The Ava Luna singer delivers an excellent solo album of minimalist funk and R&B pared down to its barest essence.

Not Mine

Carlos Hernandez helped shape the Brooklyn music scene of the 2010s—as a denizen of the defunct DIY space Silent Barn, and as a producer and arranger for artists like Frankie Cosmos and Mr Twin Sister—but you may not know his name. As the bandleader and frequent lead singer of the perennially underrated Ava Luna, he never hogged the spotlight. The Brooklyn art-funk group operated more like a creative collective and talent incubator, with Hernandez routinely ceding the microphone to bandmates Becca Kauffman, who piloted the band’s kooky, theatrical side, and Felicia Douglass, whose versatile pipes channeled introspective soul. Hernandez could shriek and croon with the best of them, but as Ava Luna’s career progressed, his own voice became less prominent.
Now, with Ava Luna on hiatus since the 2019 departure of Kauffman (aka performance artist Jennifer Vanilla), Hernandez steps into the spotlight with an excellent solo album of minimalist funk and R&B pared down to its barest essence. Although he quietly self-released an album as Carlos Hernandez in 2018, Not Mine is the artist’s first under the Carlos Truly moniker and billed as his proper solo debut. It’s understated and warm, nimbly bridging the gap between the vintage soul influences embedded in everything Hernandez creates and the jagged hip-hop production by the artist’s brother, Tony Seltzer, who co-produced most of the record.
Never does this conjoining of worlds sound more revelatory than on the sizzling electro-funk workout “Dumb Desire.” Ava Luna sometimes described themselves as “nervous soul,” and that nervousness boils over into jittery intoxication on this ode to the terror of making one’s desires known to a crush. The track is syly addictive, with Seltzer’s escalating symphony of synth squiggles and boom-clap beats goading along Hernandez’s increasingly agitated vocal delivery, which includes stretching the word “fire” into a five-syllable anxiety swell. Leave it to Carlos Truly to make an introverted banger for the masses.
Hernandez’s voice—a honeyed soul croon—remains his purest asset. The son of a ’70s New York soul DJ, Hernandez grew up listening to Al Green on the subway, and you get the sense his engagement with sounds that predated his birth is more than casual. He self-harmonizes and reveals an enviable vocal range on “Your Sound,” which is, fittingly, an ode to the way a person’s voice can lodge itself in your memory; he wails in falsetto over the last chorus of “Why Suffer??” like only a seasoned Prince obsessive can. You can easily imagine the track’s supple funk, with its Stax-ready guitar tones, emanating from an old cassette deck on a sweltering day.
While Hernandez does not gravitate towards narrative songwriting, he does reveal more of himself in this music than Ava Luna’s. The band’s songs unfolded on faraway moons; Carlos Truly sings about his home city of New York. Inspired by adolescent memories of Central Park, the loop-driven “108th” is a nostalgic love story set against urban displacement and gentrification. The songwriting captures the tension between personal attachment to place and its utter triviality in the grand scheme of stolen land (“No, we can’t claim that old spot up by 108th/Even though that’s where we sat that third shift when you kissed me once”) as a string quartet consummates the track’s elegiac nostalgia.
Great albums are supposed to leave you wanting more, but Not Mine achieves this perhaps too well. At 23 minutes, it’s so brief as to feel a bit slight. Several tracks—particularly the 15-second piano curiosity “(my turn)” and the intriguingly tropical “A Strange Bird”—feel more like half-finished sketches; the album ends abruptly, too, with “Quietness” fading out after a minute and change. The brevity is a bit puzzling, since Hernandez left behind several neo-soul gems that appeared on 2020’s Canal EP. But perhaps recycling them felt like the wrong move. Not Mine is a tantalizing new start from a singer who has always recognized the virtues of stepping away from the mic.


Longtime Southern Lord labelmates, tourmates, and metal bands collaborate on this sometimes transfixing record.

Altar

Longtime Southern Lord labelmates, tourmates, and metal bands Sunn 0))) and Boris seem like natural collaborators, though they approach their music with disparate intentions: Sunn 0)))'s blood-covered drone subsumes everything around it, while Boris' blend of patiently unraveling noise and fractious thrash entices and then dramatically repels an audience. With that contrast between push and pull in mind, Altar-- written and recorded largely before a joint tour last fall-- risks leaving an audience stranded in the middle by inertia.
Indeed, the second half of Altar does just that, leaving the audience adrift in left field with little direction or purpose. But, together, the first three tracks are a perfect capitulation of their conjoined aesthetics. Opener "Etna" creeps in through feedback and slowly building and shifting bass tones before a huge guitar sweep-- split between Sunn 0)))'s Greg Anderson and Boris' Takeshi-- takes charge a minute in. A veritable war of tones follows, Boris drummer Atsuo filling the low-lying space between the subterranean guitar arches with cymbal rolls. Six minutes later, the air forces-- piercing, upper-register, signature-Boris guitar attacks-- obliterate the lowly, warring miscreants, razing the drama and letting it slow burn into "N.L.T."
The follow-up-- featuring the bowed bass of Sunn 0))) collaborator Bill Herzog-- is a vibrantly bleak and texturally captivating work reminiscent of Daniel Menche. Atsuo-- the only other musician present-- splatters the canvas, lustrous edges shaped from the sound of bowed cymbals and a carefully managed gong. It's followed by Altar’s centerpiece and masterpiece, "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)". "Belle" is the one track on which its players conspire to subvert outside notions of both bands. Sunn 0)))'s glacial motion is intact, as is Boris' lucid use of almost-gentle tones. But the amplifiers are turned down, and distortion is all but lost. Instead, warm analog delay lets the sound drift in plumes, and beautiful, understated slide guitars and O'Malley's careful piano create a cradle for Jesse Sykes. Here, her voice shifts and floats like the retiring wafts of blue-gray smoke from a funeral pyre at a misty dawn. It’s an exhalation, a last breath of robust beauty.
But, on the heels of such an overwhelming, unexpected triptych, Altar never recovers, essentially moving in redundant circles for 32 minutes. Three tracks either highlight the magic Sunn 0))) and Boris have crafted separately for a decade or the pitfalls that such work has avoided. The deftly fragmented chords that end "The Sinking Belle" open the door for the record's second side, but "Akuma No Kuma" is waylaid early by a harangued vocal take, an out-of-place horn fanfare, and overly involved Moog lines. Wata's eerie voice and the nebulous echo on everything in "Fried Eagle Mind" builds a paranoid sleep-state eclipsed after seven minutes by a solid sheet of guitar noise. It fades barely, slamming hard into "Bloodswamp", a 14-minute, multi-textural drone that would be an accomplishment for most other bands.
Asymmetrical and leaning, Altar isn't the metal icon its lineage would suggest: It bears neither the rapturous juggernaut geography of Sunn 0)))'s White 2 or Black One nor the transcendent overpowered amorphousness of Boris' Pink or Amplifier Worship. But it does speak of things to come, brave new directions for bands respectively referred to hitherto either as sheer sonic titans or on-off schizophrenics. Those descriptions are much too reductive, and such evidence is the onus and gift of Altar.


2006’s most buzzed-about band address the onset of fame and the inevitabililty of backlash on this five-song EP.

Arctic Monkeys: Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? EP

Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? EP

Five-song EP Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? is the English quartet’s first new release since it became the year’s most-talked-band and, oh dear, it’s largely about dealing with sudden fame and its unfortunate consequences—the obligations of touring, the demands of fans, the inevitability of backlash. This is nothing new for the Monkeys—“The View From the Afternoon” kicks off their debut LP with a warning that “Anticipation has a habit to set you up/For disappointment in evening entertainment,” and tellingly that’s the Whatever People Say I Am... track featured here. Thesis statement laid out, half of Who the Fuck’s new tracks are less about the experience of being young and bored and smartly observant, the combination that, to date, has colored their best tracks, but about the experience of being the Arctic Monkeys themselves—still young, sometimes bored, but their vision now limited to a tour itinerary or press clippings, and unable to successfully articulate why that’s so frustrating.
For the listener, it’s easy to spot the chief problem: Songs about the need and drive to become rock and roll stars are more powerful and interesting than the ones about the experience of being a rock and roll star—just ask Noel Gallagher. Arctic Monkeys singer and lyricist Alex Turner—an expressive storyteller with a keen eye for detail and a deceptively sly wit—seems well-equipped to navigate the divide between talking as one of the kids and talking to the kids, so perhaps his stumbles are more a shell-shocked response to the speed in which they gained their fame than a fundamental flaw. The EP’s defensive title track comes across as a poor decision, a dispatch from the other side of the velvet rope that moves between communicating directly with their fans (“Your heroes aren’t what they seem/When you’ve been where we’ve been”) to dismissing johnny-come-latelys to admitted bouts of paranoia. The stick to your guns/last gang in town tone of the thing is admirable—lord knows, rock could use a bit of swagger—but it has a bit of a “famous last words” quality to it, reading like that “Declaration of Principles” that came back to bite Charles Foster Kane in the ass.
“Despair in the Departure Lounge” is about, you guessed it, missing your girl when you’re on the road. And sure, it’s a cliché, but it eventually unfolds as an unexpected gesture from a lyricist who’s often guarded, reserving his empathy for his characters (and, on “A Certain Romance,” for his could-be enemies) and putting up a front with regards to himself. The moment when the song redeems its cookie-cutter nature is its third verse, and it hits not because of what Turner says but how he says it, slowing his voice into a wobbly quiver that mimics both the haze of travel and the hallucinatory nature of the lyric (“Yesterday, I saw a girl/Who looked like someone you might knock about with/And almost shouted”). It’s reminiscent of the aforementioned Gallagher’s exhausted solo acoustic turn on Oasis B-side “Talk Tonight.”
The other two new tracks are a third-tier character sketch (“Cigarette Smoker Fiona”) and an understated ballad (“No Buses”), with the latter serving as the record’s grower and most thoroughly satisfying track. So, more a reiteration of their mission statement than a new record, the hint of ferociousness and fight on the title track is a positive sign; that the band feels backed into a corner by the manner and speed in which it gained fame isn’t. It would be churlish and archaic to insist in 2006 that bands drive around in a van for x number of months in order to “earn” success when they can efficiently and quickly cover the distance of the globe with a single MP3. (Gnarls Barkley, the UK market’s other recent digital-age sensation, presumably get a free pass because they’re industry vets.) If people already have their knives out for the Arctic Monkeys, the band would do best to ignore them and move on rather than address the issue itself in song. After all, the surest way to deflect backlash is to make good music.


