Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the groundbreaking 1995 soundtrack that changed Bollywood forever.

Bombay

In 1993, when the Indian director Mani Ratnam recruited the then-27-year-old composer A. R. Rahman to make the music for his film Bombay, he said it would be one of the rare Bollywood films to tell a story about a Hindu-Muslim romance, a union that was, and often still is, widely considered taboo. Nearly 50 years earlier, the South Asian subcontinent achieved independence from British rule and underwent a traumatic process of Partition, dividing into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. Though their ideologies were born before Partition, the Hindu elite in India formed a new national identity based in Hindu supremacy in the decades that followed. It was within this context that Ratnam, a Hindu filmmaker, decided to make a film that suggested love could triumph over all.
At the time, Hindu-Muslim tensions in India were escalating higher still when gruesome riots in Mumbai left over 1,100 people dead, the majority of them Muslim. The riots started in December 1992 after Hindu fundamentalists burned down the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, and were further spurred by leaders of the Hindu supremacist Shiv Sena party in Mumbai. It was widely considered one of the worst instances of religiously motivated violence in Mumbai in the last 50 years.
Into this world, Bombay brought the story of a Hindu man, Shekar, who falls in love with a Muslim woman, Shaila Banu. They move to Mumbai, where they raise twins and enjoy a blissful life together until riots wreak havoc on the city and separate their family. The film ends with a cry for peace from Shekar, a reunion of the couple and their children, and the formation of a “human chain” of Hindus and Muslims who dramatically throw down their weapons, clasp hands, and choose to live in harmony.
Ratnam gave Rahman a two-week deadline to make all the music for the complicated film. As the deadline passed, Rahman didn’t have a single song ready. Instead, he surprised Ratnam with an instrumental piece he called “Bombay Theme.” In A. R. Rahman: The Spirit of Music, he told interviewer Nasreen Munni Kabir that the song, which opens with a sinuous bamboo flute singing out over a churning underbelly of synths and strings, “made a musical statement about non-violence…`and encouraged us to see the inner self rather than the outer.” When Ratnam first heard the song, he was silent for a few minutes and then jokingly asked, “Where are the tunes?”
The tunes would come eventually, including a bombastic synth-pop number, a lovesick ballad, and a winding qawwali-inspired song. The scope of the album solidified Rahman as the preeminent South Asian film composer for the next two decades, and arguably the one with the biggest influence on Western music. It would also become the best-selling soundtrack in Indian film history.
“Bombay Theme” in particular has had a surprisingly successful trajectory for an instrumental piece. It has been used in four other international films and added to countless “world music” soundtracks. In his essay “Violence, Reconciliation, and Memory: A.R. Rahman’s ‘Bombay Theme’,” Jayson Beaster-Jones writes that the song’s inclusion in the soundtrack was unusual, and perhaps a way for Rahman to flex the range of his skill. At the time, background instrumental pieces, known as film music in Indian cinema, were mostly outsourced by musical directors, but even early in his career, Rahman was creating both high-intensity pop songs and their sophisticated instrumental counterparts with ease. The inclusion of the instrumental piece in the soundtrack also signaled the importance Rahman placed on using themes and repurposing snippets of songs throughout a film to gesture at the emotional states of the characters. As Beaster-Jones points out, there are at least 50 instances of re-emerging leitmotifs in Bombay that further convey the cycle of violence and reconciliation central to its plot.
A. R. Rahman was born Dileep Kumar in Chennai, and was raised in a musical family that listened to everything from Vangelis to John Williams to Zulu chants. His father, R. K. Sekhar, was a well-known musician, and the first composer in South India to own a Japanese synthesizer at a time when they were prohibitively expensive. Sekhar died when Rahman was just 9 years old, ultimately pushing him to take musical jobs to help support his family. He was a roadie for a period and, later, a keyboard player for prominent artists like Ilayaraja, one of the first composers to incorporate Western music into Indian films. When the composer and his family converted to Islam from Hinduism when he was a teenager, he changed his name to Allahrakha Rahman, a name his mother liked.
