The Berlin-based DJ’s first official mix in four years sounds new and vital even when steeped in retro sounds. Her encyclopedic taste and smooth, linear style of mixing defines the shape of the set.

Fabric 94

Music “with a certain mindset” was the brief that the Dutch-born, Berlin-based DJ and electronic musician known as Steffi gave to her friends when she solicited new material for Fabric 94, her first official mix CD since 2013’s Panorama Bar 05. Whatever further specifications she may have given them, that mindset rings out clear as a bell from virtually every bar of the 70-minute mix, which she composed entirely from the exclusives she sought out. It's remarkably cohesive both in mood and style: energetic but never wanton, bittersweet but never wallowing. Songs are steeped in the synthesizers and whip-cracking drum programming of 1990s electro and IDM, yet because it covers a set of stylistic cues that aren’t particularly in fashion right now, the set is also free of retro pretense. Most of these tunes could be mistaken for tracks put out by tiny Dutch or Detroit labels 20-odd years ago. To hear the style sounding so vital is a little bit like spotting a bird long thought to be extinct flourishing in the wild.
Many artists have utilized Fabric mixes as proving grounds for their own material: Ricardo Villalobos, Omar S, Shackleton, and Daphni have all delivered sets comprising only original productions and custom edits. Steffi’s decision to commission a set’s worth of exclusive material marks a new twist in that approach, one that goes to the heart of her interest in narrative—in the mix as a kind of essay, a thought experiment. “It’s very important to me to tell a story when I’m DJing,” she told RBMA in 2015. “The records that I choose have certain connections, in my head, with each other.”
The story she tells here has to do with sounds that tend to get left out of the standard, binary accounts of house and techno as dance music’s twin poles. Instead of steady, four-to-the-floor grooves, she opts for slippery syncopations and rhythms that lurch from side to side, reflecting on her earliest years as a DJ, when she cut her teeth playing electro, Miami bass, and laser-cut grooves from labels like Warp and Rephlex. Despite the jagged beats, Steffi’s smooth, linear style of mixing defines the shape of the set: Her blends are seamless yet dynamic, and tracks fit together like robotic hands in robotic gloves.
She begins with scene-setting shoegaze chords—perhaps the only element in the entire mix that isn’t descended from “Numbers” and Man Parrish—and a gravelly scrap of NASA control room chatter. It's a fitting way to set up Voiski’s “Sound of Distance”: Combining tension-building drums with unfurling synths, it serves as a launch pad for everything to come. The next few tracks build on that widescreen vibe, with gorgeous pads falling across bruising drums like sunbeams cutting through thick clouds. Echoes of mid-‘90s Autechre and Carl Craig are all over “No Life on the Surface,” by Doms & Deykers (Steffi and the Dutch producer Martyn), and Dexter’s “66” offers an even more thrilling take on classic IDM, with stuttering vocal loops reminiscent of Gescom or Phoenecia perforating a legato melody that’s pure Boards of Canada. Forceful and fluid all at once, it marks the set’s first major peak.
From there she steps back and concentrates on rebuilding energy with a series of dark, ominous cuts infused with electric jolts of bass. The sun pokes through the murk again in the middle of Duplex’s “Voidfiller,” as bright funk keys splash over rolling, mechanical grooves. Much iconic electro and techno was inspired by Detroit’s car culture, and Fabric 94 excels as an automotive soundtrack: It takes its inspirations from long, halogen-lit avenues and graceful cloverleaf sweeps. Heading into the final stretch, she tunnels into deep electro-funk with a driving, atmospheric cut from Late Night Approach, a Milan act with scant profile, and a kinetic, deeply hued tune—sounding like a Miami electro remix of Violator-era Depeche Mode—from Afik Naim, a new producer on Steffi’s Dolly label. All hell breaks loose for the finale. With Dexter & Virginia’s “Off the Beat,” the drop-top pops open to reveal the tremolo-soaked synth flourishes of electro at its funkiest—a pure party jam—while Privacy’s shimmering “Broke” takes us out with a melancholy Drexciya tribute. As with her Panorama Bar 05 mix, there’s no lengthy outro, just a gentle fade to black—a reminder that, as moody as it might get, Steffi’s favored mindset always puts rhythm first.


Music has always been just one aspect of the former YouTuber’s cryptic multimedia experience, but Flux makes it finally feel like the most important one.

Flux

There’s an entire subgenre of videos dedicated to catching the YouTuber and walking avatar Poppy breaking character. These clips present their findings as a kind of gotcha journalism—watch as Poppy’s soft voice sharpens in response to an unpleasant interview question, or as she laughs through a bit she should be playing straight. The artist and musician born Moriah Pereira dove headfirst into the uncanny valley with her early video work, creating an android-like character whose cheerily flat speech and demeanor felt like a Lynchian satire of vloggers. The Poppy persona was so unsettling that seeing the person behind it briefly appear human was disturbing in its own way, like witnessing a glitch in the matrix. But over the past few years, Poppy’s albums have increasingly offered revealing glimpses of the woman behind the mask. Flux is her most unguarded work yet, and it’s the closest we’ve come yet to meeting the real Poppy.
On 2020’s I Disagree, Poppy flicked a lit match at her YouTube-era identity, charring its edges with chaotic hyperpop and nu-metal riffage. She couldn’t fully burn her former self down, though, at least not when her former creative partner Titanic Sinclair was still involved. (Sinclair co-wrote every song on I Disagree and directed two of its music videos, though he and Poppy had parted ways at the end of 2019 after she accused him of manipulative behavior.) On Flux, she finishes the job. The album’s catharsis feels convincingly raw, and the anarchic genre mashups that could sometimes feel shticky on I Disagree have been subsumed into something more seamless. She’s still a musical polymath, but she’s learned how to channel her omnivorous tastes into a cohesive whole.
Most of the textures Poppy explores on Flux are rooted in rock music, and she spends much of the record sounding more like the frontwoman of a killer band than a pop star. That’s perhaps an inevitable result of recording live in the studio with her touring musicians, a decision that lends the songs a sweaty, electric frisson. Poppy and her band work through excursions into pop-punk, shoegaze, grunge, dream pop, and in a few carefully chosen moments, the metallic fury that served as I Disagree’s calling card. Where that album delighted in smuggling a Slipknot riff into sugary pop like a razorblade in a candy apple, Flux comes by its bursts of heaviness more honestly. At the climax of “On the Level,” Poppy’s self-proclaimed “first love song,” a chugging thrash passage overtakes the mix. It’s overwhelming in the way that falling in love is, channeling that rush of blood that makes your head swim. “Sometimes love will find you, and it comes at the most unexpected of times, and it’s a nice feeling,” Poppy told DIY of her recent engagement to vampiric shock-rapper Ghostemane. “On the Level” invites us to share in that feeling.
Elsewhere, Poppy taps into her rage. The vicious pop-punk of “Lessen the Damage” sounds like Paramore with harsh vocals—a “good 4 u” for the Hot Topic set. “Her” is one of several songs that feels like a pointed rebuke of her ousted collaborator: “Give her a taste/Take it away/Under your thumb/Tell her to stay.” Its empowering chorus is a moment of triumph for this new, liberated Poppy, who “picked herself up, put her back together.” Delivering such obviously autobiographical lines in the third person is a canny touch from an artist still in the process of shaking off the character she once played. When the storming metal guitars return deep into the otherwise serene closing track, “Never Find My Place,” Poppy screams “You broke into my life!” over and over. The effect is purifying.
Music has always been just one aspect of the Poppy multimedia experience, but Flux makes it finally feel like the most important one. It’s been a long journey, from going viral with a cotton-candy ASMR video to making the kind of vibrant, sophisticated pop songs that populate the album. Yet every previous version of Poppy—every outdated operating system—informs who she is today. “So Mean” is the only song on Flux where she reverts to her former character’s small, synthetic voice, to ask “How did I get here?” That’s a big question, but with Flux, it feels like Poppy’s finally on her way to answering it.

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Faye Webster adds gorgeous orchestral arrangements to songs from her most recent albums, drawing on Old Hollywood drama to expose the emotion in her words.

Car Therapy Sessions

Faye Webster knows the power of an arrangement. Never one to relegate her instrumentation to mere backup, she has a knack for underscoring the emotional resonance of her words, whether through a well-placed pedal steel mewl or a nimbly unwinding bassline. Her typical compositions are lush yet economical, sitting well against lyricism that’s at once vulnerable and dry. But she tries her hand at something different with her new EP, Car Therapy Sessions, in which she and a 24-piece orchestra reimagine several songs from her last two records, 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club and 2021’s I Know I’m Funny haha, plus one new entry, “Car Therapy.”
Created and conducted by Trey Pollard (Foxygen, Natalie Prass), these orchestral arrangements sound like love letters to golden age Hollywood. The instrumentation is strictly classical, and Drew Vandenberg’s production is rich and glimmering. For fans, it’s an Easter egg hunt to hear how the particulars of the songs are translated. “Cheers (To You & Me)” most pointedly illustrates the value of these transformations, based as it is on Webster’s rockiest cut. Without the anchor of the original track’s robust drums, there’s an insistent lurching feel to its cellos as they mimic distorted guitar, giving the song a new, almost drunken swagger; the closing guitar solo, transposed to violin, ends the EP on a triumphant high.
Webster, who recorded live with the orchestra in view, is having a lot of fun with her vocals: controlling them tighter, flexing them a little more, and imbuing them with new drama. But it’s also apparent that she’s genuinely moved by these gorgeous interpretations of her songs. Rising to meet the occasion, she delivers some of her best vocal performances to date, like her tender, entrancing repetition of the refrain at the end of “Kind Of (Type of Way)”.
Most interesting is how the maximalism and earnest vintage homage of these interpretations strips away the defensive irony in Webster’s lyrics, exposing naked emotion in the exact same words. That’s clear even in the new track “Car Therapy,” as Webster quietly requests, “Hold my body and I’ll forget I hate me”*—*no “haha” here. Where the original “Sometimes” is a dreamy slow dance, this version—“Sometimes (Overanalyze)”—sounds like the heartbreaking final act of a musical, Webster alone and hopeless under a spotlight just before the curtain falls. And in the second half of “Suite: Jonny,” which combines a two-part song from Atlanta Millionaires Club, Webster hams up her spoken-word delivery atop an instrumental that sounds like a score, turning a voicemail into a film monologue. Like the rest of the EP, it’s audacious, but Webster knows what she’s doing. These arrangements make her a star.