A new reissue collects the work of the pioneering icons of queer punk, whose uncompromising approach and knowing intimacies made them pre-Tumblr beacons of community.

Team Dresch: Personal Best / Captain My Captain / Choices, Chances, Changes: Singles & Comptracks 1994-2000

People who talk about Team Dresch’s music say it saved them. It’s not an exaggeration. The feminist queercore band was active for only about five years, leaving behind two albums and a collection of singles, but the records’ knowing intimacies made them pre-Tumblr beacons of community for isolated queers in their darkest moments. A life is shaped by minute experiences; when a great punk song captures the emotional specificity of those moments, it wins our lifelong devotion. Team Dresch mirrored the experiences of people who weren’t used to having their lives reflected back to them. In doing so, their work shattered isolation.
In the early 1990s, Donna Dresch lived in the Martin apartments in Olympia, Washington alongside many members of the rising riot grrrl movement, worked for K Records, published the queercore fanzine Chainsaw, and played in bands such as Dinosaur Jr. and Screaming Trees. When Jody Bleyle, then drumming in the Portland band Hazel, met Dresch after a show, she expressed a longing to play in “an all-dyke band.” Her desire would materialize in spring of 1994, when the two were joined by Marcéo Martinez (of Calamity Jane) and Kaia Wilson (of Adickted), who herself had once written long letters to Dresch as a lonely gay teenager living in conservative rural Oregon.
In poetic fragments dripping with humor and pain, 1995’s Personal Best recounted evergreen stories about crushing on straight or closeted girls (“Freewheel,” “She’s Crushing My Mind”), making your mother cry by shaving your head (“Growing Up in Springfield”), and dreaming of leaving it all behind and moving to the woods (“Screwing Yer Courage”). “She told me I needed God/I told her I just needed her,” Wilson sings on “Growing Up in Springfield,” named after an Oregon town which, in 1992, became the first municipality in the nation to include anti-gay language in its city charter—a measure pushed by a conservative Christian organization called the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which also advocated to classify homosexuality as “abnormal, unnatural, and perverse.” Team Dresch responded to these attitudes with “Hate the Christian Right!,” where metalcore screams, melodic vocal lines, shredding guitar, and rapid-fire drum fills combined to create a sick-of-it-all rage spiral, a plea for an out that might never exist.
Everyone in the band was already a skilled musician in their own right, and Personal Best was tight and catchy, packing deft, shifting melodies and numerous ideas and genres into less than half an hour. The bridge on “#1 Chance Pirate TV” sounds quintessentially mid-’90s emo, and “She’s Crushing My Mind” precedes one of the Promise Ring’s most memorable melodies. “Fake Fight’”s longing for tree forts and bike rides is one banjo short of folk-punk, while “Freewheel” delivers “go back to your boyfriend” levity with power-pop glee. But the album’s emotional centerpiece, destined to grace many a mixtape, is “She’s Amazing”: a tribute to every outspoken woman and queer root that did for Team Dresch what they would do for countless others: “She’s amazing/Her words saved me/She holds her head as if it’s true.”
Dresch’s Chainsaw zine grew into Chainsaw Records, which, along with Bleyle’s Candy Ass Records, co-released both Personal Best and the band’s second album, Captain My Captain. Chainsaw also released notable records by bands such as Heavens to Betsy, Tracy + the Plastics, and Sleater-Kinney, and hosted an online message board where community and conflict played out in real time. As grunge blew up and major labels began courting bands from the Pacific Northwest, independent artists felt the weight of their mission. Bleyle, whose band Hazel had been signed to Sub Pop, was familiar with the industry and wanted to remain autonomous. Team Dresch funded their own European tour, wrote to fans directly when mainstream gay magazines wouldn’t interview them, and worked to inform their peers. “The more bands and labels that… are willing to cooperate with one another—to share information and talk about what these major-media people are saying to them—the easier it will be to resist commodification,” she told Punk Planet. “There’s no way you can up against this by yourself. Once you’ve dealt with labels like this you realize that’s what they want: for everyone to be isolated.” Operating through DIY channels meant Team Dresch didn’t have to compromise, assuring fans that behind every release stood a tangible community of like-minded co-conspirators.
By the time Captain My Captain came out in 1996, with Melissa York replacing Martinez on drums, Team Dresch recognized their status as visible dykons. They wrote longer songs that were intentionally aimed at their audience, with more straightforward hooks, more legible structures, and more prominent vocals. Even without the metal screams, their directness was often combative. Take the hurtling chosen-family ode “Uncle Phranc,” where Bleyle slams a mother’s conditional love as “emotional blackmail,” or when, at the end of a ponderous musical break in “The Council,” Wilson belts a cathartic call-out of scene gossip. There’s also an enormous amount of sweetness, not just in love songs to partners (“107,” “Take on Me”), but in love songs to the community that urge listeners to survive, find their people, and live on their own terms (“Musical Fanzine,” “Remember Who You Are”). Throughout, lines about writing your own Rubyfruit Jungle or figuring out whether you’re butch or femme signalled familiarity. “Live your truth” messaging can be cloying, but Team Dresch sang it in earnest, sounding more like a trusted sibling than a sloganeer.
On Captain, Bleyle also started writing intentionally about her struggles with mental illness—a topic that wasn’t being discussed much, even in underground circles. One of the most affecting examples is “Don’t Try Suicide” (not to be confused with the Queen song of the same name), where a deflated Bleyle talks about being “scared to leave the house/scared to go to sleep.” The second chorus tells of a girlfriend’s attempt at reassurance, and Bleyle’s voice is raw as she screams, “I don’t believe her/But it makes me feel better anyway.” With queer suicide—particularly queer youth suicide—an ongoing national epidemic, these moments are, tragically, some of the record’s most prescient.
The opportunity to reevaluate these albums comes as Portland label Jealous Butcher reissues both of them on vinyl, CD, and streaming platforms, along with a CD-and-streaming-only singles compilation called Choices, Chances, Changes: Singles & Comptracks 1994-2000. A soft case with a band photo collage on the outside cover and a chronologically sequenced array of miscellaneous releases on the inside, it feels like a promo CD you might get at a punk fest and end up treasuring. Selections include fan favorite “Hand Grenade” (a track that first appeared as a 7" on Kill Rock Stars), an early version of “Fake Fight,” the bratty Tribe 8-reminiscent “Song for Anne Bannon” (released on Candy Ass’s Free to Fight self-defense compilation), and several songs recorded after Wilson left the band in 1996. Less cohesive than the full-lengths, it’s a compilation for collectors and true fans, demonstrating the band’s range and offering sought-after bonus tracks for when two records are just not enough.
Listening to the Team Dresch reissues in 2019 feels different than I imagine it did in 1995. The internet has made it easier for queers to find each other, and there are more openly queer artists than ever before. Transmisogynist elements in riot grrrl, like Wilson’s 1999 defense of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s trans-exclusionary attendance policy, seeded enduring distrust, though many current scenes are working to become more inclusive. (Wilson’s own views have since changed as well.) Still, much of the music feels and sounds as relevant as ever—both because the band’s words continue to resonate and because their harmonies, melodic defiance, and true-to-life lyrics echo through much of today’s DIY punk (Waxahatchee has covered “Freewheel” live). As a new generation discovers classics like 1985’s Desert Hearts and realizes we don’t have to settle for straight-authored queerbaiting, there is a lot to learn from queer elders, especially those that never conceded to marketability.
Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of Captain is the unabashed sexuality, stated plainly rather than cloaked in coded desire: Bleyle finding solace in cruising on “Remember Who You Are,” or Wilson asking a lover to boss her around on “Yes I Am Too, But Who Am I Really?” and declaring herself “a flaming S&M rubber dyke” on “I’m Illegal.” Fifty years after the Stonewall riots, mainstream Pride events are often sanitized and corporate, but it still feels revolutionary to put on “Musical Fanzine” and sing along: “Queer sex is great, it's fun as shit/Don't kill yourself cause people can't deal with your brilliance/Sometimes I can’t remember why I want to live/Then I think of all the freaks and I don’t want to miss this.”


Released on Merge Records, the singer-songwriter’s debut is a gorgeous devotional to the South that reshapes the traditions of country music into a powerfully queer and consequential set of songs.

Lionheart

Heather McEntire’s solo debut is a vivid travelogue of the American South penned in her native tongue of country music. Lionheart is brought to life by McEntire’s soulful voice, by a sweeping Nashville sound, but more so by a deep sense of conviction. It feels like a baptism, the sound of a woman newly believing in who she has always been. In Lionheart’s opening psalm, “A Lamb, A Dove,” McEntire presents a Biblical image of innocence and flight as she sings of an all-consuming force in her blood, her head, her eyes—and perhaps that force is her true self. “I have found heaven in a woman’s touch,” McEntire sings, clear and assured. “Come to me now/I’ll make you blush.”
McEntire grew up in a small Bible Belt farming community in North Carolina, listening to mainstream country, bluegrass, and church hymns. It was a context in which, she said, coming out as gay “wasn’t even an option.” McEntire has called her Southern Baptist family “mountain folk who grew up in a different time,” who still do not accept her. She spent nearly two decades rejecting country and religion—in the angular post-punk outfit Bellafea, the rootsy indie-country trio Mount Moriah, and backing Angel Olsen—before retracing her path back to both again. Lionheart is the sound of a woman, now 36, returning home with a new confidence, having seen the world for what it is.
When McEntire’s voice trembles at its vulnerable edges, or curls into a rave-up, she recalls Dolly Parton or Emmylou Harris. And yet Lionheart was inspired most directly by an icon of another breed. After feminist punk hero Kathleen Hanna saw McEntire open for her own band, she was so enchanted that she offered to do anything to help summon McEntire’s solo LP into existence. With Hanna’s encouragement and the suggestion that she “listen to Wanda Jackson,” Hanna became McEntire’s de facto producer, choosing songs from McEntire’s trove of demos and shaping the record’s gentle country sound.
McEntire’s primary subject is the South and its golden fields, gravel roads, valleys, and pine groves. The smell of tobacco fills a town; junkyards and bramble are dignified. McEntire renders it all with perceptive grace and a physicality. The melody of “Baby’s Got the Blues” crawls deep beneath the skin as she sings of “the dogwood and the chicory” and wonders over acceptance: “Do you see it in my hips? It is now what it is.”
Lionheart is at once devout and critical of religion’s shortcomings; McEntire’s queerness shines through every song. “It’s a wild world/That will make you believe/In a kingdom/Full of mercy and faith,” she posits in a glorious gospel sway on “A Lamb, A Dove.” She’s more elliptical than the pioneering gay country singer Lavender Country, but “When You Come for Me” contains a searingly poignant observation: “Mama, I dreamed that I had no hand to hold/And the land I cut my teeth on wouldn’t let me call it home.” McEntire has said she was inspired by a documentary about the country-establishment singer Chely Wright, who came out as a lesbian in 2010 in the face of the genre’s staunch god-country-family conservatism. Against such stakes, Lionheart feels like a miracle. Amid the continued fight for LGBT rights in McEntire’s home state, the record’s social and musical negotiation feels like an undertaking of consequence.
“Dress in the Dark” is Lionheart’s swaggering stand-off of a closer. McEntire lingers with smoke at the edge of each line: “I can only feel your heart/Through your dress/In the dark,” she sings. More than an outlaw, she’s a country-music outsider among country-music outsiders, reclaiming and rewriting its weathered language. Rather than a mainstream country label, McEntire has released Lionheart on indie stalwart Merge—her position recalls a young Lucinda Williams, who once said, “It took a punk label from England [Rough Trade] to recognize what I was doing,” which was something utterly new. As McEntire returns to tradition, she pushes ever further towards shaping a new one.