In his teens and early 20s, Rahman also formed multiple short-lived rock bands, as well a putting out a few solo albums in the late ’80s, but didn’t feel that there wasn’t a market for the music he was making. He knew it was lucrative to work in movies, but for the most part, as he said in A. R. Rahman: The Spirit of Music, he didn’t like the kinds of films he saw in the ’80s, so he made tracks for fun and kept them for himself. When Rahman and Ratnam met, after a 1991 awards ceremony where Raham was honored for a coffee jingle, it was ultimately this trove of private songs that won the director over.
In 1992, the two began working together on a film called Roja, a Tamil-language movie about a woman searching for her husband, who was being held captive by secessionists in Kashmir. It was the first in Ratnam’s contentious “terrorism trilogy”: films that used ordinary citizens’ stories to examine the sociopolitical turmoil of contemporary Indian culture, but that were rightfully critiqued for pushing nationalist Hindu-dominant perspectives. Roja’s unconventional soundtrack—which masterfully melded Indian folk sounds with reggae, introduced new playback singers, and broke away from traditional verse-stanza song construction—was a huge success. It catapulted Ratnam and Rahman from stars of their regional Tamil-language scene to mainstream success within the broader Hindi-dominated Bollywood industry.
Even before the success of the Roja soundtrack, Ratnam was invested in Rahman’s career as a collaborator and mentor. It was Ratnam who encouraged Rahman to mash together beautiful and jarring sounds, and you can hear it at the beginning of “Bombay Theme,” which symbolizes Shekar and Shaila’s romantic union in contrast to the monstrosity of the violence beyond it. When a technician balked at Rahman’s Roja’s soundtrack—asking him where the traditional tabla and violin sounds were—Ratnam told him to leave the music as it was. Rahman once told Chennai Times that he remembered Ratnam meeting his mother and telling her, “I’m doing a movie with your son now. If this doesn’t work out, I’ll do another movie with him.”
That kind of unequivocal validation was necessary for someone breaking as many conventions as Rahman did in the early ’90s. Beaster-Jones argues it was a moment perfectly primed for a new voice: R. D. Burman, the composer credited with introducing rock and disco to Indian folk music, had just died, and a number of influential composer duos, including Laxmikant-Pyarelal and Kalyanji-Anandji, had recently retired. Ratnam had also recently split with Balachander and Ilaiyaraaja, the composers with whom he had made a number of Tamil film songs in the ’70s and ’80s.
Rahman found that voice by incorporating new Western electronic sounds without sacrificing Indian folk influence, specifically the Carnatic sounds of South Indian music, Hindustani classical, and qawwali, an ecstatic form of Sufi music that aims to bring the listener closer to God. While most film music of the time relied on large string sections and orchestras, Rahman worked from his home studio with limited resources. Instead of expensive ensembles or extended studio sessions, he used double-tracking and samples to weave together snippets of sound. His music had a newfound dynamism: the trill of a flute or a cascade of synth surge to the front of the mix for a few seconds at a time, like a jack-in-the-box bursting open and then retreating back. This style of textured, emotional music helped to shape the political contours of his early collaborations with Ratnam.
“Kannalanae,” a song influenced by qawwali, is sung by Shaila at the beginning of the film as she pines for Shekar’s love. There are moments when K. S. Chithra’s voice comes into sharp focus, dripping with yearning over the very slightest of percussion flourishes, but right as the song might become cloying, Rahman puts the harmonium or group vocals centerstage. Motifs from the song symbolize Shaila’s journey through the first half of the film: They play whenever she feels tension between her family, her Muslim identity, and her love for Shekar. “Kuchi Kuchi Rakkamma” uses the same Rolodex of samples to evoke an entirely different emotional state. The song plays once Shekar and Shaila are happily married and Shekar playfully asks Shaila to have a daughter. Jabs of violin, tambourine, and bamboo flute burst into the mix and retreat just as quickly, creating a tapestry of sound that relays their marital bliss.