The first thing to know about Greetings from Michigan, the third album from Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens, is that ...

Sufjan Stevens: Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State

The first thing to know about Greetings from Michigan, the third album from Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens, is that its creator was born there. Few albums more clearly evoke their namesake: Towering pines, highways paved through granite walls, great lakes and deep valleys resonate in its gentle piano, muted trumpets, and close-mic'd production-- which is particularly odd, given that Stevens' home city is Detroit. It leads you to wonder how one could craft an album so delicate from an inspiration its author calls a "monstrous concrete prison" which has been "destroyed by its infidelity." Certainly, the album is run through with a wistful melancholia, with lyrics that reference the city's dead machinery and empty warehouses. But there's a reason the album's title greets its listeners from the state and not the city: The record is a beautiful, sprawling homage to the self-described pleasant peninsula.
Fittingly, Stevens opens the record on a pensive note: "Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)" is a lulling, depressive hymn comprised of dew-drop piano and a shimmering backgrounded trumpet. Like Roger & Me, the song focuses on the titular city's impaired economy and empty rust-belt factories, albeit with a more bathetic and singular approach than the everyman journalism of Michael Moore: Stevens softly sings, "Since the first of June/ Lost my job and lost my room/ I pretend to try/ Even if I try alone."
"All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!" follows, offering the first of only a handful of upbeat tunes. Here, the pace shifts to a sound more informed by the metropolis at the opposite corner of Lake Michigan, echoing the tight, sophisticated arrangements of Chicago's post-rock scene. The lengthier "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)" follows suit, also invoking a vaguely Sea and Cake-inspired background over which Stevens layers an extensive list of shoutouts to Michigan cities, as well as a warped guitar solo and nice tempo implosions.
"For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" is a banjo-led boy/girl bluegrass spiritual, dour but uplifted by the kind of sighing instrumentation Jim O'Rourke made his name on, while the strumming of "Romulus" evokes the fragile folk of Eric's Trip and Nick Drake. Here, Stevens' pen most achingly depicts the everyday sadness of muted familial disruptions. The song's narrator remembers his mother distantly: "Our grandpa died in a hospital gown/ She didn't seem to care/ She smoked in her room and colored her hair/ I was ashamed of her."
Equally beautiful are the sporadically placed instrumentals. If Philip Glass wrote pop songs, they might sound something like these, as Stevens often uses Glass-like patterns as the foundation for his lushly produced, moody indie pop. "Tahquamenon Falls" is what I took to be a glockenspiel clocked with a number of mallets and buried within a diaphanous echo of reverb; it varies and shifts slightly for over two minutes before trailing off upward. "Alanson, Crooked River" is similar in tone, perhaps using ice cubes or the rims of wine glasses as instrumentation. The mostly instrumental "Redford (For Yia-Yia & Pappou)" is a gently repetitious piano piece with whispered notes at the end: The human voices that resound here do so as isolated elements of a winter breeze, not as fully articulated words or thoughts.
If Stevens can be at all faulted on Michigan, it's for erring on the side of indulgence, with the occasional track running too long. "Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)" drags somewhat over its nine-minute runtime, though to be fair, it does bloom icily towards the end. Its sleety water crystal feel reminded me of the almost anonymous hoarfrost of mid-period, pre-Kinks-fixated Lilys and the vastly underrated work of the 90s D.C. indie pop band Eggs. On the ebullient eight-minute "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head!", the repetition works: Nowhere else on the album is the Philip Glass influence quite so notable, as its note patterns occur and recur, adding layers and resonance through chance sonic meetings.
On "The Upper Peninsula", Stevens harmonizes with The Danielson Famile's Megan and Elin Smith: "I live in America with a pair of Payless shoes.../ I've seen my wife at the K-mart/ In strange ideas, we live apart." It's this kind of sad observation of the lives of the working class that repeatedly moved me on this album, as Stevens offers both realism and idealization in his portrait. The record is stacked with impressive space for Stevens' shimmering geography, and it manages a melancholy beauty; Michigan is a frost-bound tone poem in which average people live out their victories and defeats with a shadowy, dignified grace.


The debut EP from upcoming singer Ogi Ifediora introduces a gifted vocalist and charismatic performer who’s still finding her feet as a songwriter.

Monologues EP

Los Angeles-based R&B singer Ogi Ifediora got her start posting cover songs on Instagram as a senior at Northwestern University. After PJ Morton shared her take on his song “Alright,” producer No I.D. got in touch; a record deal and tour opening for Snoh Aalegra soon followed. On her debut EP, Monologues, Ogi wields her voice with precision and joy. Though there’s room to hone her original songwriting, the project is an impressive showcase of her technical skill and vocal prowess.
Ogi’s musical background—she sang with an a capella group in college—is apparent in her enveloping harmonies and precise vocal control. The jazzy arrangements and layered vocals are dense and complex, but her singing feels effortless. Listening to Ogi’s voice wind from a gauzy falsetto to her golden deeper register on “Let Me Go,” you feel completely immersed, as if watching a wave of fog roll in. EP highlight “Bitter” boosts the energy, with syncopated vocals skipping over snappy drums and a bubbling horn line. The arrangement conveys prickly frustration at feeling inadequate in a relationship, but Ogi’s confident delivery implies that she’s still very much in control.
She has described Monologues as her “audition into the industry,” a collection of six songs selected to showcase her range. The project feels like a sample pack, covering a variety of emotional states in broad strokes. On “Let Me Go,” Ogi cooly informs a lover that they deserve someone who cares more about them. She grapples with other people’s resentment on “Envy,” flexes on “I Got It,” and devotes a ballad to a struggling loved one on “IKYK.” Each new direction could be a viable concept for a longer project, but since it never focuses on any one mood or theme, the EP feels a bit scattered.
In part, this is because the lyrics on Monologues can be vague, gesturing at feelings and experiences with less nuance than Ogi brings to her singing. “Was the problem always me?/Or the fact you can’t believe/I have what I have and that you don’t,” she sings on “Envy,” never quite moving beyond a generic description of envy itself. At other times, the metaphors can border on corny. “All these blessings falling in my lap like I’m a grandpa/All this money I go swimming in it like a tadpole,” she sings on “I Got It,” a moment of would-be bravado that comes off stilted.
But on the effervescent “Bitter,” storytelling comes second to the restive mood Ogi establishes. “I hate that I’m not what you want,” she repeats, her voice full of frustration. But as she stacks up harmonies and maneuvers around them with the ease of water slipping through your fingers, it’s also clear she’s taking pleasure in every note she sings. Even as she parses out angst, envy, and disdain, her charisma makes these songs shine.


The genre-defying rapper’s third album pays tribute to the artists who helped shape his sound—and sounds like something else altogether.

GUMBO’!

Before he was a rapper, Pink Siifu was a dancer. “I would battle people at parties,” he told the blog Passion of the Weiss in 2018. “I wasn’t a b-boy, but pop locking and krumping and dances I grew up on—I was doing that.” You can hear it in his music, which prioritizes movement and feel above almost everything else. The Alabama-born artist seems more concerned with following his own kinetic energy than abiding by the rules of genre or narrative focus.
When Siifu occupies a style, he tilts it, keeping that sense of play alive. His early Bandcamp releases were spacey, jazz-inflected sound collages that occasionally waded into ambient. He raps in koans; he doesn’t tell stories so much as he drops hints. He can create strangely memorable moments out of densely muttered lines, but he also knows when to just let the beat ride, saying only enough to propel the song along. On last year’s Negro, Siifu yelped and screamed, begging for deliverance from the earthy pain caused by racial oppression and police violence. His latest album, GUMBO’!, is a sprawling homage to the artists that purportedly shaped his sound (especially Dungeon Family). Mainly, though, it serves to prove how unique his sound is.
On GUMBO’!, Siifu deconstructs hip-hop and neo-soul, treating the genres as blank canvases for his own odd compositions. Over the G-funk ambience and clomping hi-hats of “Bussin’ (Cold),” he uses his voice as percussion, repeating the words “Snakes all eye see” in a clipped monotone. Cincinnati rapper Turich Benjy drops in with more straightforward lines (“Can’t keep fucking these dusty ass hoes/Wondering where the money had gone”) that seem to exist just to remind listeners that this was supposed to be a trap song. On “SMILE (wit yo Gold),” Siifu is backed by singers V.C.R and Coco O. and the jazz-funk band Butcher Brown, who add warm percussion and syrupy guitar. He sings the song’s title with a raspy growl of desperation that contrasts with their more mellifluous contributions; it’s as if the other musicians are pulling him away from his angst.
When Siifu wants to, he can skillfully step into the frame provided by one of his references. On the gorgeous “Scurrrrd,” a posse cut halfway through the album, he comes as close as possible to recreating a classic Outkast song. Over a Rhodes-centered beat created by Siifu and Richmond producer DJ Harrison, it opens with spoken word by Dungeon Family associate Big Rube (who famously provided some of the most poignant lines on “Liberation”) and closes with Georgia Anne Muldrow’s earnest promises of comfort and health for her son. In between all of this, Siifu details hardships and prays for his family. It’s a loving emulation, played straight and made with care.
But on most other tracks—the rage-filled “Roscoe’!,” the introspective Alchemist production “Living Proof (Family),” the playful “lng hair dnt care”—Siifu is more inscrutable. He buries his voice low in the mix and goes wherever his mood takes him, even if that makes him hard to pin down. As he told Stereogum recently, “I just want you to just listen to this, and hopefully be like, ‘Nah, Siifu his own cat. He’s on his own shit.’” GUMBO’! is an ambitious sprawl that doesn’t always work perfectly. But when it does, there’s nothing else like it.

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This Portland, Ore. duo have been racking up Iron & Wine comparisons but there's something a bit more avant going on beneath its rustic façade.