The polymath brings his signature compositional style back to the piano for an expressive album that is intimate, immediate, and, for all its ambition, easy to connect to.

Duval Timothy: Meeting With a Judas Tree

Meeting With a Judas Tree

To say that Duval Timothy is primarily a pianist is like saying that Benjamin Franklin mainly published newspapers. The artist, who splits his time between London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, is a polymath par excellence. His work spans not just music and painting but a perpetually expanding array of media: hat-making, textiles, a children’s book, furniture, food. He has brewed ginger beer from a West African family recipe and sold it on the streets of the UK, designed sneakers from an upcycled running track, worked with Sierra Leonean traditional weavers, and co-directed a pop-up restaurant serving sub-Saharan food at communal gatherings. The piano is at the heart of his recordings, where, over the past decade Timothy has developed an instantly recognizable, plangent style of playing. Yet even here, his circular progressions might be interwoven with field recordings from his travels, voice messages from friends and family, or a Pharrell Williams sample that roots Black artistic autonomy in the history of colonialism and enslavement. Born in London to an English mother and a Sierra Leonean-Ghanaian father, Timothy consistently places themes of identity, community, and place at the center of his work.
On the surface, Meeting With a Judas Tree might appear to be a simpler, more narrow musical release than some of his previous projects—for instance, Sen Am, which collaged WhatsApp messages from Sierra Leone into a meditation on distance and diaspora. After last year’s Son, a billowing choral fantasia he made with the British musician Rosie Lowe, Meetings With a Judas Tree returns Timothy’s focus to the piano. It is a short album, just 32 minutes long, and all six tracks are instrumental, draping his characteristic chords in faint electronics. It’s uniformly gorgeous; in purely expressive terms, it might be his most inviting album yet. But as usual, a glance at Timothy’s notes reveals that there is more here than meets the ear. Incorporating sessions from a handful of studios across London, Freetown, and Spoleto, Italy, with field recordings made around the world—birds, bats, insects, primates, and even plants and stones—Meeting With a Judas Tree is meant to explore “what the natural environment means personally,” he says.
Timothy’s nomadic methods are most apparent in “Up,” one of the album’s highlights. The playing is typical of his customary style: His left hand toggles away at an ostinato bassline, as though treading water, while his right lays down airy chords with a wistful, ruminative feel. With UK producer (and Frank Ocean collaborator) Vegyn handling effects processing, the piano sounds submerged in a murky pool. The mood is so lulling that it would be easy to miss all the detail in the periphery: softly spoken voices, footsteps, and an electrifying array of buzzing and scraping. Some of these sounds come from a walk with his mother in Bath, England; others are termites in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone, and still others are granite stones recorded in the hills of Freetown. The piano, meanwhile, once belonged to Alma Maria Mahler, a composer who was married to Gustav Mahler between 1902 and 1911. Timothy gained access to the instrument during a residency at the Casa Mahler in Spoleto, where he spent two months exploring Gustav Mahler’s work in the context of the climate crisis.
“Many of my projects find their inspiration in specific environments and have led me to connect and care more deeply for that place,” Timothy wrote of his residency in 2021. Taking Mahler’s The Song of the Earth as his starting point, he continued, “I’ll explore the context of Spoleto and hope to make work that could inspire people to consider the critical issues of climate change in a fresh way.” While the didactic use of “Up” is debatable—can a four-minute lullaby change anyone’s mind about global warming?—its transporting mixture of sounds nevertheless exists thanks entirely to Timothy’s wayfaring instincts. Once you know what’s behind the music, the song’s invocation of family ties, the natural world, the classical canon, and even geologic deep time amounts to a potent constellation of forces and ideas.
Despite the focus on the piano, Meeting With a Judas Tree captures a richer, more enveloping sound world than any of Timothy’s previous albums. The opening “Plunge” wraps an ascending, optimistic chord progression in elastic electronics and hints of strings; in “Drift,” the Sierra Leone-born, New York-based musician Lamin Fofana adds flickering, indistinct shapes to Timothy’s mournful chords, as birds twitter about the periphery. A few of these pieces feel like sleight-of-hand tricks, letting in a welter of disorienting detail so gradually that you’re never quite sure how you ended up where you are. “Wood” starts with simple, elegiac piano, but as the song gathers steam, birdsong swells in volume, and an additional topline melody played by Yu Su appears; run through a battery of hazy effects, it streaks like contrails across the sky. Somehow, in just three and a half minutes, we’ve been taken from the practice room to a vast plain where birds and flying machines sketch vectors across the heavens; the sense of wide-open space is overwhelming.
Timothy’s compositional style is so distinctive that at times, it’s unclear whether he’s repeating himself: The rousing chords in “Wood” are strongly reminiscent of “Slave,” a song from 2020’s Help whose theme reappeared in multiple places on that album. Even if this habit of iterating upon favorite motifs is an intentional part of Timothy’s process, there can be a slight feeling of déjà vu upon listening to his work—not an unpleasant one, necessarily, but I do find myself occasionally wishing he might push his playing style in new directions. Fortunately, on Meeting With a Judas Tree, a number of collaborators help defamiliarize his sound. Neither “Wood” nor “Drift” would have been the same without Yu Su’s or Fofana’s respective contributions; likewise, the nearly nine-minute “Mutate” takes flight in large part thanks to the London guitarist Kiran Kai’s playing, which serves as a brittle, metallic counterpoint to Timothy’s free-floating chords and pulsing synth bassline. Somewhere in the mix, apparently, are sounds sourced from the bark of a silver birch tree, and the whole thing really does resemble a tree silhouetted at dusk—branching guitars gradually filling in the negative space, electronic crackling simulating the rustle of roosting birds.
“Thunder,” as intuitive as it is complex, offers a glimpse of new horizons. Timothy improvised the song in a single take while London electronic producer FAUZIA helmed effects pedals in real time. Stretching out, Timothy leaves behind some of his characteristic tropes to explore more abstract shapes that are bounced through FAUZIA’s delays and filters. In places boldly staccato and in others as vaporous as Nala Sinephro’s spaciest ambient jazz, it feels like a real conversation, a free-flowing give-and-take between two friends, teasing out inchoate emotions without ever pinning them down. This time, the sense of place is purely virtual, as hammering chords and booming sheets of electronic tone mimic the thunder of the title. The song exemplifies what is so rewarding about Timothy’s work: It is intimate, immediate, and, for all its ambition, easy to connect to. Whether working solo or in collaboration, seated at a Steinway or with his Zoom recorder pressed up against a tree, Timothy’s musical voice remains as singular as ever.


Moving in a more traditional R&B direction, new breed is a richly detailed, self-confident, yet somewhat uneven album that attempts to weave together disparate elements of Richard’s personality.

new breed

Dawn Richard has a sumptuous rasp of a voice and brazenly left-field musical instincts. She pulled from club, R&B, and electronica to craft a propulsive, expressive trilogy of sleek, dance-floor-ready albums that felt like the kind of accomplished artistic statement that the erstwhile Danity Kane and Dirty Money member had been working toward for years. For her latest release, new breed, Richard attempts to synthesize the pleasures of her past music while moving in a more traditional R&B direction. Where 2016’s Redemption elegantly closed out a narrative of overcoming both the music industry and romantic hardships, new breed digs into Richard’s formative years growing up in New Orleans’ 9th Ward and how they have fortified her character. The result is a richly detailed, self-confident, yet somewhat uneven album that attempts to weave together disparate elements of Richard’s personality.
new breed’s cultural and historical bent adds a welcome new fold to Richard’s music. Threaded through with clips of spoken word from elders of the Washitaw Nation, a black tribe linked to the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, the album feels instantly lived-in, communal. Richard moved back to NOLA to regroup following an extensive tour behind Redemption, and here she makes strides to honor the ways in which her hometown have shaped her. She sports a hand-sewn headpiece made by Washitaw figurehead Chief Montana on the album’s cover, and on the sparse, airy intro, shoots off references to eating crawfish on Jonlee Drive and throwing beads at rude revelers during parade season. The effect is illuminating, offering up a specific, fleshed-out portrait of Richard as a person and an artist. “She just a girl from the Nine,” she makes clear over a chorus of her own soaring, multi-tracked backing vocals. “She just a king from the Nine.”
That sense of self-assurance is pervasive on new breed. “They ain’t no bitches, ain’t no queens/I’m the motherfucking king, yeah,” she spits on the title track over charging synth lines and martial programmed drums. She even cuts in a bite-sized clip from an iconic Grace Jones interview, further giving a sense of cultural context to the record. Richard’s strong sense of purpose is more deliberate on the two-part centerpiece “vultures | wolves,” when she renders her plaints against soulless music industry types: “Those packs of wolves/With suits and deeds/Tempting the girls with pretty things/Just to share them piece by piece.” Richard’s delivery is affecting, her voice both forthright and honeyed, and the imagery is haunting and timely in a way she hasn’t explored before.
When Richard recasts R&B in her own image, new breed truly excels. Her noted devotion to Prince’s wanton spirit manifests here on the smooth, sex-obsessed “sauce,” on which she adopts an appealingly louche rap flow: “I just cleaned the spot and put on your favorite panties/The ones you say look like Diamond’s from Player’s Club, I’m wylin’.” The similarly woozy, dub-inflected highlight “jealousy” finds Richard taking vindictive to a whole other level. “I know you feel you have a right to text him,” she chastises her partner’s far-too-present ex, “You don’t.” The song’s waterlogged bassline and glitchy production furnish a smoky, laid-back atmosphere for Richard to seethe.
Richard’s dusky voice is a soothing conduit for slower tempos, too, but the ones on new breed end up more stilted than usual. “we, diamonds” is a melismatic victory lap that is hamstrung by dated references to Bobby Boucher (?) and Tony Hawk (?!) in its opening verse. Even “jealousy,” with its Instagram-centered lyrics, falls into similar lyrical potholes. Richard is speaking her truth here, but the way she phrases them and the speed with which she moves from one topic to the next don’t always allow new breed’s themes—romantic jealousy, sexual autonomy, triumphing over industry setbacks as a black woman, the vibrant historical tapestry of New Orleans—to completely jell and flourish. As a sincere love letter to NOLA, new breed certainly succeeds. But as a further example of the kind of musically adventurous statement that Richard has already proven she’s capable of, it falls just shy.