Because sexuality is heavily censored in Bollywood films—onscreen kisses are rare—the lavish musical sequences are often a way for the characters to dramatically express desires and emotions they wouldn’t be able to within the rest of the regular script. In Bombay, Ratnam takes this a step further, using the music to explore a Hindu-Muslim romance, which is otherwise taboo in Bollywood. He uses art-house cinema techniques on typical Bollywood tropes, supplementing ostentatious choreographed dance numbers with meandering, inky cinematography, and leitmotifs that tie the music explicitly to the plot. Ratnam wanted to show Shekar and Shaila’s love as an antidote for the brutal violence that was to come. Instead of simply using songs to relay desire and lust, he used Rahman’s triumphant music to relay the intensity of their bond and the family unit they create together, one forbidden within the political context of the film. Every song captures a pivotal moment in their relationship, whether it’s the first time they openly declare their love, their wedding night, or the birth of their children. Notably, “Idhu annai bhoomi,” the one song in the film that’s explicitly about the riots and not about the couple’s romance, is not included in the soundtrack.
The clearest examples of musical sequences driving the romance narrative are “Uyirae” and “Poovukkenna Poottu.” The former—a heart-wrenching ballad that details the excruciating pain of separation from a lover—was originally meant to be sung years into the couples’ relationship as they reminisce on a temporary separation in the past. Instead, it was moved to the beginning of the film to soundtrack the moment when Shekar and Shaila decide to be together despite the pain it will cause their families. It was a risky move, one that could easily have felt like unearned emotion. But together, Ratnam and Rahman pull it off. The scene contains some of the most iconic cinematography in contemporary Bollywood cinema: Filmed on the Kerala seaside during the monsoon, waves crash, wind rustles, and emotion seems suspended in every particle of the humid air. Paired with percussive dabs of synth and vocal performances that move with the quiet force of a river slowly carving a canyon, the scene leaves you overwhelmingly convinced of the grandiosity of the couple’s love.
“Poovukkenna Poottu” also depicts a montage pivotal to Shekar and Shaila Banu’s evolution as a couple. Throughout the course of the song, Shaila gets pregnant, gives birth, and raises her twin sons into early childhood. The song and imagery are so euphoric—full of wonderfully noodly synth lines, lyrics shouted as much as they are sung, and scenes of pure domestic bliss—that the sequence feels almost ominous. As Lalitha Gopalan outlines in her book Bombay, with disaster on the horizon, “Poovukkenna Poottu” represents one of the last moments of pure joy the family will experience, an allegory of the real things that are lost amid political violence.
In the 26 years since Bombay was released, the treatment of Muslims in India has only worsened as the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party has risen to power. India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, has been stripped of autonomy and access to basic amenities like internet and phone services. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens together deny citizenship to many Muslims in India. And a new law passed in the state of Uttar Pradesh makes religious conversion after marriage a non-bailable offense, motivated by a Hindu supremacist notion that Muslim men forcibly convert Hindu women via marriage.
In this context, Ratnam’s desire to portray a loving Hindu-Muslim romance, subject matter that most directors found—and continue to find—too controversial to approach, feels earnest. In a generous reading of his portrayal of the Mumbai riots and Shaila and Shekar’s relationship, the film chooses to ignore the structural power Hindus have over Muslims in India. In a more critical reading, it is overtly Islamophobic. The film has been heavily criticized for promoting a veneer of secularism that stigmatizes Muslim identity rather than honoring it. When it was first screened, Muslim critics and leaders urged a boycott of the film, claiming it portrayed the Muslim characters as overly aggressive and that it was disrespectful to show Shaila without her veil. “It was perhaps the worst period in the city’s history and Mani Ratnam is making a song-and-dance affair out of our suffering,” film critic Iqbal Masood told Agence France Presse at the time.
And it’s all right there: As Angie Mallhi outlines in her essay “The Illusions of Secularism,” Muslims are much more likely to be shown praying throughout the film, an implication that they are overly religious by comparison to “secular” Hindus. Shaila Banu forsakes her burqa, a part of her religious identity, when she decides to be with Shekar. He makes no religious sacrifice for the relationship. At the end of the film, he proudly declares, “I’m not Hindu or Muslim, I am every man,” again reinforcing the idea that upper-caste Hinduism is the default Indian identity. What’s more, the film only shows Hindu supremacists demolishing the Babri Masjid through newspaper headlines, but explicitly depicts Muslims instigating the riots that followed, as if they were primary or at least equal aggressors in the conflict. In reality, Muslims made up less than 15 percent of Mumbai’s population at the time of the riots, but were the majority of the people killed.