Words Are Dead

That echo chamber's a dangerous thing: A number of critics have mistakingly labeled Horse Feathers-- the Portland, Ore., duo of Justin Ringle and Peter Broderick-- another folksy Americana troupe with an interesting vocalist. Broderick, a talented 19-year-old multi-instrumentalist, certainly adds folk instruments such as banjo, mandolin, and saw to emotive, gothic backdrops; he also accents Ringle's quavery, near-falsetto with cello, piano, viola, violin, and various sorts of almost-funky percussion. Ignore the chatter-- there's something a bit more avant going on here.
The two approach music rustically, but the Iron & Wine name-checks are off the mark-- there's a different vibe and pacing and phrasing entirely. You could snag some Sam Beam beard curls on "Dustbowl", but what to do with the truly swinging send-out of "Falling Through the Roof"? Or "Untitled", a quiet bit of chamber piano that makes me think of a slow, sad, last waltz? Same goes for the syrupy keyed'n'bowed ministrations of "Like Lavender".
Ringle, who contributes guitar, banjo, and some percussion in addition to his arresting voice, is reminiscent of John Orth from Holopaw; there's something more gorgeously unhinged, though-- not mentally, but the way he sings with his entire body. You keep thinking he'll crack. At times, his pronunciations come out like a male Chan Marshall-- but on a bit too much caffeine. Listening to "Honest Doubters" from a distance, I heard the ghost of Jeff Mangum or Arthur Russell (a real ghost) via Kelley Polar.
In the end, forget the RIYL one-sheet copy and instead absorb a fragment of "Like Lavender"'s track marks: "Some things always stay the same/ How you looked wet from all the rain/ Like lavender the small of your hair, silly errs postponing your despair." Follow this with a small, stringed flourish to complete the silent epiphany. The ambiance of the album is great: "Hardwood Pews" rapidly builds from bedroom hush (and blush) to saw-bent crescendo. "Blood on the Snow" lists body parts in a somber parade-- "Their heads, their lips, their chests, their hips, they walk. Them bones they move, they talk. Their bones they bleed they rot"-- a deep-pool cello acting as slithery metronome.
Lyrically, Ringle's fond of thorny repetitions: "Goodnight, night, night" or "Like how her bark, it has calmed before her bite, bite, bite." These extra words add an emphasis, but also keep the libretto moving. For such a sweetly silent (but always swiveling) set, there's a ton of activity: "Walking and running, sucking and fucking at your will. You won't debate us, nor entertain us. It's your thrill." A truck-full of action verbs: "they move, they touch." Gathering bruises, there are trips to Heaven and Hell (and, well, Hades). Tongues "taste the sky." The boys hop a little waltz, tumbling through a bruised roof. Sometimes Ringle makes his voice quaver intentionally, stuttering with his tonsils.
Amid the blood, snow, sawdust, roses ("bones may break, parts go on bleeding"), the body's breakdown is seen as but another way to move. Worms singing in your guts, creating air holes-- you, yourself, become an instrument. Maybe this gets at what the album's title means to say: It's okay words are dead because they'll find newer forms within their decomposition. Whatever the case, Horse Feathers just keep moving (in both senses of the word...).


Over the last four years, Virginian guitarist Daniel Bachman has lazily meandered through the outer realms of American music. On his newest LP, he sculpts his work into a comprehensive thesis; where he once made stylistic leaps in between songs, he now ambles effortlessly.

Orange Co. Serenade

Over the last four years, Virginian guitarist Daniel Bachman has lazily meandered through the outer realms of American music. Cribbing the best bits from a long line of outré acoustic guitarists, Bachman's taken an academic approach to the wide-ranging styles once herded under the umbrella of "American Primitivism," and on his newest LP, Orange Co. Serenade, he sculpts his work into a comprehensive thesis.
Where Bachman once made stylistic leaps in between songs, he now ambles effortlessly. Opener "Blue Mass" leans on a lurching drone to underpin its melodic play, which couldn't be farther from the nimble-fingered twang of "Pig Iron" that shows up just two tracks later. Bachman has gotten better at using these interstitial moments to stitch together his disparate interests.
Despite the fact that the seams show less frequently, Bachman nonetheless retains his adventurous approach to the acoustic guitar. Whether relying on subtle slide flourishes, as on "Little Lady Blues", or on the slippery, barely-there melodic leads that mark "Up and Down the C & O", he uses the familiar language of American folk music to conjure a quietude that's unique to his particular brand of guitar work. Even the tracks with more locomotive fingerpicking, like "Pig Iron" or the dreary "And Now I Am Born to Die", use minimal melodic movement as a way of eliciting stillness from that apparent motion.
Though the record is largely uniform in its instrumentation, Bachman still leaves plenty of room to ramble. Unlike William Tyler or Steve Gunn's interpolations of pop structures into instrumental guitar music, Bachman largely leaves his melodic lines open ended. Even the title track, the only track on the record that comes close to possessing a proper refrain, swells to the fullest expanses of its three-and-a-half minute runtime while exploring variations on its loping theme, until Bachman wipes it away with smears of slide work.
On Orange Co. Serenade, Bachman delves into the joyous ("Little Lady Blues") and the desolate ("We Would Be Building") with the same amount of gleeful fascination. The album underscores all the little emotional breakthroughs that Bachman has made over his career thus far, but it also serves as a reminder that he's more interested in the act of discovering rather than the discoveries themselves.


The 19-year-old rapper’s latest project is a quest of self-discovery that serves as a reminder of the power and dexterity New York’s new vanguard of artists.

Black Soap

The easy gripe with what most people consider “lyrical” rap is that it’s preachy, that it fills space with excessive pontificating. True, words are messy, easy to trip over and to misuse. But the best artists know that the right words can hit you over the head, landing squarely in the quietest corner of your mind. MIKE, a 19-year-old rapper living in Brooklyn, works diligently to find out which words do exactly that. Over the span of several self-released projects, including last year’s excellent May God Bless Your Hustle, the rapper exhibits a knack for packing big ideas in just a handful of phrases. On his latest, the seven-track EP Black Soap, words are a tool of liberation.
The album is billed as “a collection of songs for black and brown excellence,” and a recurring theme is the discovery, and ultimate love, of self. Black Soap is itself a product of self-discovery. Last fall, MIKE traveled to his childhood hometown of London to record the record as well as reconnect with his mother who, after challenges with immigration, was separated from MIKE when he was a child. The record opens with a prayer from his mother spoken in their native Yoruba dialect. The language centers MIKE’s existence underneath his mom, the first of many tendrils of this sort of cultural specificity. The album art, made by the Brooklyn-based designers Abraham El-Makawy and Isaac Baird, takes its inspiration from black soap packaging found all over West Africa. The ebullient syncopation of the track “Of Home” is likely familiar to anyone who's ever attended the types of Nigerian celebrations that extend into the wee hours of the morning. “You can tell by my nose I’m a king” he raps on the song, alluding to distinctly African facial features as a source of pride.
As a lyricist, MIKE is fleet. He earns comparisons to baritone rappers MF DOOM and Earl Sweatshirt by exhibiting the same penchant for inventive and unexpected rhyme schemes, but MIKE isn’t a mere copycat. It’s more like the lo-fi style of those benchmarks found him—a means to get out what he needs to say. “I know the truth I’m tryna get it out my teeth,” he raps on “Ministry.”
Thematically, Black Soap is dead-set on growth. Challenges with depression color the lyrics across all of MIKE’s projects, but rather than languish in gloom, he finds the power within, and much of Black Soap feels like the first ray of light after a bout with darkness. “Remind me that I’m real/Remind me that I’m still here/Remind me that I will,” he raps on “God Save the Queen.” One of MIKE’s greatest strengths as a writer is his level of self-awareness, of both his physical presence as a black man in America, and of his emotional self. “Love is scary but it’s cheap,” he reminds us on “Ministry,” juxtaposing the brutal financial reality of New York with the need for connection.
The instrumentation on Black Soap was provided by Standing on the Corner, a crew of creatives in New York that, like MIKE’s sLUms collective, offers a decidedly more ground-level perspective of life in the city. It’s a commitment to authenticity that makes MIKE one of the more exciting young voices in rap today. If the darlings of the streaming era are the glitzy glass skyrises that litter Brooklyn, MIKE and sLUms are the neighborhood bodega still going strong. And while lyricism has slowly become synonymous with holier-than-thou didacticism, Black Soap reminds us of what’s possible when you choose your words carefully.


Free is a collaborative, improvised mixtape of freestyles from Chance the Rapper and Lil B. At its best, the tape's live atmosphere highlights what the two have in common. What really makes this release replayable, though, are the gold foibles: the moments where both artists—especially Chance, who's not as used to this sort of thing—surprise themselves.

Lil B / Chance the Rapper: Free (Based Freestyles Mixtape)

Free (Based Freestyles Mixtape)