On her first album in eight years, the iconic singer-songwriter continues to take the lyrical road less traveled on a vulnerable, sedate, ballad-heavy album.

Alanis Morissette: Such Pretty Forks in the Road

Such Pretty Forks in the Road

It’s fair to say that Alanis Morissette, a once omnipresent cultural icon, has slowly receded from view. As seemingly every millisecond of the ’90s has been reassessed and re-released and homaged, the musician whose 1995 album Jagged Little Pill was once the biggest album in the world (and by long-term sales, is still massive) and who became a template for the next several years of outspoken female pop-rockers, has long been under what one writer called “the curse of the CD binder.”
Part of it’s that her back catalog has either aged horribly (just imagine the respose to “Thank U”) or aged surprisingly well: Jagged Little Pill, obviously, but also “Hands Clean” from 2002’s Under Rug Swept—a song that dissects a sexual predator’s grooming with medical precision and corpse-grinning horror—and 2008’s Flavors of Entanglement, which matches late-’00s electropop at its game before the game even fully started. The other part of it is that, you-know-which song aside, she’s a zero-irony artist in an irony-poisoned world. The title of Such Pretty Forks in the Road is illustrative; if mainstream pop took one fork, Alanis continued down her orthogonal path, and soon it became entirely her own. Jagged Little Pill was credited as much to megaproducer Glen Ballard as to her, but if it wasn’t clear by the 2000s that she was a creative force, it’s clear here. She’s working with Troye Sivan and Selena Gomez’s producer, making a kind of music with more and more revivalists, and she still sounds like nobody else.
More so than on previous albums, Morrissette dips into less poppy singer-songwriter tricks. “Ablaze” and “Sandbox Love” are like lost, exuberant ’90s VH1 hits: rides on an abandoned pop-rock roller coaster. The dissonant piano that encircles “Reckoning” is all the more effective for no longer being cliché. Lead single “Reasons I Drink” is built atop a jaunty cabaret piano line  and that sets up a huge chorus only to let it trail off before the payoff, too fallible for the façade; it’s like a tipsy, half-remembered karaoke version of Heart’s “Alone.” Among her reasons to drink are her hyper-productivity and the “sick industry,” which are even more relevant than when Morrissette was (her words) in “single digits.” And yet there’s something ineffably two-decades-ago about lines like “That’s it, I am buying a Lamborghini to make up for these” or, later on the album, “I am grieving the end of super-womaning.”
Not that that’s bad, entirely. By Morissette’s standards, Pretty Forks is a vulnerable, sedate, ballad-heavy album. Most of those ballads are unobtrusive, with songwriting-template piano and strings plush and regular as amphitheater seats. But a piano ballad by Alanis is still an Alanis song, and thus it just won’t sound like the rest, not with music’s most chaotic-neutral pop lyricist. Whether she actually writes like this, her songs sure sound first-thought-best-thought, no workshopping and no curation, let the syllables fall where they may.
And for this, she’s taken two and a half decades of shit. But there’s a method to the badness. For every awkward meter or future mondegreen, Alanis produces a lyric that’s charmingly handspun. “Ablaze,” written for her children, could easily be unbearably saccharine if it were just a dedication; instead, it’s specifically, wildly hers. When the songs are funny, she’s often in on the joke, like on the bleak, quavery “Diagnosis,” a dispatch from the world where you really just can’t: “I can’t remember where the sentence started when I’m trying to finish it.” If Morrissette writes mostly in epigraphs, the ones on “Pedestal” recall nothing less than Rita Hayworth (who famously said, of her titular role in the film noir classic Gilda, “Men go to bed with Gilda but wake up with me.”) Morissette’s version, “One day I won’t be craved the way you crave me now,” is more awkward but also more disarming; with a slight personal tweak, she turns the song from fear of abandonment to fear of the world’s abandonment. She knows what she’s doing.
These U-turns of phrase are well within bounds of what you expect from an Alanis Morissette album. But her music still has surprises, and she saves the most rewarding one for the end. “Nemesis,” like much of Pretty Forks, begins midtempo and pro forma. But across six minutes, it snowballs into something large, picking up element after element. Trance chimes, galloping “Running Up That Hill”-drums, buttinsky electric guitar and cellos coalesce into what sure sounds like an Alanis banger in 2020. Ironically, the song itself is about hating change—you don’t need an homage to ’90s Alanis when she’s still finding new ways to do “Alanis” herself.

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Working with a few key collaborators, the singer-songwriter delves into inner turmoil and late-night anxieties. But they play with a relaxed touch, creating a cozy, inviting atmosphere.

Inside Problems

Andrew Bird’s catalog offers ample evidence of a uniquely cerebral style of songwriting: His formidable discography spans artful Americana, refined revivals of hot jazz, a series of geographically -inspired records, and a bunch of Armchair Apocrypha, as he put it on the 2007 album that finally earned him a cult audience after a decade of steady work both on his own and with his group Bowl of Fire. Bird’s profile continued to rise in the decade after Armchair Apocrypha, to the point that he snagged a starring role on the fourth season of FX’s Fargo in 2020 and snared a Grammy nomination for My Finest Work Yet that same year.
Inside Problems plays like a retort to My Finest Work Yet, Bird’s last solo album. Where Bird addressed social upheaval on the 2019 record—a common trend among previously apolitical musicians during the Trump administration—Inside Problems is entirely concerned with matters of the mind and heart. It may chronicle an interior journey, but Inside Problems doesn’t sound insular, even if it wears its intimacy with pride. Working with a small group of musicians and featuring producer Mike Viola—a returning collaborator who helmed These 13, Bird’s 2021 duet album with Jimbo Mathus—on guitar, Alan Hampton on bass, and drummer Abe Rounds, Bird steers away from the folkier elements of his style, finding a previously uncharted territory closer to indie pop than Americana. The quartet plays with a distinctly relaxed touch, creating a cozy, inviting atmosphere.
But “cozy” might imply that Bird is mining familiar territory on Inside Problems, which isn’t quite true. He still relies on his customary tricks: He wields his violin and occasionally contributes a spectral whistle that dances along the margins, as it does on “Fixed Positions,” and he invites Jimbo Mathus to give “Faithless Ghost” a bit of revival spirit. Despite these accents, Inside Problems feels strikingly urbane, a well-tailored record whose heart and mind reside in the modern world, rather than some imagined Americana past. There are repeated allusions to author Joan Didion—there’s a direct nod on the sprightly “Lone Didion,” while “Atomized” spins off of her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem—and Lou Reed’s ghost looms over a good portion of the record, surfacing on “The Night Before Your Birthday,” a muffled thump of a rocker where Bird adopts Reed’s patented sneer. “Stop n’ Shop” occupies the same studiously primitive territory as “The Night Before Your Birthday,” but the results are closer to the cheerful naivete of Jonathan Richman. (It’s tempting to wonder if the song’s title might be a tip of the hat to Richman’s own “Roadrunner,” which immortalized the supermarket chain in its lyrics.)

These direct, unguarded moments are countered by tracks where Bird and company stretch out their rhythms, as they do on casually funky “Underlands,” or indulge in painterly textures, creating slowly shifting sounds that capture the elasticity of dreams. “Eight” takes full advantage of its nearly seven minutes, cascading to an extended instrumental session where Bird’s violin conveys emotions his meticulous vocals do not. It’s not that Bird is a limited singer—he can command attention with a murmur and ascend to the upper reaches of his range without cracking—but rather that the strength of Inside Problems lies in the way this small crew of musicians creates such a muted yet vibrant vibe. These 11 songs may be meant to chronicle a pointedly personal inner voyage, yet he’s wound up with a warm, collaborative record that feels like a balm for fear and loneliness.


One of rock music’s former Next Big Things returns with a propulsive, stream-lined album that has the modest charm of fan service.

