sing-alongs. During “Riddle,” she begins, “I had a hell of a time making these memories of mine/Fit like a fiddle into just another riddle of mine.” It is tidy to the point of being empty, the syllables coming off more like a nursery rhyme than a nostalgic reflection. She relies too much on rap-whispered affectations, too, something the singing, scatting, and shouting of singles like “Boy Bruise” and “Hush” reinforce. Still, at her best, her writing feels like that of an older sister or ex-lover—worn-in, intimate, direct. “I know you keep the bath lit to dull all of your senses,” she starts slowly on “Fat Duck” before cutting to the point. “But now is not the time to sit with a joint lit/Shitting little bricks over the small stuff.”
It’s tempting to call Your Dog breezy, but that diminishes the anxieties Droll expresses, reducing her to the sum of her mostly acoustic past. Droll has slowly moved away from the folk that once defined her; on Your Dog, she actively seeks new spaces. This is an artifact of self-discovery, then, one that often defies expectations of how a singer like Droll should sound.


The Long Island emo outfit pushes the classic poison-pen sound into brightly colored power-pop territory.

Super Enthusiast

In 2019, “emo from Long Island” and “Long Island emo” are two very different things. Over the last few years, the classic poison-pen-valentine sound has slowly commingled with the bookish, bashful indie rock that was once seen as its antidote in the era of Fuse video blocks. While Oso Oso’s Basking In the Glow remains the most brilliant example, you can also hear it in the extended universe of associates and peers that has sprung up around Jade Lillitri. Guitarist and Yunahon Mixtape producer Billy Mannino released a strong debut this year as Bigger Better Sun, while Lillitri’s former State Lines bandmate Tom Werring bowed with Yeah Is What We Have; both drew on Death Cab and Teenage Fanclub more often than the Starting Line or Taking Back Sunday.
Macseal is the project of singer-songwriter Ryan Bartlett, but the Lillitri EU extends here as well—the band’s Francesca Impastato once served as Oso Oso’s touring drummer. Unlike Werring and Mannino, who more or less arrived fully formed, Bartlett on Super Enthusiast sounds stuck in the middle road, trying to summon the confidence to change lanes. This problem is hardly exclusive to Macseal—as with alt-country, grunge, and shoegaze in earlier years, power-pop is emo’s exit strategy du jour, and just ask longtime Joyce Manor fans what they think of Barry Johnson getting into Big Star. Turns out that power-pop and emo aren’t instantaneously compatible—emo is driven by anxious, imperfect musicianship where the former prides itself on being finicky and clever, emotional distance often proof of a sense of craft. Macseal prove to be adept students, as evidenced by the cascading melodic resolution in “Graduating Steps” or the beaming falsetto lines neatly layered like rainbow Jello on “Without a Trace.” Against the kind of meandering verse melodies that typified Macseal’s earliest work, the pop classicism here is endearing and jarring.
As he did with Wild Pink’s Yolk in the Fur, producer Justin Pizzoferrato exfoliates a once-scruffy band for proper mainstream presentation and otherwise trusts the songwriting to provide the dynamic frills. But while “Always Hazy” and “Irving” could safely blend into the latest All New Indie Spotify list, they can just easily pass by without any kind of impression. Both songs are victims of Bartlett not completely trusting himself. There’s a discernible emotional core in each—a coming of age, a realization of failure—but both are obscured by lyrics that sacrifice clarity and concision to read nice on paper. “What’s clear to me, has always been hazy,” he sings—an unintentionally meta moment.
However, the late-autumn crispness of the sound (and its early November release date) is no accident. Super Enthusiast addresses life from a standpoint where the afterglow of summer or graduation has long faded and the reality of “Where do I go from here?” has set in. “They reserve a special kind of defeat/For when your new home spits you back to old/They expect a swift and solemn retreat/Back to the hole that you first crawled out of,” Szilagyi moans on “Graduating Steps,” an earnest show of empathy for boomerang kids who watch friendships fade, people outgrow each other, and nostalgia become a trap. If “Graduating Steps,” like much of Super Enthusiast, feels like it’s stopping shy of conveying the kind of energy suitable for its youthful milieu, notice that it’s describing a special kind of defeat—a point where anger gives way to surrender. If Super Enthusiast seems hamstrung with uncertainty about Macseal’s next phase, that’s pretty much the entire point.

Buy: Rough Trade
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