Short of perhaps Keith Jarrett, you could find no better company than Lil B for creating an album of collaborative, improvised music. For years, the elusive Berkeley rapper has built a cottage industry out of making invention-in-real-time the focal point and pleasure center of his music. Process is foregrounded, not sublimated; there is no desire to pull anything, in particular, off with a given song, just to tap into a mindset and atmosphere. This is part of what has made Lil B's unconventional style so maddening to traditionalists: Normally, the success of a freestyle is gauged by the degree to which it sounds too "good" to be one—by the rapper's ability to keep up steam. In B's world, the approach is hands-off, quasi-Eastern-philosophical; steam, as a concept, is rejected completely. Vulnerability is the Based God's most important tool: He tunnels into his moments of non-proficiency, like a free jazzer might lean into a bad note to justify it. This is, in a nutshell, B's "Based" state of mind, which was, before it became the stuff of hip-hop's most legendary meme culture, just an adjective describing a musical procedure.
With Lil B, the creative environment automatically creeps into the listening experience. Since his multiple-MySpace days in the late '00s, Lil B's music has conjured the image of a lone wolf at his laptop in the basement of his Berkeley villa, leaving the Record button red for an hour or two at a time, ripping songs to MP3 without even listening back to them. While this lonesome vision has heightened the "Based God" mystique, it also makes some of B's music feel cramped and ritualistic—a one-man-show confined to too small of a stage.
Recently, it seems as if B, too, has been feeling the claustrophobia. Tapes have been arriving at a diminishing rate, with a paltry three last year and nothing in 2015. He's been getting out of the house more—not only to do tours and motivational lectures, but to work with others. His new six-song Based Freestyles mixtape with Chicago superstar-in-the-making Chance the Rapper is the first major yield of this more social period, putting B back in human space and time to a degree we haven't heard since the days of his Soulja Boy collaboration Pretty Boy Millionaires.
Free, initially, highlights the Based elements of Chance's style, though he is usually more associated with Kendrick's more athletic tongue-twisting. Chance, like B, is interested in tapping into the rhythms and cadences of speech in his rapping: see the dialogue-y features he contributed to Kehlani and Action Bronson's recent projects. Both rappers, in their own ways, frequently make their bits of doggerel feel almost-cogent and sometimes beautiful.
But it's essential for any great duo to be foils to one another, and Free is propelled by the differences between the two young rappers as much as their shared agenda. Though Chance is a known studio rat, his art comes from a very live and extroverted tradition—the open mic stage. So while B's verses gradually dissemble instead of building in clear trajectories, Chance's are a series of razor-sharp gestures, monologues delivered to hypothetical stadiums. The younger rapper is a more apt rhythmic stylist, or at least a more hyperactive one, with a unique sense of daubed-on phrasing and improvisational timing. For Chance, the musical squiggle comes before the thought, whereas for B, rhythms get weird only when the words do. This is particularly evident on the faster tracks, "Do My Dance" (with an acid-jazz-trap beat in the vein of Acid Rap's "Chain Smoker") and the demented, strip-club-anthemic "Rare," where Chance enters with a swaggering half-hook before devolving into yips and screech ad libs. In some of these pre-verbal moments, it feels like one is truly witnessing something previously unnoticed at the heart of these rappers' artistry—what is at the root of "songwriting" for them.
What really makes this release replayable, though, are the gold foibles: the moments where both artists—especially Chance, who's not as used to this sort of thing—surprise themselves. In "First Mixtape", the most fun-loving and directly collaborative track, Chance categorizes his own rapid-fire flow almost by accident ("Need a gas mask just to rap ass fast/…As Eminem back in '96"). He breaks off, stunned, as B in the background responds with a long "Wooo!" in amazement. "Who you think you rhyming with?" Chance explodes enthusiastically, laughing. "You don't got a mixtape with Lil B!"
Likewise, on his half of the nine-plus-minute mellotron dirge "Amen", Chance sings with a soulful, beatific air, but as he heads more and more uncontrollably into the inexpressible, his phrases become stifled by giggles: "It's like God is my...on the side of my ear and I watch him talk into the shit/ I can't get into the shit, but understand that I'm blessed...God, just say 'yes.'" B, naturally, swoops in to play the Creator: "Yes, yes." Meanwhile, in the background, there are mutterings of friends coming into the studio, getting introduced to one another, and leaving, possibly weirded out ("What happened to my bros?" Chance cries out at a certain point, as if desperate for something to ground him).
All of the tracks feature engaging microdramas along these lines. To make a record of this sort— both intimate and compelling—is no small achievement: Anyone who's ever recorded themselves jamming with friends, and then forced their other friends to listen back to it afterwards, will realize this. On all fronts, Chance and B deliver, with an extra helping of humor and lust for life—even beyond the degree we might have expected from these two. When B stops ranting about how it's okay to get "a Buick or Ford" and "liv[ing] with the Lord" to turn on a dime and ask, earnestly, "How you doin' today, Chance?", I would defy anyone not to laugh, and resist the urge to play the exchange right back again. No, this is not the stuff of genius, but it's enough to save anyone's bad day.


The teenage Baton Rouge rapper’s latest mixtape an intense and emotional collection about finding new power in freedom. His versatility and charisma are shaping a style that’s all his own.

AI YoungBoy

The first thing to know about YoungBoy Never Broke Again, or NBA YoungBoy, is that he does most of his talking in verse. The teenage rapper from Baton Rouge is quiet outside his raps, which teem with pent-up aggression and anxiety. Because of this, many songs read like journal entries. He spills his guts in a grisly drawl still coated in a nasally boyish rasp, constantly negotiating the terms of innocence and indecency. When he was 4 years old, he broke his neck play-wrestling, and he still has scars on his face from the brace that held his head up while he healed. After dropping out of school in 9th grade, YoungBoy turned to crime, and was booked for robbery. This path escalated quickly last year when he was arrested on two counts of attempted first-degree murder, later pleading down to aggravated assault with a firearm. The murder charge came just as he was gaining traction with 38 Baby, a singsongy mixtape of cold pronouncements from a kid resigned to the violent cycle that governs his city’s rap scene.
A week after his release from jail, YoungBoy shared “Untouchable,” a post-prison screed of resilience and prosperity. “I didn’t really mean untouchable because you are touchable,” he explained. “The only thing stopping me is jail or death now. Either you’re going to see me on the sideline or you’re gonna come get rid of us.” YoungBoy seems cognizant of how real the latter threat is, for the video opens with an urgent FaceTime advisory from Meek Mill: “You gotta move or you gon’ die.” Now free and ready to realize his promise, he’s growing sharper, flowing effortlessly. YoungBoy’s new mixtape, AI YoungBoy, is an intense and emotional collection about finding new power in freedom, dedicating oneself to craft as a means of escape, enduring betrayal, and having a complicated relationship with home and the people searching for meaning there. He wants out, but the prospect of a shootout is still constantly lurking.
YoungBoy is primarily influenced by late Trill Entertainment wunderkind Lil Phat, a 19-year-old rapper killed in a murder-for-hire plot outside a Georgia hospital waiting for his daughter to be born. YoungBoy isn’t unlike Lil Phat; both Baton Rouge-born teenage shooters were implicated in robberies as juveniles, and rapped about juuging as a means to feed broken families. But retaliatory violence and real talk are far more focal to YoungBoy’s outlook. In this respect, he is a disciple of Boosie Badazz and Kevin Gates, Baton Rouge cult heroes with rap sheets who relive street life through gritted teeth. None are wordsmiths, but they are all illustrators, and YoungBoy can be nearly as visceral. He sometimes embodies one or the other, on songs like “Murda Gang” and “Ride on Em,” which channel their respective energies. Then there’s the croaking “Left Hand Right Hand,” his first clear-cut hit, which clearly embodies Gates.
These are the voices that inform YoungBoy’s, but he has a style and charisma all his own. His early work was less defined and somewhat limited in tone, but on AI YoungBoy he evolves as a writer and rapper, and he begins to realize his versatility. He refuses to mold himself in the image of any one artist (he once rapped, “I ain’t never had a role model, watched Chief Keef growing up”), and here he mixes spacey outsider trap and local country blues. He is as comfortable flexing in his shoot ‘em ups and he is decompressing in his half-ballads (“No. 9,” “Twilight”).
There is a remorselessness to YoungBoy’s murder threats that can be chilling (especially given his circumstances), but he has a softer side that complicates him. “Gotta keep my head above water, gotta make it through/I do this shit for my momma and my lil brother too,” he raps on “Untouchable.” Then there are heart-stopping admissions like this one on “Graffiti”: “You know I got money but I’m in a hole/Scared I’ma die when I’m out on the road.” These moving flashes of accountability and paranoia reveal a teenager indoctrinated by the streets, seeking an escape hatch. In this light, the chest-puffing “No Smoke” and the bouncy, gun-brandishing romp “GG” come off as necessary warnings and preemptive strikes, measures taken in self-defense. All at once, his music communicates the ways hood masculinity corrupts and guards black boys.


Fat Joe and Remy Ma had their biggest hit together in 2004 before last year’s comeback “All the Way Up.” On this collaborative LP, their hard styles are too similar to make for a compelling dynamic.

Plata O Plomo

Fat Joe can no longer take hits for granted. While never a megastar, Joe has proved himself one of the most resilient rappers of all time, with a lengthy career spanning Big Punisher, Ja Rule, and DJ Khaled. At a point, he looked to be one of those old icons, like Snoop Dogg, whose stature seemingly grandfathered him into radio play for life. But then the hits dried up. Before his comeback single with Remy Ma “All the Way Up” returned him to the charts last year and earned a pair of Grammy nominations, it had been nearly seven years since Joe released his last commercial album, and almost a full decade since his last Top 40 hit.
In truth, “All the Way Up” would have been a hit with or without him. It’s primarily a showcase for Cool & Dre’s deliriously celebratory beat and a never-better feature from French Montana, which makes it a Fat Joe hit in the same way that “Fuckin’ Problems” was an A$AP Rocky hit. No matter the means, though, a smash on this scale is a major feat for any rapper. And so on Plata o Plomo, the belated follow-up to 2010’s The Darkside, Vol. 1, Joe goes to almost superstitious extremes trying repeat that single’s formula. He brings on Remy Ma as an equal partner, recruits Cool & Dre as primary producers, and invites back French Montana for its second single, “Cookin’.” Despite his best efforts, lightning does not strike twice.
Joe’s great gambit is going halfsies with Remy Ma. Her own career was limping along before “All the Way Up,” and the two had previously scored the biggest hit of their respective careers together—2004’s inescapable “Lean Back”—so it figures they’ve come to view each other as lucky rabbits’ feet. And recently, other New York rap lifers have found second winds with these kinds of collab albums. Smoke DZA and Pete Rock just teamed for a widely praised record, and Joell Ortiz has rarely sounded more alive than he did on his Salaam Remi-produced album last year with No Panty, his group with neighbors Bodega Bamz and Nitty Scott.
Collaborations like this work best when there’s some meaningful contrast between the performers, though, and Joe and Remy Ma are too similar to establish any kind of yin/yang dynamic. Both stem from a school of New York hip-hop that values presence over personality, and they both rap with meticulous enunciation, punctuating each bar with percussive emphasis. Their voices hit like rocks on concrete. That may be catnip for some diehard New York rap enthusiasts, but for younger listeners who came up with the nimble, free-form expression of modern Atlanta rap, that delivery can feel downright arthritic. What scans as hard for one generation of hip-hop fans just scans as stiff to another.
And while Joe can bend just enough to fit different styles—he’s been doing it since he was biting Das EFX flows on his 1993 debut Represent, riggity-riggity-rather blatantly—Remy is inflexible to a fault. She assumes a default battle stance even on songs that in no way call for it, like Ty Dolla $ign’s smooth ’80s R&B homage “Money Showers,” or the Sevyn Streeter-featuring DeBarge/Blackstreet flip “Go Crazy.” She still continues to rap about shitting on her enemies, too. She does it on two different tracks.
Plata o Plomo does feature one strong single candidate: the Caribbean-flavored the-Dream feature “Heartbreak.” Joe delivers his loosest performance in years, and for once even Remy Ma unwinds a bit and breaks out the suntan lotion. But more representative of the album’s conservative approach is the mid-album champagne clink “How Long.” The song’s yawn of a chorus is supposed to be a boast about their veteran status—“How long?/How long?/How long we been getting to the money?/How long?/How long we been gettin’ it?”—yet through sheer repetition it becomes a kind of commentary on their songwriting: How long have we been rapping about this? How long have we been returning to these sounds? Without running the math, it sure feels like it’s been ages.