Secret Machines: Awake in the Brain Chamber

Awake in the Brain Chamber

Secret Machines began their 2004 debut Now Here is Nowhere with six seconds of silence,  and when the kick drum hit, years of buzz became reality: a Next Big Thing band unafraid of all the Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular comparisons winging their way. 16 years later, Awake in the Brain Chamber begins much in a similar way, albeit only similar enough to bring the difference between 2004 and 2020 into sharp relief. “First Wave Intact” boomed like “When the Levee Breaks” out of the Darrell K. Royal jumbotron, and Awake in the Brain Chamber’s opening moments thud like two kids smacking a tetherball in a deserted schoolyard—a sound that absorbed every deflating circumstance of the past decade-plus, which were marked by artistic stalemates, fading commercial fortunes, and unthinkable tragedy. But if “3,4,5 Let’s Stay Alive” is the opposite of a Big Comeback from a former Big Thing, that’s kind of the entire point—Secret Machines just sound relieved that Awake in the Brain Chamber actually exists.
It’s a wise management of expectations for a version of Secret Machines that’s downsized in all ways. Original guitarist Benjamin Curtis died of lymphoma in 2013 at the age of 35, and his imprint is still noticeable on the remaining duo of brother Brandon and drummer Josh Garza; his electro-pop project School of Seven Bells is referenced in “3,4,5 Let’s Stay Alive.” Awake in the Brain Chamber clocks in at just a bit over a half hour, sucking out the dry ice and fog that filled the air as past songs stretched out past five minutes. What remains is an album built in the image of “Nowhere Again” or “Lightning Blue Eyes,” propulsive, streamlined, and feasibly pop—the kind of songs that once put Secret Machines alongside Arcade Fire as David Bowie’s favorite rock bands of 2004, or at least ones that pointed towards a brighter future at that moment than U2.
If the concept of “krautrock, but with choruses” is no longer novel in 2020, it’s at least fresh on Awake in the Brain Chamber—even as their vision of planetarium-ready rock receded almost entirely from the public imagination, Now Here is Nowhere maintained its cult appeal in large part because there really hasn’t been anything remotely like it since. Though Secret Machines don’t have the same sense of scope or scale today, the economized production and sleek song structures become an unexpected asset. Awake in the Brain Chamber shifts towards a more stately, synth-heavy sound. The sweeping and silvery “Talos’ Corpse” and “Angel Come” reimagine Secret Machines as logical forerunners and peers of British “The Big Music” revivalists like Foals or the Horrors, studio nerds who developed into a reliable late-afternoon festival act, rather than a band at the top of the American Landfill Indie heap, as their Spotify’s “Fans Also Like” page suggests.
But Awake in the Brain Chamber has the modest charm of fan service, intended for an audience that’s actively rooting for Secret Machines to succeed. The back story is indispensable to project a sense of stakes onto a record that takes the straightest path in cruising to the finish line, never once swerving or stepping on the gas. While certainly the tightest Secret Machines LP, much like Brandon Curtis’ side gig Interpol, the band’s power is directly proportional to an unshakeable belief in its inherent profundity. As longtime fans know, Awake in the Brain Chamber stands in the place of an even more troubled predecessor: The Moth, The Lizard and the Secret Machines was completed in 2010 and scrapped at the mixing stage, deemed “too depressing.” The duo plans to release it at some point, and hopefully it does come to light, if only to reveal what “depressing Secret Machines” might actually sound like. They’ve never been particularly forthcoming with their emotions, with Ten Silver Drops standout “Alone, Jealous and Stoned” standing as the rule-proving exception. Awake in the Brain Chamber is best when Curtis is at his most vulnerable—giving himself a pep talk in the call-and-response chorus of “Everything Starts,” muttering “I want to give up” all too believably throughout the chorus of “Talos’ Corpse,” before amending himself—“I want to give up, but don’t.” They sound like they have much more to give.

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Three years before they split, at an Independence Day concert in a downtown park, the band tore through its earliest work with the polish of seasoned pros.

Sonic Youth: Sonic Youth: Battery Park, NYC: July 4, 2008

Battery Park, NYC: July 4, 2008

Sonic Youth ceased to exist in 2011, at the end of a 30-year career, much of which was obsessively archived in live audio and video recordings that have surfaced both officially and not so officially. Documents of their last few years together show a band that had perfected its live show and was spending a lot of time revisiting the songs of its early days. Battery Park, commercially released for the first time this month, was originally given away along with pre-orders of the band’s final full-length, The Eternal, 10 years ago. A free show in a lower Manhattan park on the Fourth of July is a pretty good place to capture a band that was forever inseparable from New York City, specifically its lower reaches.
True professionals—the only events that ever derailed them were a massive instrument theft in 1999 and, finally, the breakup of a marriage—and seasoned festival players after years on the European circuit, they handled a daylight set in a park like just another day at the office. That might make it sound as if they were going through the motions, but that undersells how seriously they took their job. Up until the end, they came to play.
The set is relatively heavy on audience-friendly tracks from Daydream Nation. That album had just turned 20, and Sonic Youth had spent a good amount of time in the previous months on tour playing it in its entirety. Those songs perfectly showcased how polished their organized whirlwind had become over the years, while retaining the ability to give listeners whiplash with a sudden change of pace or blast of noise. “Hey Joni” veers from hardcore ranting to dissonant squalls to furious rave-up. “The Sprawl” is the set’s jammiest improv moment, extending into a dreamy cymbal-and-guitar back and forth, dying down to just a single strummed note, then roaring back. It’s also a tease for those fans who lived for the moments when the band would stretch out, toying with effects to create not so much a wall of sound as a whole, enclosed room.
A couple years later, even Daydream Nation would seem like recent material in a Sonic Youth set, as their last few shows consisted almost exclusively of material from the Bad Moon Rising through Sister era. This set didn’t touch any of those, instead reaching back to the band’s debut self-titled EP and first LP, Confusion Is Sex. Hearing those 1982 songs played by 2008 Sonic Youth collapses time in a way that’s more familiar to reunion tours, but of course there was no break for this band until they called it quits. Early, bare-bones no-wave stompers “World Looks Red” and “Making the Nature Scene” get the benefit of more musicality and, of course, Steve Shelley’s drumming, the X factor that propelled the band from very good to one of the greatest of all time.
Karen Carpenter and Madonna were always as important to Sonic Youth as the Beat poets and Glenn Branca, and, unwilling as they were to baldly grasp for the brass ring, they clearly wanted at least one big hit. Their closest shot was probably “Bull in the Heather,” one of Kim Gordon’s signature songs, released in the heat of the Lollapalooza boom. And here it gets the loudest audible audience reaction, from the start of its plinking, dissonant intro, before Shelley’s maraca-accented drumming begins. Gordon seems to be having a decent amount of fun here. Mark Ibold’s presence as the fifth Youth, in addition to filling out the band’s sound, allowed Gordon to occasionally switch to guitar or take a turn as a pure frontwoman and focus on vocals. Here she plays around with a goofy British accent while singing “Making the Nature Scene.”
As with all bands that so thoroughly reshape the genre in which they work, it’s impossible ever again to hear Sonic Youth as they sounded when they emerged. At times, it seemed like the electric guitar had been invented just for them to fuck up. The sudden blasts of feedback on their early albums were physically startling, the interplay of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore hypnotic. Live, they could freeze you to the floor—trying to hear everything, wondering if all of it really existed or if some of those sounds were only inside your skull. Gordon’s determinedly simple bass and Shelley’s powerful, tom-forward drumming tied it all down and provided the center around which all that guitar noise swirled. While Battery Park isn’t their best or most comprehensive live document, it is further proof of how consistent their genius was and how enduring the qualities that made them such a special live act were—not dependent on youth, novelty, material, or anything except for the irreplicable chemistry between four people.
Just before “The Wonder,” Moore asks Ranaldo, “Do you start this or do I?” "We start together,” Ranaldo responds. Moore echoes him: “We start together, man. Together, forever!” Or three more years, as it turned out. But he could hope.


The debut album from the Queens crew is fiery and kinetic, mining the history of New York rap without coming up with much of anything new.

New Lows

The Queens rap crew World’s Fair pride themselves on showcasing cultural diversity. The group’s members claim Puerto Rican, Dominican, Filipino, Jamaican, Jewish and Haitian heritages, a makeup that, along with the crew’s name, implicitly promises a global array of voices and perspectives. But while on paper World’s Fair have all the makings of a vibrant melting pot, in execution it’s more like a fondue, a homogenous porridge where the most interesting ingredients get buried and the dominant flavor note is always “New York.”
The crew’s regional roots aren’t the selling point they were five years ago, when they released their debut mixtape Bastards of the Party against the backdrop of a “New New York” hip-hop renaissance that’s since fizzled out. World’s Fair weren’t as overtly traditionalist as some of the more prominent acts from that movement (Joey Badass), nor were they as mold-shattering as the more exciting ones (Action Bronson, Flatbush Zombies, or A$AP Mob, to the extent they were ever really part of that scene). Their belated full-length debut New Lows finds them in the same stasis many of New York hip-hop’s true believers have been locked in for most of the new millennium: trying to grow something new from the seeds of some of the genre’s greatest music ever, with little to show for it.
Sometimes they get by on sheer perspiration. New Lows plays out as a kinetic tour of the city’s bodegas, subway stops, and underground dice games, with adrenalized production designed to keep the crew firing fast. “Elvis’ Flowers (On My Grave)” spikes its breakbeats with jungle BPMs, while the booming drums of “Win4” bring to life the song’s accounts of how shit can hit the fan even on a routine trip to the corner store. The wilder the production, the more lasting the high: The tweaked-out synths of “Dundas Street West” bring out the most hyped-up performances from the group (as well as guest Freaky Franz, the rap alias of Turnstile bassist Franz Lyons). “Birdman,” meanwhile, charts the inhospitable middle ground between gnarly UK grime and the scorched-earth noise of vintage Def Jux.
So, at its best, New Lows re-energizes some familiar sounds. But the crew’s producers can only carry so much weight, and they can’t disguise how little World’s Fairs rappers bring to the table. It’s a trap too many New York traditionalists fall into: They rap forcefully but with little nuance or personality. While rappers around the rest of the country swing for the fences with daring deliveries—not just rhyming but belting, serenading, and exploring—most of World’s Fair’s primary lyricists default to the city’s usual hard-spitting preset, rapping as if smacking a camera lens in an imagined music video. It’s a rigid, outdated notion of hard, and with each verse they run it a little further in the ground.
With such a full bench, you’d expect that at least one of the rappers in World’s Fair would rise to the challenge to standout. The big selling point of a rap crew is more bang for your buck: You get to hear a multitude of ideas and personas. But compared to a collective like Brockhampton, where each member brings his own set of convictions, anxieties, and passions, World’s Fair’s rappers are largely interchangeable, distinguishable mostly by the pitch of their voice. In a sense, they’ve been failed by their shared muse: They spend so much of New Lows riding for their city, its heritage, and its way of life that they forget to say all that much about themselves.


For some reason, Stars decide to take a three-year-old album and commission their own tribute to it.

Do You Trust Your Friends?

In recent years, everyone from Death From Above 1979 to Architecture in Helsinki to Bloc Party have succumbed to the temptation to create indie remix albums. Now we're faced with Stars' Do You Trust Your Friends?, which we may someday see as the tipping point from indie rock remix albums being idle, indulgent fan-club novelties to becoming inescapable annoyances. Helpfully, it gathers all the transgressions of the trend into one convenient package: incestuous choice of collaborators, unimaginative use of technology, and reconfiguration that uniformly fails to improve on the originals. It also ups the criminal ante by revisiting, track-by-track, an album that's already three years old (Set Yourself on Fire) and splitting the time between flimsy remixes and lazy covers; in other words, Stars has commissioned their own tribute album. The sheer egotism is the most impressive thing about it.
Final Fantasy's leadoff take on "Your Ex-Lover is Dead" sets the tone, lying limply between remix and cover. Preserving Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan's vocals, Owen Pallett fills in the rest with waltzy piano and random string bursts that seem fairly oblivious to the song, sounding more like an audition to be Jon Brion's film-soundtrack intern than a new take on a song that was already more effectively cinematic to begin with. And Pallett's not the only one who utilizes the "hey let's attach the original vocal track to whatever random shit we have lying around" method, as the Most Serene Republic short-circuit the glistening synth-pop of "Ageless Beauty" by layering Millan's singing over an aimless acoustic jam, and the Stills use "Soft Revolution" as a riff-and-solo trashcan, with a horrible pan-flute solo as frosting.
Even when the covers sound less like a band cleaning out their hard drive, the reinterpretations misunderstand Stars' appeal and strengths. Both Apostle of Hustle's slack "One More Night" and the Russian Futurists' breakbeat-and-power-chord "The First Five Times" over-masculinize the sleepy and sensitive Stars sound, while retaining none of their romantic grandeur. Only Broken Social Scene alumnus Jason Collett's top-to-bottom remake of "Reunion" offers any sort of surprising alternate take, turning the song into a ragged, Stonesy number that's far enough afield of Stars' usual M.O. to justify the makeover.
In the actual remix department, there are multiple examples of the most common rearrangement gaffes. Camouflage Nights' "Celebration Guns" and the Dears' "What I'm Trying to Say" (inexplicably split into two parts) both commit the crime of reproduction, with new versions mostly adhering to the originals' structure and sounds and merely moving the sonic furniture around a bit ("hey, what if the chorus drumbeat was the drumbeat for the verses!"). Then there are the tracks that are completely electronified, but to little result, like the Junior Boys' phoned-in "Sleep Tonight", perhaps the most promising (given the Boys' remix know-how), and therefore disappointing, track on Friends. Minotaur Shock (with "The Big Fight") and Metric ("He Lied About Death") at least get a little ambitious, but both leave the oven undercooked, the former rendered somewhat uncomfortable by gallons of empty space, and the latter fixated like a third-grader on the swear-word lyric "don't fuck with our lives" as it runs a psych-loop treadmill.
All together, Do You Trust Your Friends? is an ideal demonstration of why the trend of indie rock remix records should be snuffed out before they becomes industry standard. While we understand the urge to create this kind of stopgap project, either as a way to keep an artist's name in the newswire, a chance to make some extra pocket change with minimal work, or an opportunity to promote some musical pals, as an artistic statement these releases almost uniformly fail to creatively re-imagine any of the source material, only serving to fill the market with inferior versions. Ideally, indie bands will restrict their remixing impulses to B-sides and blog leaks, utilize artists with some experience and talent in the art, and spare us from the feeble, immaterial album-length likes of Friends.


Mike Hadreas’ fifth album glides between sublime melodies and grimy, guttural dissonance, embracing the joys and burdens of the human body and its innumerable, intangible yearnings.

Perfume Genius: Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

Each Perfume Genius album is a metamorphosis. Over the past decade, Mike Hadreas has transfigured from confessional balladeer to glittering prima donna to our baroque-pop bard. On his terrific fifth album Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, Hadreas emerges with all new contours. Guided once more by the meticulous work of producer Blake Mills and an expert troupe of musicians, including experimental saxophonist Sam Gendel and renowned session drummer Jim Keltner, Hadreas glides between sublime melodies and grimy, guttural dissonance. It is his strongest work to date—a three-dimensional, dust-blown world that is cinematic in its grandeur and intimate in its inspection of the human form.
On 2017’s fantastic No Shape, Hadreas sang of liberating the body. Each song seemed to unhitch his spirit from the corporeal grind, letting it whip through the air like Fragonard’s swinging lady. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately feels more grounded, both in the earth and in the flesh. As on No Shape, there are skyward string arrangements and sparkling harpsichord passages, but Hadreas and his crew also introduce harmonium, grumbling synthesizer, and rust-worn electric guitar. The effect is sprawling and dynamic, made all the more intriguing by Hadreas’ agile vocal range. On earlier LPs, his voice pierced through the clouds with a clean note or a vulnerable falsetto. Those techniques remain, but he also dips to craggy lows, enhancing the record’s texture with layers of silt and grit.
“Leave” marries these two approaches beautifully. Hadreas’ voice is pitched-down and scuffed, backlit by beams of violin and twinkling keys. Halfway through, howling dogs and unintelligible whispers besiege the song from its edges as the dream succumbs to nightmare. Conversely, “Without You” and “On the Floor” are the album’s most spry compositions. The former floats on plinked organ, distant percussion, and dashes of viola, a blend that somehow resembles a calypso melody. “On the Floor,” the album’s sweet and chewy pop center, bounces atop Pino Palladino’s elastic bassline, so thick it sounds like he’s wailing on industrial-strength bungee cords. Mills’ synth guitar riffs chirp and belch to Matt Chamberlain’s peppery snare, evoking a contemporary translation of Chic. Both songs find Hadreas in a state of intangible yearning. “Without You” chronicles an absence as “a blurry shape” that’s “just enough to find a trace.” In “On the Floor,” he attempts to recall that shape once more. “I’m trying/But still I close my eyes,” he sings, “The dreaming/Bringing his face to mind.” He never quite gets ahold of the complete image—it dissolves just before it’s fully realized.
When Hadreas abandons the imagined world to confront physical reality, his palette darkens. On early single “Describe,” his voice seems to emerge from a crust of topsoil. Dirtied, distorted bass and twanging guitar lend a country western flair, and Hadreas’ rugged new look (perhaps a nod to Tom of Finland’s cowboys) enhances the fantasy. His multi-tracked vocals braid and tangle in the mix as he illustrates two sounds similarly entwined: “No bells anymore,” he sings, “just my stomach rumbling.” It’s a loaded couplet, hinting at his lifelong battle with Crohn’s disease, and a gesture toward Perfume Genius’ two greatest fascinations: The erosion of the body and the curative properties of love. When Hadreas confesses that there are no more bells, just bodily functions, it feels like a reluctant surrender to the mundane.
If No Shape endeavored to transcend the body, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately embraces the joys and burdens of human anatomy. On mid-album battle march “Your Body Changes Everything,” Hadreas explores the exchange of power between bodies. “Give me your weight, I’m solid/Hold me up, I’m falling down,” he bellows. It might be his most masculine song ever, chronicling a sexual exchange that alternately yields to strength and conquers it. But it is audibly macho as well: Hadreas sinks to a shadowy register, Gendel issues militant sax blurts, and the whole thing gallops to a relentless drum pattern. It’s robust and intense, echoing the theme song from 1982’s Conan the Barbarian (itself a celebration of flesh).
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is both vast and packed with detail. The songs expand and contract, one minute blasting open with the melodrama of a Roy Orbison ballad, the next zooming in with surgical detail as Hadreas describes ribs that fold like fabric, a tear-streaked face, an instance of post-coital petty theft. He laments the passage of time in a trembling existential opus, then squeezes us into a bedroom to witness a clumsy, tortured hookup. On their own, these complementary vantage points are potent; in concert, they are grand, filmic, and tactile all at once.

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A lost album from the UK post-punk greats, recorded circa 1989, sheds light on the creative process of brilliant, troubled frontman Dan Treacy.

Television Personalities: Beautiful Despair

Beautiful Despair

In his prime, Television Personalities frontman Dan Treacy was perhaps the most unconventional figure in post-punk. Indeed, the usual procedures of writing, recording and performing music seemed to bore him so much he could hardly be bothered to try. In concert, Treacy refused to write setlists or announce titles, leaving his bandmates to identify each new mystery song as he launched into it; Television Personalities rehearsals, meanwhile, were virtually nonexistent. “I remember us rehearsing once in late 1983,” Treacy’s friend and collaborator Jowe Head recalled to The Brag in 2016. “We did another one five years later, and that was about it.” So averse was Treacy to the obligatory drudgery of being a musician that it sometimes seemed as if he’d prefer to do anything else. “In fact music is probably not the right medium for me to express myself,” he confessed in an interview in the mid-’80s. “I like films and books more.”
But music was what he chose. Over more than 30 years and nearly a dozen celebrated albums, Treacy expressed his suffering with his music until the suffering overwhelmed him. (He expressed his joy and humor when he felt them, too, but the pain won out.) In the ’90s, he vanished for more than half a decade, whereabouts unknown: it would later transpire he’d been serving time on a prison barge, convicted for shoplifting. Addiction tormented him. In 2011, after a short-lived mid-aughts comeback, he disappeared again—this time owing to a blood clot in the brain that required extensive surgery. Since then, reportedly, he has been recovering under professional care in a nursing home. With not much prospect now of new music, the arrival of a lost Television Personalities album would seem to be cause for celebration—we’re getting more Dan Treacy just when we need him.
Beautiful Despair was recorded at Jowe Head’s flat at Glading Terrace in Stoke Newington over a number of sessions in 1989 and 1990, after the release of the acclaimed Privilege and before the recording of the mid-career classic Closer to God—the latter of which contains so many of these songs in more complete form that it seems more accurate to describe Beautiful Despair as a first draft of Closer to God than a proper standalone LP. It is a true “lost album” in one literal sense: Head admitted recently that he had “mislaid the tapes” from these sessions and simply happened upon them while looking for something else. But it is not as though 48 minutes’ worth of never-before-heard vintage Television Personalities material has been unearthed after all these years. Beautiful Despair is a rough sketch, and its worth extends only as far as one’s interest in such a document.
If it’s true of the best Television Personalities songs that, as NME said in a  review of the band’s 1981 debut, And Don’t the Kids Just Love It, “their particular magic lies in their half-formed nature, their humble hesitancy,” then Beautiful Despair has that virtue. Indeed, the familiar tracks here sound cruder and less refined than their finalized Closer to God counterparts, ramshackle in a manner that can be quite appealing. “Hard Luck Story Number 39” and “Razor Blades and Lemonade,” two of Treacy’s best songs from this period, have the pleasant dreaminess of bedroom pop—a stark change from their full-band rock arrangements and robust production on the better-known record. A simplified “I Hope You Have a Nice Day” seems in particular an improvement over the original: shorn of its brass and wall-of-noise guitar, it’s revealed as a charming, breezy pop gem, precisely the sort of thing Treacy did well.
Beautiful Despair does boast a handful of bona-fide discoveries. The finest, a downtempo number called “If You Fly Too High,” was recorded after a show at the Ecstasy Madhouse club in Berlin in 1989; the Television Personalities were playing with the Lemonheads, and the song was conceived as a parody of Evan Dando. (It includes such memorably Treacian witticisms as “Have I told you I know Alan McGee?”) Another, “Love is a Four Letter Word,” went on to become “Love is Better Than War,” a b-side to a single from 1992. The song is a test case for the merit of much of this album. Probably it’s good that “Love is a Four Letter Word” exists in this incarnation, as a matter of historical interest and a gift for dedicated fans. But is it significant? Frankly, no. It shares with most of Beautiful Despair the unfortunate condition of superfluousness.
“It just amuses me,” Treacy told Scottish fanzine Slow Dazzle in 1984, asked how he felt when epithets like “art pop” and “psychedelic” were used to describe his style. “I can hardly be accused of jumping on the bandwagon though, can I? A couple of years ago people were saying, ‘What the hell are they doing?’” It was an old story for him even then. His band always seemed out of harmony with fashion, either too early or too late for what was popular at the moment. In 1976, aged 17, he went to his first punk-rock show, but left because he found it too violent. So he made up his own genre, and ridiculed the punk kids with defiantly uncool cheer. The world would catch up with Treacy eventually: his witty, lo-fi pop influenced everyone from Pavement to the Jesus and Mary Chain. Only by then he’d moved on to something else that wasn’t trendy—ever the prescient artist, never a man with much luck.