California duo Wreck and Reference provide a radical vision of what the metal of the future might look like with their latest album, Want. Metal claims to be challenging, but Wreck and Reference go one step further, challenging the genre's practicioners to pull themselves out of complacency.

Want

For all of its bluster of rebellion and individuality, metal remains a particularly conservative genre. There are entire labels affiliated with the genre that are dedicated to the idea of preserving the old, signing a glut of bands that, at best, unfavorably smack of the innovators they're so slavishly devoted. So California duo Wreck and Reference provide a radical vision of what the metal of the future might look like with their latest album, Want. Their version of metal does not have guitars, bass, leather, devil horns, or any other metal tropes; their arsenal is comprised of  a sampler, drums, voice, and bottomless despair.
Limited instrumentation does not stop Wreck and Reference from bringing in a range of dark sounds, as they have a habit of flipping their own script quickly. This is evident from the smooth transition from the industrial squeals of opener “Corpse Museum” into the piano-driven “Apollo Beneath The Whip”, or the shift from the dimly-lit lurch of “Bankrupt” to their interpretation of doom metal on “A Glass Cage For An Animal”. Want maintains a consistent atmosphere throughout, excelling even as it broadens and warps the definition of metal. Felix Skinner, who handles electronics and some vocals, conjures up the closest thing to big, blocky riffs that an experimental effort like this can offer, feeding them through dehumanized filters.
While Wreck and Reference are redefining metal, “Whip” is their most metal song in a sense, mainly because of its enveloping buildup. As drummer Ignat Frege gets busier, Skinner’s piano sounds more nervous, and his vocals sound grander in their misery, resembling a charismatic preacher that wants to swallow you in the greater void. The songs on Want are too diverse for Wreck and Reference to possess a “signature song,” but “Whip” deserves to become one of their staples.
For a band driven by electronics, it might seem that using a drum machine would make the most sense, Frege serves as both a compliment and a foil to Skinner, amplifying his movements without going overboard. He also takes a freer approach to drumming on Want, removing blast beats from his repertoire; on “Museum”, he flirts with the technique but ends up holding back just enough to lend a looseness that works with Skinner's electronic freakouts. Frege's cymbal rides on “Bankrupt” are tense, making Skinner’s howls and spare electronic hums loom even more dreadfully. It's often perceived that hitting the snare and double bass hard and fast is a surefire way to sound “heavy”, but Frege challenges that notion by doing more with less. His performance is such a secret weapon that it’s quite missed on “Machine of Confusion”, an ambient break that is the only song not to contain drums.
Amidst the boundless experimentation, there's one flickering light of traditional metal on Want. Closing track “Apologies” features swells that are oddly reminiscent of the opening to "Cathedral”, Eddie Van Halen’s solo guitar piece on 1982’s Diver Down where he gorgeously replicated a church organ. "Apologies" is the closest thing the album comes to providing a comforting presence, in terms of both lushness and familiarity, but it’s still buried beneath the overbearing existentialism that Skinner and Frege traffic in, its beauty interrupted by faint snare rolls and creeping static.
Most metal groups are either blind to the future or are scared shitless by it. Wreck and Reference take on what’s on the horizon, and while most metal groups are content to yell that they don’t give a fuck, Skinner and Frege put it into principle too. Metal claims to be challenging, but on Want, Wreck and Reference go one step further, challenging the genre's practicioners to pull themselves out of complacency.


Kurt Vile now builds albums the way other artists might compile demo collections. His latest LP conjures images of dreaming and traveling without worrying where they lead.

(watch my moves)

Listening to (watch my moves) is not like watching a man relax in a hammock. It’s more like following him as he peruses the house for all the right snacks and just the right book, as he steps into the yard to assess his surroundings and find a sweet spot in the sun, as he sets up a hammock between two trees and settles in to recline until, aw man, it’s time to get dinner goin’. The songs on Kurt Vile’s latest album are patient and methodical, building gradually as the lyrics descend from a general premise—say, getting on a plane or chilling in the practice space—to casual observations of what’s happening in the music itself: narrating the mood before receding into a tranquil guitar solo or dreamy coda that feels like the payoff for a long day’s work.
Anyone accustomed to soundtracking their routines with little made-up songs for their cat or houseplants will immediately recognize the tone. “Thoughts become pictures become movies in my mind/Welcome to the KV horror drive in movie marathon,” Vile announces in “Like Exploding Stones” before downplaying his invitation with a sheepish aside: “But I’m just kidding and I’m just playing.” Within the first two minutes of opener “Goin on a Plane Today,” he announces plans to chug a beer, listen to some Neil Young, and try a mindfulness exercise of checking in with his younger, more insecure self. His message from the future? Guess what, things turned out pretty OK.
At 42, Vile has worked hard for this kind of self-assurance. He’s inked a new deal with the prestigious jazz label Verve and met some of his heroes. He’s written a block of slow-motion anthems to form the staples of a festival set and developed the kind of sprawling discography that feels more akin to the classic rock era he adores than the fickle streaming era, even as playlist curators and commercial music directors have embraced his vibed-out sound. All the while, Vile seems no further from his muse than he was back in his early lo-fi days, when you could only barely see the shape of his singer-songwriter ambitions through the pot smoke and amplifier fuzz.
The result of this consistency is two-pronged. On one hand, it makes minor updates feel more rewarding. Nowadays, Vile’s singing leans toward the deadpan spoken word of late-career Lou Reed, an approach that helps the stoner-dad observations land harder (“That teapot sings in a beautiful falsetto”) and melodic outliers like “Jesus on a Wire” stand out from the pack. On the other hand, you are less likely than ever to hear a new Kurt Vile song and think, “Wow, maybe I didn’t have this guy all figured out.” For large swaths of the record, if you’re not paying close attention, you might wonder if he set a loop on the drum machine, picked up a guitar, and forgot the tape was running.
In both his music and lyrics, Vile conjures images of dreaming and traveling, moving forward and getting lost in thought. He works well with duet partners—Cate Le Bon on “Jesus on a Wire,” Chastity Belt on “Chazzy Don’t Mind”—and remains a singular guitar player, even as his loose, major-key melodies become harder to differentiate. More playful and atmospheric than 2018’s Bottle It In, the music sometimes recalls Vile’s earliest material, when his songs were distinguished more by their textures—the muted horn arrangement in “Goin on a Plane Today,” the descending slide guitar in “Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone),” the woozy synth in “Fo Sho”—than the actual songwriting.
One track cuts through the fog, and it’s Vile’s cover of “Wages of Sin,” an eerie Bruce Springsteen outtake written between Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. It makes sense that Vile gravitates toward this kind of obscurity, something that likely materialized during a single day in the studio. (Springsteen himself forgot it existed until coming across the recording while poring through master tapes for 1998’s outtakes collection Tracks.) Ignoring an ominous sense of desperation that Vile rarely approaches in his own writing, you could easily mistake it for one of Vile’s originals: the collage-like string of memories and visions, the unresolved chord progression that seems born from those early, sleepless hours when every thought feels frayed and bittersweet.
The song also serves as an interesting center of the Venn diagram between Vile and the War on Drugs, former bandmates and fellow Springsteen acolytes whose path has diverged considerably from his own. While the War on Drugs, also now on a major label, build their glossy, meticulous arena rock piece-by-piece to summon the magic of their heroes’ biggest hits, Vile has burrowed into the messier corners: He’s less interested in the endless studio hours spent perfecting “Born to Run” than all the other songs neglected on the cutting room floor, half-formed or unfinished, lost to time or resurrected decades later.
In some ways, Vile now builds his albums the way other artists might compile their demo collections. He wants you to hear the wide-open, negative space where someone might place a chorus; he wants you to zone out to the endless jams before they get sculpted into tighter compositions; he wants you to consider the banal, vulnerable diary entries that often lead to sharper observations. Occasionally, he frames this all as a self-soothing mechanism against the uncertainty that courses through his lyrics: “Even if I’m wrong, gonna sing-a-my song till the ass crack o’ dawn,” goes a line in “Fo Sho.” “And it’s probably gonna be another long song.” The deeper Vile gets into his career, the more his creative process seems to blend with the results. On (watch my moves), he invites us to follow the introspective journey from the spark of an idea to its steady pursuit to its contented fadeout, knowing the next flash of inspiration could be just on the other side.


The South African singer’s star-making debut is a lithe, contemporary take on pop-R&B that pulses with the log-drum heartbeat of amapiano.

Tyla

“Water,” Tyla’s first major label single, had a rare sort of alchemy: sultry, cheeky vocals on a humid dancefloor anthem with a chorus so divine that hearing it over and over was actually appealing. The 22-year-old’s lithe blend of amapiano and R&B shot her to seemingly instant ubiquity in the second half of 2023, as “Water” blasted from streetside subwoofers, through club sound systems, and across the TikToks of young acolytes and horny dudes. (The song’s oiled-up video featured Tyla slow-wining as she doused herself with a bottle of agua, accounting in part for the horny dudes.) A little over six months after its release, “Water” had earned Tyla the Recording Academy’s first-ever Grammy for African Music Performance, edging out global superstars like Burna Boy and Davido, as well as Asake and Olamide’s well-deserving “Amapiano.” It was the kind of industry anointment—off one big single, not yet an album—that aspiring pop stars dream about.
Though amapiano has ascended from South African clubs to the global charts, the broad appeal of “Water” lies in Tyla’s voice, which seems attuned to contemporary R&B in the same way that Rihanna’s debut single “Pon de Replay” was geared to split the middle between pop and dancehall. Tyla’s pre-“Water” music, crafted not long after she graduated high school, inclined towards the underground; her first single “Getting Late,” from 2019, emphasized the sparse interplay between her angelic voice and club-centric 808s. “Been Thinking,” from 2021, had its own anthemic chorus and a clever interpolation of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” displaying her admiration for Y2K-era radio hits on a rhythm whose lineage threaded through South African kwaito and back to another diasporic genre, UK funky.
On her debut album Tyla, she flexes her fidelity to pop-R&B, weaving through its lingua franca—attraction to bad boys, puzzlement over bad boys, and finally the cathartic elation of moving on. It helps that the album pulses with amapiano’s log-drum heartbeat, with Wizkid collaborator and “Water” producer Sammy SoSo co-helming most tracks and brushing them to silky fluidity. The terrain is familiar but Tyla is playful within it, as on “Breathe Me,” a song about sex with a paramedic analogy (“Mouth to mouth when you’re touching me/Open up baby I’ll fill your lungs/CPR”) and a song-length meditation on how Tyla’s body is worthy of a high-end gallery (“ART”).
She’s a savvy singer, capable of a full belt while mostly residing in the realm of sensuous breathiness, which gives her songs the air of an internal monologue. The vocal intimacy betrays her influences—she’s studied the Aaliyah canon—and her rendition is committed but cool, like she’s singing from the back of the club and hasn’t yet removed her sunglasses. In “On and On,” the Babygirlest of these tracks in name and execution, she unwinds the chorus as though whispering a secret, her easy melisma slinking through the bass.
On “No. 1,” Nigerian star Tems drops in with a welcome jolt, her vocal power contrasting with Tyla’s charming effervescence. “Jump,” with Atlanta rapper Gunna and St. Thomas dancehall deejay Skillibeng, is a black-light banger that slinks “from Jozi to Ibiza,” though I’m begging for an edit without Gunna rhyming “Put some carats in your ear” with “Wanna put it in her rear.” (Perhaps I’m just “in the wrong place with the right energy,” as Tyla sings on the lovely, flange-drenched Afropop track “Priorities.”)
Gunna’s presence in general is a bit confusing, suggesting the shadow hand of a music conglomerate, as is an appearance by Becky G, singing in Spanglish over the delectable “On My Body,” which showcases amapiano’s deep house influence; it sounds great, but what’s the connection other than to create an avenue into the lucrative “Latin music” market? Meanwhile, “Girl Next Door,” Tyla’s excellent 2023 collab with Beninese-Nigerian singer Ayra Starr, is nowhere to be found. But this is the kind of decentralization that occurs upon reaching the mainstream, even while being nestled in a very specific sound—the preordained path of a gifted young musician who became a near-instant star.


Following the camp-infused club music of 2017’s Shaneera, Al Qadiri once again examines questions of gender and representation in the Arab world, this time invoking women poets of the Middle Ages.

Medieval Femme

Like certain Celtic druids or Rome’s emperor Constantine, the 7th-century Arabic poet known as Al-Khansa leapt into an unfamiliar cosmos, converting to the nascent faith of Islam during middle age (Muhammad himself was said to be a fan). She composed elegies in an era of social upheaval and imperial collapse, including this defiant lament for her own brother:

Thus I shall weep for you as long as ringdoves wail,
as long as night stars shine for travelers.
I’ll not make peace with people that you fought
until black pitch turns white.

The new Fatima Al Qadiri album Medieval Femme takes inspiration from female Arabic poets of the Middle Ages, and it quotes directly from Al-Khansa’s verse on “Tasakuba.” A soft-synth lute melody wanders until it becomes only faintly audible, the sound of footsteps through a cavern. As Al-Khansa once passed down these half-remembered pagan rituals to Baghdad’s grand libraries, Al Qadiri gives the poet’s threnodies a modern context.
On Al Qadiri’s previous release, Shaneera, she returned to Kuwait, where she grew up, to record purposefully outrageous club music. She lifted her lyrics from drag routines and Grindr chats, and posed as an evil queen on the cover. This record turns inwards, its archetypal women more yearning than commanding. Al Qadiri looked to the past for instrumentation as well, evoking antique ouds; little percussion can be heard, and digital effects only bring subtle estrangement. “Sheba” interrupts a reverberating organ with kick drums, as if waking from a hypnotic trance, while “Golden” draws out the title into a distorted mantra. I thought of the bardcore “Hips Don’t Lie” cover that a streamer friend often plays, where Shakira’s single becomes the soundtrack for a rival seductively lifting your chin with their sword-tip. Al Qadiri dislocates the standard images of courtly longing: Imagine a scented garden on the moon, or thwarted lovers crying out to each other around some impossibly curlicued balcony.
Left alone long enough, dance music can drift into languor, as when Donna Summer sighed, “Love to love you, baby,” for 17 straight minutes. The critic Richard Dyer once argued that disco’s sinuous rhythms “restore eroticism to the whole of the body.” Medieval Femme, barely half an hour long, uses repetition to suggest open space rather than abundance. Its songs feel like movements of a single composition. “Vanity” winds Al Qadiri’s regal vocal along melodies strung with lambent synth tones; “Qasmuna (Dreaming)” returns to that same infatuated phrase as the singing grows more and more otherworldly. So many medieval love poems dramatize private desire through the ceremony of speaking it. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish called back to that contradiction with one of his early verses: “Rita’s name was a feast in my mouth/Rita’s body was a wedding in my blood.” The austere style of Al Qadiri’s music makes its beseeching words sound all the more bereft.
“Zandaq,” the final track on Medieval Femme, is the only one that uses a traditional Arabic scale and simultaneously the most radical, an airy ecology of plucked strings and flutes like mourning birds. Microtones echo as they might in nature, carrying the gentlest sense of desolation. Al Qadiri brings together past and future in an uncanny rhyme, nodding toward loss without wallowing in torpor. Walter Benjamin, who appreciated with ambivalence the political force of sadness, once wrote: “Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to rescue them.” There are no such hollow forms among Al Qadiri’s music. Like the poet who vowed to weep until constellations burn out, she remains unreconciled.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Decades after it surfaced as a bootleg, a collection of demos from the late 1970s reveals hidden threads running through a crucial moment in the UK post-punk legends’ evolution.

Not About to Die

Wire were never much for fan service. On the televised performance captured on the Wire on the Box: 1979 CD/DVD set, bassist Graham Lewis bats away an audience member’s demand for “I Am the Fly” by gravely informing him, “We don’t play requests,” like a boarding-school headmaster telling an orphan there’s no more porridge. That philosophy has served them well: The UK art-punk pioneers have thrived for the better part of 45 years by largely avoiding the things that 45-year-old bands do to stay in the newsfeed, like anniversary tours, trendspotting collaborations, or self-mythologizing biopics. Wire don’t give the people what they want so much as what they think they deserve.
But while Wire have always been paragons of anti-nostalgia, they also recognize that a lot of the stuff that gets left off their albums takes on a life of its own, acquiring a mythic status among fans that its creators never quite intended. And though they haven’t been shy about bringing castaway material to market via live albums or modernized re-recordings, Wire’s latest move constitutes their most extreme act of pride-swallowing to date: They’re giving an official release to an old bootleg they once wished never existed, but have come to recognize as a valuable snapshot of their evolution in its most dramatic phase.
On their 1977 debut, Pink Flag, Wire made a convincing case for being the world’s first hardcore band, setting new standards in brevity and velocity that the likes of Minor Threat would later use as their starting point. But within its opening seconds, 1978’s Chairs Missing reduced that legacy to an afterthought, introducing a more patient yet more peculiar strain of avant-pop that, with 1979’s 154, opened up into vast expanses of synth-frosted ambience and mutant prog. Cue up these three albums back to back to back, and you could be forgiven for wondering if you were still listening to the same group. But when it first surfaced on some fly-by-night imprint in the early ’80s, the unauthorized Not About to Die revealed a steady linear trajectory connecting albums that seemed to be separated by leaps and bounds. Comprising cassette demos passed around the EMI offices circa 1978-79, Not About to Die functions as a real-time document of a band caught between the idea of cranking out Pink Flag II and the reality that they were already getting bored of punk.
The songs collected here have dribbled out on various official releases over the years, whether through now out-of-print compilations or as reissue bonus tracks. This edition of Not About to Die brings them to vinyl for the first time, presenting a standalone “lost” album that provides a clear, chronological view of Wire’s metamorphosis in the late ’70s. And while the new remastering job can’t completely mask the album’s dubbed-cassette roots, the wobbly fidelity is ultimately overpowered by the kinetic thrill of the most innovative band of punk’s first wave. Of Not About to Die’s 18 songs, only half wound up seeing official release at the time, and the rest damn well deserved to.
The album’s first side reminds us that, for all their turbo-charged aggression and militaristic shouting, Wire also had hooks and humor to spare. Had they opted to take a safer route for their second album, discarded delights like “Oh No Not So (Save the Bullet)” and the ba-ba-ba-bouncy “Love Ain’t Polite” could’ve positioned Wire as serious challengers to the Buzzcocks. The band teased at this direction with the release of their 1978 stopgap single “Dot Dash” / “Options R”; the latter track is featured here in more or less finished form. But an early take on “French Film Blurred” provides a stark indicator of just how swiftly and severely Wire would change course. The version that appears on Not About to Die is a scrappy rave-up that would’ve been right at home on Pink Flag, but when the song surfaced on Chairs Missing just a few months later, all that remained were the lyrics, which singer/guitarist Colin Newman applied to an entirely different arrangement that tiptoed the line between eerily calm psychedelia and time-bomb tension.
While no other song on this set underwent quite as radical a transformation on the journey from demo to post-punk classic, the 154-era material included here is equally fascinating. By that record, Wire’s punk roots had been all but vanquished by their growing affinity for proto-industrial propulsion, gothic grandeur, and futurist sound design, so it’s a real treat to hear steely, synth-streaked standards like “I Should Have Known Better” (née “Ignorance No Plea”) and “On Returning” in more primitive, violent form, while charting the development of “The Other Window” from Newman’s pogo-ready romp to a queasy spoken-word set piece recited by guitarist Bruce Gilbert. Alas, the sheer rapidity of Wire’s progression meant they could no longer accommodate simpler pleasures like “Stepping Off Too Quick (Not About to Die),” whose slow, sustained intro tees up an exuberant jangle-punk surge that anticipates the Feelies’ epochal Crazy Rhythms. Newman has claimed this song contains “the best intro to any song ever,” but even that was apparently not enough to meet Wire’s exacting standards at the time. So if you’ve ever been to a Wire show and had your hollered requests for “12XU” or “Outdoor Miner” met with derisive stares from the stage, take heart: Sometimes, this band ignores even its own members’ favorites.


Featuring Mikey Young of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, among others, Total Control is as close to a supergroup as a tandem of cult Australian punks can get. Surprisingly, their debut LP surpasses even the top-shelf efforts from their other bands.