The hardcore trio grapples with the ongoing death of their NYC home in their most cohesive work to date.

Dog Whistle

In 2015, Show Me the Body frontman Julian Cashwan Pratt told The Guardian that he was struggling to write love songs. “The city is dying” he said of his native New York, outlining the institutional and economic blows NYC residents deflect daily just to survive—displacement, aggressive policing, corporate homogenization. On Show Me the Body’s new album Dog Whistle, the hardcore trio grapple with the same conundrum, but while digging through the rubble of razed local businesses is disheartening work, Show Me the Body would sift through no other city’s debris. Dog Whistle, like the band’s previous records Corpus I and Body War, is quick to state the failings of the five boroughs—but it also aims to fortify the underground community in which it was created. As a result, the band have produced their most cohesive work to date, however one that struggles to maintain interest and energy throughout its 30-minute runtime.
Dog Whistle functions best when Show Me the Body are able to capture the vitality of their live sets, as well as the sheer noisiness of New York itself. “Not for Love” is punctuated by throbs of distortion that sound like a jackhammer busting up concrete. Here, Pratt’s vocal chords are ripped raw, and they dispatch quick, incisive lyrics that sting long after the cut’s been made. Pratt’s view of his home turf is as uplifting as it is doomed: In one snarled breath, he offers a succinct manifesto on drudgery: “Fuck and work if you’re lucky.” In another, he holds his community to a higher standard: “Let’s do it right/Let's do it for love.”
“Madonna Rocket” is the most vigorous and traditionally punk song on the album, and its momentum alone makes it the most memorable. It’s easy to see how this track would translate into the band’s gigs; a pit of tangled limbs churning in front of the stage. Show Me the Body excel when they allow their music to whip itself into a frenzy like this, and co-producers Gabriel Millman and Chris Coady (who’s worked with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Beach House) deserve some credit for letting the LP stay stained and frayed at the edges. But the album screeches to a halt during a couple of spoken word interludes that feel forced and unnecessary. The 45-second “Animal in a Dream” features Pratt reciting a poem that feels generic and half-finished when compared with his bright, insightful discourse in interviews, or the venom he spits onstage. The static sizzling in the background of the track is arguably more intriguing than his words, and would be just as effective as a transitional element on the record.
Structurally, “Camp Orchestra” is Dog Whistle’s most interesting song, creeping in with rigid bass and banjo plucks that sound siphoned from an early Genesis tune, before propelling into a furious headbanger that borrows as much from metal as it does punk and prog rock.
Show Me the Body’s comfort experimenting with different genres may stem from the fact that their Corpus collective is home to artists across mediums and styles—it might also be a result of inhabiting the city that birthed punk, hip-hop, and so many other creative movements. But what imbues “Camp Orchestra” with added weight is the trip that inspired it. While recently on tour in Poland, Pratt and his bandmates Harlan Steed and Noah Cohen-Corbett—all of whom are Jewish—visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, and were especially haunted by a phrase on the entrance gate: “Work Sets You Free.” Pratt was thinking of a specific kind of work when he wrote “Camp Orchestra,” which is named after the prisoners who were forced to perform music for Nazi officers, as well as for fellow captives while they were marched to and from labor. Pratt screams over a squall of feedback: “No work will set you free to work,” a notion that could easily be applied to the inescapable hustle that is as much a part of NYC as its artistic milestones.
New York is a complicated place to call home. This is one way to sum up Show Me the Body’s mission statement. They feel constantly at odds with the city’s imposing new structures, and their disappearing locales. In the midst of losing members of their community, they strive to bring their found family closer together. Their songs embody a ceaseless push and pull, but unfortunately don't always epitomize the fervor of their lives outside of the music. New York is a place that relentlessly demands more from you—but I imagine Show Me the Body will push even harder in years to come.


On his first proper album in five years, Tom Jenkinson patches together a passel of vintage hardware to revisit the breakbeat mayhem and drill’n’bass hijinks of his early years.

Be Up a Hello

The cultural cachet of the leftfield electronic music of the 1990s is higher now than it’s been in years. Aphex Twin headlines festivals; Autechre set the internet alight with radio appearances and DAT tapes of unreleased material; younger generations’ output is peppered with copious references to acts like Plaid and B12.
But what about Squarepusher? Tom Jenkinson was a huge part of the original IDM boom, not to mention one of Warp’s core artists during its late-’90s golden era. His albums Hard Normal Daddy (1997), the jazzy Music Is Rotted One Note (1998) and even Go Plastic (2001) are  invoked in reverential terms, along with his early records for Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label. But Squarepusher’s recent output hasn’t been greeted with the same kind of collective enthusiasm that Aphex and Autechre’s mature work has received.
There is one key difference between his career and those of his contemporaries: Squarepusher never really went away. Where some of his peers have taken extended breaks or remained shrouded in mystery, Jenkinson has been steadily releasing music for the past 25 years. He has kept taking risks: fronting a band (Shobaleader One), soundtracking a children’s television program (Cbeebies), collaborating with Japanese robots (Squarepusher x Z-Machines), dipping his toes into EDM (Ufabulum), and dazzling us with his fretwork (Solo Electric Bass 1). Jenkinson’s experimental impulses are commendable, but not all of these creative dalliances were successful, and he’s never disappeared long enough for fans to forget the duds and fall back on their warm memories of his glory days.
Be Up a Hello, the first proper Squarepusher full-length in five years, explicitly nods to his earliest days as a producer. Abandoning the custom software he’d developed over the course of his career, Jenkinson constructed the album using a small fleet of vintage hardware, including a Commodore VIC-20, a personal computer first released in the early 1980s. Due to the nature of his setup, many of Be Up a Hello’s tracks were recorded in a single take, giving the album a loose, freewheeling feel that suits the music’s generally manic nature.
Frantic breakbeats are at the core of Be Up a Hello, which is littered with echoes of classic jungle, hardcore, and drum’n’bass. During particularly intense moments, that energy even tips into ’90s drill’n’bass territory, most notably on the unrelenting “Speedcrank,” whose full-throttle hijinks will likely prove exhausting for all but the most amped of ravers. More palatable is the berzerk “Mekrev Bass,” a showcase for glitchy 8-bit chaos. Several cuts harken back to old-school video-game soundtracks; with its bright chords and bouncy rhythm, “Oberlove” sounds like something unearthed from a wholesome Yoshi title, while the neon-streaked twists and turns of the densely populated “Hitsonu” would be perfect for the final stages of a complex puzzle game.
That kind of nerdy nostalgia is baked into Be Up a Hello, although the presence of colorful club rippers like “Nervelevers” and “Terminal Slam”—both of which pair crunchy acid blips with frenzied breakbeat assaults—ensures that the LP is more than a quaint trip down memory lane. “Vortrack” heads down a darker path, but the scattered rhythm, intermittently slipping into a dubsteppy half-time cadence, gives the song a drunken, meandering feel. (Much better was Jenkinson’s own “Vortrack (Fracture Remix)” from last year, which distilled the mayhem of the original single into a hard-stepping jungle cut with a gooey, gut-rumbling bassline.)
Jenkinson wisely puts the breakbeat onslaught on pause for “Detroit People Mover” and LP closer “80 Ondula,” both of which are beatless synth excursions. Employing a symphonic flair that’s equal parts Wendy Carlos and John Carpenter, the former evokes ’70s sci-fi film scores, while the latter’s creeping tones are better suited for a dingy horror flick. A world away from his signature drum attack, they nevertheless represent some of Be Up a Hello’s most compelling material.
For years, Squarepusher fans have been clamoring for Jenkinson to get back to his roots, and Be Up the Hello is the closest he’s come to his ’90s self in quite some time. With its glitchy bedlam and mischievous spirit, the album does offer moments of gleeful chaos, yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s a facsimile, a simulacrum. The LP feels more like a technical exercise than a genuine outburst of creative spontaneity. It too often feels like Jenkinson is applying his virtuosic talents to covering his own back catalog—something he’s literally done before with the Shobaleader One project—and the overload of nostalgia keeps the album from feeling fresh. As thrilling as those vintage Squarepusher records were (and still are), it wasn’t necessary that Jenkinson make another one.