Henge Beat

For the most part, "supergroup" is a relative term. It's a descriptor that itself holds a load of other nebulous, subjective ideas, such as "success," "relevance," and the notion of a "primary band." But with musicians-- especially nowadays-- being prone to enlist in three or four groups at a time, devoting a fairly even amount of attention to all of them, is there any way to logically keep track of which bands are bands and which bands are side-projects or supergroups?
Total Control are as close to a supergroup as a tandem of cult Australian punks can get. Each member is involved in another band, the most well-known of which being guitarist Mikey Young's Eddy Current Suppression Ring-- which, if you only have a passing knowledge of current garage-rock, can elicit the same sort of confused blank stare as if you told someone your band's most famous member also plays in the Growlers. Thankfully, when mild obscurity is on a group's side, they are allowed few expectations to conquer and the chance to legitimately surprise people. But even if you're intimately familiar with Eddy Current Suppression Ring, UV Race, Straightjacket Nation, and the Collapse, Henge Beat is startlingly good; good enough to surpass even the top-shelf efforts from the members' other bands.
As you might expect from a band named after a six-minute Motels single, Total Control possess a rich knowledge of a very specific point in music history. Though bearing no resemblance to the song in which they've derived their name, most of their key influences were very much active in 1979, the year the single was released. Opener "See More Glass" is indebted to Suicide's second self-titled album. Shades of late-period Roxy Music can be found in closer "Love Performance". Wire, the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, and Swell Maps all slow up in the strands of Total Control's DNA.
But if Henge Beat were simply a 36-minute post-punk genre exercise, it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. The band explores a different realm of possibilities in every song, punctuating creeping lurches with ear-splitting explosions and delivering spacey instrumentals not incredibly far removed from elevator music right after. "The Hammer" is eerie, black-clad darkwave. "Shame Thugs" sounds like alternate title screen music for beloved Super Nintendo RPG EarthBound. "No Bibs" comes off like SST hardcore thrown into vertigo. (If you have an older sibling that grew up in the 1980s and passed you all of their coolest punk records when they went off to college, give them a copy of Henge Beat and they may shed actual tears of joy.)
As if the ultra-cohesive fusion of punk music's fruitful first decade wasn't enough, Dan Stewart (Straightjacket Nation) makes for a compelling frontman, a lyricist weaned on Salinger and Philip K. Dick whose vocal range stays in the pocket but exhibits a great deal of versatility regardless. His taste in literature proves that he knows the value of a good narrator: The greedy factory owner in "Retiree" barks, "keep them at work," in an icy, robotic tone while looking at a gold watch ticking down the days. "Meds II" captures the redundancy of self-medicated culture-- through methods both legal and otherwise-- with the lyric, "Taking pills to remember to take pills to forget."
"Love Performance" can sound glittery and optimistic due to its blinking neon synths and "these are not the last days" refrain, but it's actually a rumination on our fantasies of being eulogized ("In the last days, they'll sing your praise"), finding Stewart pitching rocks at the celebratory stance of the supposedly righteous whenever they think the world's number is being called (think Y2k, the rapture, the end of the Mayan calendar). Album centerpiece "Carpet Rash" finds Stewart at his most detached vocally while crafting an array of evocative imagery ("Drinking detergent and licking the walls/ Eating your breakfast in shower stalls"), writing a song that fully embodies how desperate, unfulfilling, and hopeless sex can sometimes be.
Throughout the entirety of Henge Beat, there is a sharp fluidity in all of its elements, from the interplay of the band's members to its lyrical concepts. In spite of being primarily described as a composite of members from other groups, Total Control display the kind of unity that veteran bands take years to cultivate. They make you realize that a lot of the best "supergroups" are merely regular old groups with members noteworthy for being excellent at what they do.


Mostly recorded before Pimp C passed away in 2007, the final UGK album is steeped in the craft the duo took years to perfect.

UGK 4 Life

"Back from the dead." Delivered by Pimp C, these are among the first words you hear on UGK 4 Life, and unfortunately, it's a sentiment delivered way less metaphorically than we're used to. Lives are cut short with a sad frequency in hip-hop, but Pimp C's early death was something of an anomaly: too often, ascendant talents are snuffed out before we get a full glimpse of their capabilities. But by 2007, UGK had become something like Houston's answer to Gang Starr, a partnership that thrived on consistency and longevity while their peer groups either broke up, soldiered on in an unknowable format, or just fell the fuck off completely (I'm looking at you 8Ball & MJG).
So, yeah-- UGK 4 Life doesn't dwell a whole lot on what the future holds in large part because it's so steeped in the craft they took years to perfect. Though it lacks something as jump-off-the-screen as "Int'l Players Anthem" and the feel-good momentousness of a #1 debut on Billboard, it also lacks double-album stuffing filler. Though probably not the best UGK album, it might be the strongest illustration of what they do best. As with most of their material, the vast majority of the UGK 4 Life's action takes place behind a woodgrain wheel, in the vicinity of a pistol, or inside various female orifices, with only the incredibly ill-advised Akon spot about erectile function ("Hard as Hell") to fuck up the flow. Of course, there are still plenty State of the Streets sermons, as "Purse Come First" makes the latent political awareness in Bun B's raps come to the forefront ("it's a new world order, at least that's what I read"). But even if Pimp C opened up about his image ("I look like this, I don't talk it/ I make 'em think I'm dumb"), he still ended his verse with a blowjob joke.
While UGK's albums have always delivered, I never quite shared the opinion that they're godbody MC's. For me, there's not enough clever wordplay and not enough detailed storytelling-- basically that whole East Coast bias bullshit. But maybe due to the proliferation of Kanye-jacking newbies who used to rap and now wanna sing, I've come to appreciate UGK as having two of the best voices in hip-hop. It's a dynamic that's been explored over-and-over-- the deeper, more methodical cadence balancing out the nasal loose cannon. Bun B's performance is a masterwork of nuance here, sounding doubled even when it's obvious he's not. His oaken, sturdy intonations give authority to anything he's saying, whether introspective ("The Pimp and the Bun") or just stuck on the same ol' bullshit (just about everything else). As for Pimp C, it's easy to point out that nearly all of his metaphors on this record are food-based and related to him getting his dick sucked, but he remains untouched in terms of delivering hooks and his mere accent can still be the highlight of any track. Just check "She Luv It" for the incomprehensible pronunciation of "barbecue rib," wherein the former word has fewer syllables than the latter, or the entirety of "Everybody Wanna Ball", where he takes an obvious line and flips into a spirited performance on his own terms.
There's also a nice "Eh, why not?" feel to the guest list: there's Akon, Ronald Isley, B-Legit, and E-40, but also Snoop and Too $hort (guess what the song they're on is about) and even commercial non-starters like Big Gipp. The common thread through all of them here is that they're all on UGK territory, and they don't get beats so much as music, steaming organ trills and wah-wah guitar filling out the backdrop and rendering even the most smutty material sultry. The delightfully nasty "She Luv It" could even be a hit if it didn't begin with Pimp C trying "to fit [my] whole dick and nuts inside your mooooouth" and end with his advice on female grooming. Same for "Harry Asshole", which raises the question of how it could be filthier than its title and answers with "feat. Lil' Boosie and Webbie."
Is it weird for UGK 4 Life to make pretty much no mention whatsoever of the fact that half of the rapping is done by someone who died a year and a half before its release? A little-- Sleepy Brown gets himself off the milk carton to propose a toast to Pimp during the ice-grilled rumination of "Swishas & Erb" (possibly a nod to OutKast's similar-sounding "Crumblin' Erb"), and only then do you realize it's the only Bun B solo performance on the whole thing. But UGK never seemed like the type to buy into a whole lot of self-mythologizing, maudlin or otherwise. You'd expect something of that sort from the penultimate "Da Game Been Good to Me", but instead it might as well be subtitled "But Not to You", as Pimp and Bun talk down rappers who failed to respect the game like they did. It makes sense: As long as there's grain to be gripped, lanes to be switched, and, for better or worse, way too many words that rhyme with "bitch," UGK's music remains timeless in its own way.


This compilation gathers experimental musicians like Dan Deacon, David Grubbs, Senyawa and others, all of whom explore the strange sounds they can make from eccentric instruments.

I Said No Doctors!

For Tom Tolleson, the fourteen-track compilation I Said No Doctors! began with a personal fascination. The founder of oddball record label Dymaxion Groove, Tolleson began tinkering with ways to manipulate his guitar, making it sound strange and unpredictable. He soon encountered the famed Dutch luthier Yuri Landman, who has long built unorthodox guitars and instruments for experimental stars. Several gear purchases and years later, Tolleson started assembling I Said No Doctors!, an hour-long survey of such eccentric instruments used in wildly different contexts, from meditative free jazz and surf rock to folk hokum and total noise. It is an exhibition of instrumental diversity, an attempt to showcase the possibilities of sound and song when the sources are no longer standard.
There’s plenty of intrigue and some inevitable filler here, all bound together by instruments that, as Tolleson puts it, are “only in tune with [themselves] by the way [they’re] made.” Dan Deacon’s MIDI triggers a trillion tiny notes from a grand piano on “Opal Toad Segment,” while a bowed Indonesian plough on Senyawa’s “Anak Kijang” conjures a militia of aging cellos. David Grubbs doctors his guitar until its notes ring like hiccups and gurgles. The synthesizer builder Peter Blasser wields his invention, the Deerhorn, to reshape a lovely torch song into a lonely transmission from an alien jukebox. And Simeon Coxe uses the Simeon—the amorphous electronic namesake that’s been the core of his Silver Apples for fifty years—to create a soundscape that crawls with creepiness. Tolleson himself plays a mutated kalimba made by Landman here, while Landman’s own band, Bismuth, contributes a simmering, Sonic Youth-like instrumental.
Deacon’s stunning “Opal Toad Segment” is the true standout, making good on his professed love of daring composer Conlon Nancarrow by turning a storm of fast piano notes into billowing clouds of sound. It comforts with cacophony, and its busy structure somehow soothes. Likewise, Oval’s “ISND” lands perfectly between the prickly and the pleasant, with chimes and drums dissolving into one another like ripples from raindrops on a lake. Both tracks suggest new possibilities for their composers—one point, after all, of such technical innovation.
The diversity of I Said No Doctors!, though, stalls out at sound. There are more prepared guitars and novel programming arrangements here than women. In fact, there’s only one, Pauline Kim Harris, whose adventurous, cliffhanging turn with scrambled classical duo String Noise should have served as a potent reminder to build the roster’s gender balance. The compilation’s one concession to diversity—the radical Javanese duo Senyawa, whose contribution is an acoustic uproar—smacks of exotic fetishism, given its total outlier status.
The realm of making and using experimental instruments isn’t a white men’s club, but I Said No Doctors! presents it as such. Hell, a quip from Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore inspired the design of the Deerhorn, deployed on one of this compilation’s most interesting tracks, “Deer Biphenyl.” That the past and present of experimental sound brim with and depend on both women and people of color should be obvious enough. The potential roster for a more-balanced survey is astounding, from guitarist Mary Halvorson and harpist Mary Lattimore to pedal steel master Susan Alcorn and synthesizer legend Laurie Spiegel. Their omission here lands less like mere oversight, then, than an insulting insinuation that instrumental innovation stems only from boys with toys. For a compilation so concerned with possibility, I Said No Doctors! overlooks more than half a world of it.
Ultimately, Tolleson’s fascination yields the musical equivalent of a coffee-table book, the kind of record you keep around as a conversation piece when friends come over or pick up from time to time for a scan when you’ve finished a better book. You keep it around for a spell because of its curios (remember, a bowed plough!) or its genuine accomplishments (like the radiant pieces from Deacon, Oval, and String Noise) before passing it along to a used bookstore, finally realizing it was out of date before it even went to print.


Detroit-based basement punks head into an actual studio and embrace classic hardcore sounds for their latest LP.

Nothing Fits

Full of half-hearted fuzz riffs and tossed-off two-note vocals, Tyvek's self-titled debut made for great recession-era listening. In a world suddenly crowded with dying malls, half-built condos, and underwater McMansions, the Detroit basement-punks' wobbly songwriting sounded weirdly poignant. And the name-- copped from the ubiquitous polyethylene house-wrap-- didn't hurt either. But unlike the Midwestern punks that came before them-- the Stooges, the Electric Eels, Negative Approach, to name a few-- Tyvek never seemed particularly cheesed-off about their surroundings. The rotating cast of collaborators fronted by guitarist/singer Kevin Boyer was agitated and noisy, but never aggressive. Something must be getting to them, though; on Nothing Fits, Tyvek are pissed-off.
The band's new full-length is tight, snotty, and pogo-worthy. The mellow instrumental snippets that padded the last LP are long gone. Now there's only the clacking of drumsticks to signal the next onslaught of distortion and motor-mouthed shouting. At some point in the past year, Tyvek decided to go hardcore. As a result, they nail the burnt-out 'burbs imagery better than ever. "Underwater institution/ Silent hallways vacant always endless yards of paper trails/ Medications healthy systems baby doctors cut their tails," shouts Boyer over chunky power chords on "Underwater 1", ticking off his list of gripes. In the refrain, he boils it all down to one perfect image of a "Safeway bag now sticking to my shoe." "Frustration Rock", the band's original aggro anthem, sounds kind of nerdy in comparison.
Tyvek's first full-length was cobbled together from a smorgasbord of the bands favorite tapes-- practice takes and basement jams full of lo-fi gristle. This time around, Tyvek spent some money. Nothing Fits is the band's first release to be recorded in an actual studio, and the result is a shorter, more focused record, but hardly a cleaner one. The vocals are strangled, the guitars awash in amplifier buzz. On the title track-- with its unrelenting snare cracks and blizzard of treble-cranked guitars-- Tyvek come off like the Motor City's answer to Huggy Bear. It's mosh-worthy, but not to an ugly, macho extreme. Deep down, Tyvek will always be a little bit art-school.
But like the best old-time hardcore, there's an element of audience participation built in via shout-along refrains. Those lyrics are clear enough: "People in the passing lane, just pricks in a car," sings Boyer. "Fuck off!" responds an overdubbed chorus. And burried down in the din, there's a tried and true posi-punk message. "Underwater 2" delivers the counter-arguement to Pt. 1's bleak, dumpster-diving worldview: "Want to make it something out of nothing at all/ So we've gotta pull together/ Now we gotta just start small," sings Boyer. "It's all right/ just do what you want." Tyvek are slackers no more.


After more than a quarter-century, the Dinosaur Jr. leader releases his first solo album of all original material, and it's an almost entirely acoustic gem.

Several Shades of Why

On Dinosaur Jr.'s self-titled 1985 debut, J Mascis sang, "I never try that much 'cause I'm scared of feeling." Over the last 26 years, Mascis has produced a number of guitar-rock touchstones, yet it's been tough to tell exactly how much effort and emotion has gone into his work. Cited as one of the original slackers, his demeanor is infamously laconic to the point of aloofness; even as he peels off some of the most ear-busting guitar solos you've ever heard live, he sometimes looks like he's about to doze off while doing so. Meanwhile, his words-- usually involving vague alienation and confusion-- are often drowned out by the ungodly squall behind him. Across his career, Mascis has let distortion, excess wattage, and virtuoso technique do most of the talking for him, and the translation can be surprisingly clear. But Several Shades of Why is different.
It's his first solo album of all original material and it's almost entirely acoustic. Here, the grey-haired 45 year old's weathered husk of a voice is close-mic'd, as if he's drawling mere inches away from your head at all times. And while he was rightfully dubbed "the first American indie rock guitar hero" by Michael Azerrad in Our Band Could Be Your Life-- and has backed that claim up with countless memorable solos-- the songs on Several Shades of Why are marked by background strums and finger-picking rather than spotlit wails. By using his own name and going with such bare sonics, it's reasonable to suggest that this album could be Mascis' most knowingly personal yet. On the title track, he clears up the whole "trying" issue, kind of. "I'm not saying much, I tried hard, that's all I do," he croaks, his feelings of hurt, wisdom, and wistfulness fearlessly up-front.
Though the album is confessional in nature, the reveals are relative-- there are no clear narratives and almost comically nondescript song titles like "Not Enough", "What Happened", and "Is It Done", are good representations of the ambiguous pronouns (and profundity) found therein. Dinosaur Jr. bassist Lou Barlow once said Mascis "had nothing to say, yet he had everything to say," which is about right. But, even considering the imprecise language, Mascis does a fair amount of telling through his indelible voice, which wears its years with crackling grace. Though Neil Young has been a common reference point for Mascis' vocals since he first opened his mouth to sing, Several Shades of Why has him going for After the Gold Rush-type intimacy like never before. So when he finishes the Laurel Canyon hangover track "Not Enough" with "I know my love is over/ And I wish I didn't know," the simple admission carries serious heft.
That song is also aided by the vocal talents of Band of Horses' Ben Bridwell, Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew, and J's current tourmate Kurt Vile, whose recent album Smoke Ring for My Halo shares a somber eloquence with this one. Guests are used frequently and wisely throughout the album-- adding subtle vocal harmonies or instrumental atmospherics-- proving that the notoriously non-communicative songwriter still knows how to make the right connections when he needs to. None of the featured players are more effective than  Godspeed You! Black Emperor violinist Sophie Trudeau, who adds elegant ache to the title track. For all of his technical gifts, Mascis is wise enough to know he shouldn't do it all, a fact supported by Dinosaur Jr.'s brilliant comeback this century. (While Barlow and Dino drummer Murph are nowhere to be found on this album, they are thanked in the liners.)
On opener "Listen to Me", Mascis repeats the song's titular phrase in a pleading voice. As the album's 10 tracks unravel with effortless, low-key ease, it's easy to obey his appeal. He's no longer "scared of feeling," though that doesn't mean he's not scared. The specter of loneliness and aging is a through-line here, too, brilliantly visualized by artist Marq Spusta's gorgeous cover, which shows a pair of fuzzy, unmistakably J-like creatures-- one big, one tiny-- using a sea monster's back for an island. (Mascis had a son in 2007.) Though dour, Mascis' sleeve avatar is also kind of cute. Several Shades of Why gives us that softer, gentler J Mascis. But it's not kids' stuff-- these are lullabies for adults, offered up with a compassion that doesn't come easy.


The duo foreground their most conventional pop sounds on their fourth album, but remain at their best at their strangest.

Ceremony

Phantogram thrive on discomfort. The New York duo’s 2010 debut Eyelid Movies revealed them as masters of tension: their prickly, minimalist trip-hop moved at its own pace, their lyrics full of barbed, abstract images that hinted at bigger stories the band refused to tell. As they’ve crossed over into a mainstream space via Republic Records, Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter have remained at their best when they’ve refused to let go of this strangeness—as with their excellent, twisted 2016 single “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore,” a pop song about addiction that opens with a line about teeth falling out of your head. But on their bombastic fourth studio album, Ceremony, the band sound thoroughly comfortable.
The album bounds into life with the soul-sampling “Dear God,” perhaps the closest thing there’s ever been to a happy Phantogram song. It’s followed by a run of short, sharp singles, each burying a streak of sorrow below shiny surfaces. The synth-dazzled “Into Happiness,” the best of the bunch, beautifully undercuts its own hook (“Fall into happiness”) with the next line (“Wish you could be here”).
Mostly, though, these songs feel impatient, front-loaded with choruses and stacked on top of one another. Perhaps Barthel is catering to the streaming-age trend towards shorter songs and swifter hooks, but she flattens the nuance of her non-linear, evocative songwriting. On the jagged “In A Spiral,” she delivers the non-committal social commentary “I’m a meme/On a feed/In a spiral”; “Love Me Now,” a brass-driven song at the heart of the record, leans too heavily into the repetition of its hook.
The record’s most powerful moments come in its second, stranger half. On “Glowing,” Barthel leans uncomfortably close to the microphone, her voice ringing in the listener’s skull like ASMR over a backdrop of underwater ambience; that’s followed by “Gaunt Kids,” a prowling, visceral spoken word track spliced with an eerie piano ballad. The title track provides the record’s most gratifying moment, building from a barely-there, moonlit song about insomnia and skinny-dipping into a furious rock jam over nearly six minutes. The tension is thrilling, and a reminder of what this band are capable of when they go to darker, weirder places.
In early 2019, Billie Eilish performed a cover of Phantogram’s “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore” on BBC Radio 1, referring to it as one of her “favorite songs.” It’s clear that, along with indie bands like The xx, Phantogram laid the groundwork for the whispered, gothic sound of mainstream pop today. It's a shame, then, that on their own album, Phantogram foreground their most conventional, clipped pop selves, when their quietest moments are often the loudest of all.