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The English singer’s third album promises eccentricity and personal revelation but delivers anonymous, uninspired pop-rock.

Yungblud

Yungblud isn’t one for subtleties. Armed with his trademark smudged eyeliner and creeper shoes, Doncaster, England’s Dominic Harrison uses formulaic pop melodies to proclaim the misfit manifesto: Nobody understands me. In the music video for “The Funeral,” the opener to Harrison’s third album, Yungblud, he digs his own grave and crowd surfs in a coffin before Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne run him over with their car. “Just some fucking poser,” Sharon scoffs, signaling to Yungblud’s purist naysayers that he’s in on the joke, too.
Over the past four years, Harrison has become something of a Gen Z spokesperson by rehashing pop-punk clichés of yore: “All I want is a cigarette/Until I realize I’ve got none left,” he sings on the sincere acoustic ballad “Die for a Night.” If he’s done one thing right, it’s to insist that he doesn’t consider himself a true punk at all. Instead, he likens himself to Mac Miller and Lil Peep, polarizing wunderkinds whose bright careers ended in tragedy: “I got into this place where I thought the best career move would be death,” Harrison recently told NME. “I thought, ‘If I die right now, would people look beyond a horrible trend on Twitter or TikTok? Would they give me a chance?’” With this in mind, earnest declarations like “I got a fucked-up soul and an STD” sound less remorseful and more like Harrison’s attempt to conjure pathos in a way his music cannot.
While Harrison’s previous work has touched clumsily on broader topics like chasing fame, growing up queer, and even mass shootings, he asserts that Yungblud divulges profound stories about his troubled personal history. The closest he gets to real introspection is on “The Boy in the Black Dress” when he sings: “Masculinity seems to hurt a lot/The first time that you feel it in your jaw,” or on “I Cry 2” when he dispels accusations of queerbaiting by announcing, “I’ll start dating men when they go to therapy.” But it’s hard to praise Harrison for vulnerability when the songs feel this anonymous and insipid, and harder when he wastes a sample of the Cure’s “Close to Me” on infantile rhymes like “I don’t want you to hide your issues/Blow them into your tissues”—which might help you stop crying, if only because you’re laughing too hard.
It doesn’t help that none of the music on Yungblud sounds even remotely inspired. Harrison’s first two albums, 2018’s 21st Century Liability and 2020’s Weird!, interwove elements of rap with macabre pop-punk, presenting him as the UK analogue to Twenty One Pilots or his pal and collaborator Machine Gun Kelly. It might’ve felt heavy-handed and forced, but at least it was something. On Yungblud, Harrison leans almost exclusively into saccharine pop-rock, making this his most monotonous and least distinctive record. He is still struggling to come up with a song that doesn’t already ring a bell: From a bastardization of Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” (“The Funeral”) to watered-down imitations of the 1975 (“I Cry 2”) and One Direction (“Don’t Feel Like Being Sad”), Harrison has never sounded less like the boundary-breaking eccentric he vehemently aspires to be. He’s well aware he isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s not because of his unfiltered bad boy image. On Yungblud, it’s simply because the cup is empty.


The Swedish electro-pop group’s first album for Ninja Tune is a welcome departure, finally infusing their own studio work with the creative energy of their collaborative sessions.

New Me, Same Us

The knock on Little Dragon has long been that their best work happens on other artists’ albums. Perhaps that’s an unfair standard to hold them to: After all, their collaborators tend to be some of the world’s most creative and forward-thinking artists, like Flying Lotus, Damon Albarn, and Dave Sitek, to name just a few. It might be their skillful use of negative space that pairs so well with such different compositional styles; maybe it’s the ultra-fine grit of Yukimi Nagano’s voice that serves as such an alluring foil for others to create their best work. But with a few exceptions, their most memorable songs have not been their own.
On their own records, Little Dragon’s tendency to retread the retrofuturist aesthetic they’ve refined over the last 15 years has left much of their output feeling flat and uninspired. Part polished Brit R&B, part Swedish electro-pop, there’s an easy listening vibe to their oeuvre—think hi-fi beats to relax and study to—that feels like a waste of the potential they flashed on 2009’s Machine Dreams. But their new LP, New Me, Same Us—their first full-length for London’s Ninja Tune—is a welcome departure from their somewhat staid studio sessions, finally infusing their own work with the creative energy of their collaborations.
New Me, Same Us doesn’t completely abandon their usual toolkit. Little Dragon still strike a delicate balance between the organic and the electronic, the danceable and the downtempo. They are at their best when they loosen up, forsaking technical precision in favor of a more free-flowing funk—led by Fredrik Wallin’s bass—that lets Nagano’s husky R&B vocals flow most naturally. Album standout “New Fiction” bottles this natural alchemy: Nagano’s voice and Wallin’s bass perform an elegant duet on the verses, intertwined like dance partners who’ve been waltzing together for years. And when Wallin is given free rein on the grand piano on the bridge, pummeling the high keys in a rare moment of unbridled expression, the band achieves a high-water mark that feels years in the making, injecting raw unpredictability into a sound typically defined by its slick studio sheen.
In that sense, “New Fiction” is a bit of a tease; the rest of New Me, Same Us is relatively restrained. And while the record’s press materials tout the album as the band’s “most collaborative” yet, the creative exchange is mostly internal—the sole feature comes from Kali Uchis on “Are You Feeling Sad?”, a welcome if brief addition to the record’s tonal palette. But there’s evidence that their years assisting other artists, for so long an albatross they’ve sought to shed, have finally left an impression. “BULLETS,” their collaboration with Kaytranada, was one of 99.9%’s standouts, infusing Little Dragon’s glossy funk with Caribbean soul. The impact he made is evident from the first few minutes of New Me, Same Us, from the syncopated four-on-the-floor beat on “Hold On” to the jazzy swing of “Are You Feeling Sad?”, and even in the way Nagano’s voice fills the gaps left by the rhythm section on “New Fiction.” Their wider influences are also laid bare, to positive effect. They credit Massive Attack as a sonic ancestor to “Hold On,” and it’s easy to hear how Little Dragon’s swirling synths and clacking woodblock mirror the synthesized strings and staccato percussion of “Unfinished Sympathy.”
Historically, Little Dragon albums have felt like collections of a band’s earnest attempts to find their groove, defined more by their failure to spark the magic than the few moments when they achieve it. And while New Me, Same Us is not entirely free of woe—the melancholy melody on “Every Rain” oozes existential ennui—for the most part, they sound like they’re having more fun than ever. Fifteen years in, they seem to have turned a corner, feeding off some of the inspiration that helped them stand out on other artists’ records. Perhaps they’ve finally discovered that they had as much to gain from their peers as they’ve been giving.


The fifth annual compilation from Los Angeles’ Doom Trip label is a survey of contemporary vaporwave that doubles as a snapshot of a particularly vital corner of the electronic underground.

Doom Mix, Vol. V

One of music’s chief pleasures is the way it conjures up a sense of the now, of displacement from the rest of the world into moods and grooves and hooks and melodies. But nowness isn’t just about sonic immersion, it’s about timeliness, and Los Angeles-based Doom Trip capture both on their annual Doom Mix compilations. For the past five years, label head Zac Emerson has brought together acts from his eclectic roster and elsewhere to showcase a wide array of today’s underground electronica. The results have been ceremonious because they’re an obvious extension of Emerson’s tastes; these artists are his chosen family, and pressing play on these albums can feel like peering into a cheery reunion.
As with all traditions, Doom Mix, Vol. V provides comfort in familiarity—some artists here have appeared on previous editions—but this collection is both sprawling and cohesive, providing a survey of contemporary vaporwave and similar zones. This balancing act is accomplished through astute sequencing, and the one-two punch of Fire-Toolz’s “More Spirit Spit Please” and Skylar Spence’s “Kratos in Love” is the most exquisite example. The former is a dazzling melange of screamed vocals, glittery video-game ambience, and saxophone wails that shift from free-jazz skronk to endearing melodicism—a constant pummeling of emotional release. The latter serves as the necessary comedown: a disco edit that’s breezy and light, its bunny-hopping bassline as amiable as its slick-sweet guitars.
The tracklist also features Keith Rankin and Maxwell Allison, co-founders of Orange Milk Records and Hausu Mountain, respectively. Both labels have been pillars of experimental electronic music throughout the past decade, and their inclusions point to a camaraderie in the scene at large. Rankin dons his Giant Claw moniker for album highlight “Gummy Scrub,” a collage-aesthetic pop song featuring a dizzying array of sounds: hardcore synth stabs, a warped J.Lo sample, even a hint of new jack swing. Allison’s track as Mukqs is a plunderphonic swarm of voices, its stuttered rhythm and synthetic sheen like his own take on a reduced Carl Stone track. As it progresses, a ramshackle beat works its way into the mix; it makes for an amelodic close to the album, wrapping up with a final moment of stupor.
There are long-standing vaporwave artists here as well, including Nmesh, Luxury Elite, and the aforementioned Spence. Nmesh’s “Rms Ephratha Pa (Cloud Bath)” takes samples from various movies, including Andy Sidaris’ Malibu Express, and lays them atop a ’90s downtempo beat. Its ambling bassline and skittering vocal edits provide scatterbrained introspection, standing in stark contrast to Luxury Elite’s “Psychology of Desire,” which locks you into its cozy funk-lite rhythm from the start—more than other tracks here, it’s confident in riding out a single idea across its entire runtime.
Given how disparate the artists are—“AM,” for example, features Hundred Waters’ Trayer Tryon—it’s a marvel the way Doom Mix, Vol. V manages to be more than the sum of its parts. Few tracks on this compilation are among their respective creators’ very best work, but that’s hardly an issue on a release that delights in juxtapositions. The shimmering jazz fusion of VAPERROR’s “Thickedge” rubs up against the nocturnal synth pads of Sangam’s “Broken Sky,” and the retrofuturism of Diamondstein’s opening “Heaven in Two Parts” differs from the attempts that follow. For a definitive statement from Doom Trip, you couldn’t do better than Doom Mix, Vol. V, which is emblematic of the label’s wide-ranging yet overarching ideas. But more than that, it accomplishes something that compilations rarely do so successfully: It feels like a network of artists celebrating their own niche, growing and learning and existing with each other, as friends do.

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