Especially troubling was the extent to which the government was able to edit the contents of the final film. The decision to cut footage of Hindu supremacists demolishing the masjid was part of a censorship process by many outside groups including the Board of Censors, the Home Department in the State of Maharashtra, and the police. Its release was delayed by months in Mumbai because the Hindu supremacist group Shiv Sena was running for reelection and feared that the film might have enough socio-political power to skew the election results. Bombay’s film distribution company gave Bal Thackeray, the founder and leader of the Shiv Sena Party, permission to censor the film as well. Thackeray called the final project “a damned good film.”
Theorists Ravi S. Vasudevan and Jayson Beaster-Jones have written that the film operates as a “substitute for memory.” It uses methods like grainy footage and newspaper clippings soundtracked by “heavy drums, low synthesizer drone, and sounds of men yelling” to convey a serious, political tone and present itself as a historical film rather than a purely fictional one. A piece of cultural entertainment released so close to the events it depicts feels especially capable of shaping public perception. That it depicts such a skewed version of history makes it especially irresponsible.
All of this makes the film’s soundtrack an incredibly complicated piece to consider, especially when Ratnam and Rahman worked in such synchronicity to create it. In an interview before the film's release, Ratnam sidestepped the political discourse around the album, saying it was a “genuine attempt by a filmmaker to bring about communal harmony.” As a purely musical artifact, if such a thing exists, the Bombay soundtrack marks the moment that solidified Rahman’s auteur status. He has won multiple Grammys and Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire, worked with everyone from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Dido, sold 150 million records, and revolutionized the sound of South Asian film music by melding electronic technology and Indian folk sounds, Tamil and Hindi, Carnatic and Hindustani classical traditions. On the Bombay soundtrack, he was making some of the rawest, most ecstatic, and innovative music of his career.
And yet, one of its strengths—Rahman’s ability to craft majestic arrangements that convey the gravity of falling in love and the anguish when that feeling is threatened—is also its shortcoming. This is music that leans into dramatics and celebrates romantic love as paramount, that imagines a fantasy world where the bond between two individuals and the family unit they create is powerful enough to end riots and overcome years of oppression. While poetic in a vacuum, such a claim absolves those in power of their culpability. It positions politics as something solvable by emotion instead of systemic work. But no amount of romantic camera shots, swelling synth motifs, or pleas for peace could amount to more than a symbolic half-measure. The equity found in love can never be a stand in the equity of real political justice.

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The Irish balladeer’s third album is a mishmash of mythology and past-date pop that leaves him sounding like an interloper.

Unreal Unearth

The blues-rock power ballad “Take Me to Church” was not just Hozier’s breakout hit, but the kind of epochal debut that renders the ensuing career an afterword. It had a raw, rude edge that won him mainstream acclaim and deep devotion among queer people, who heard the song as a condemnation of Christian homophobia. Unreal Unearth, Hozier’s third studio album, not only fails to best “Take Me to Church,” but makes a person wonder how a song so singular and strange could ever have sprung forth from the author of this collection of clichés.
Hozier is credited as sole lyricist on just two of this album’s 16 tracks; not coincidentally, those two vastly exceed the others in quality and feeling. The first, “Butchered Tongue,” is the album’s best, a fingerpicked composition expressing eloquent rage against Britain’s long history of violence in Ireland, rife with unsettling imagery. The second, “Unknown / Nth,” is less successful, with an incoherent mix of metaphors—“You were held frozen like an angel to me”—but still bears the dreamy, mist-on-the-moor energy that compels Hozier’s most avid listeners.
The rest of this record, which boasts a dozen co-writers, is a descent into hell. Hozier cites Dante’s Inferno as inspiration, and this is, loosely, a concept album: We hear of gluttony (“Eat Your Young”), lust (“Francesca”), and wrath (the aforementioned “Butchered Tongue”). Nary a song goes by without some mention of heaven, angels, or God; Hozier brings up a handful of mythological figures, but plays fast and loose with their lore. “I, Carrion (Icarian)” throws Icarus and Atlas into a blender: “I don’t have wings, love, I never will/Soarin’ over a world you are carryin’.” These references are about as thoughtful as bullet points on a freshman-year Great Books syllabus. They scan as a naked ploy for depth, and Hozier is quick to abandon them when he’d rather invoke “sunlight on the Mississippi” or build a verse by naming different car parts.
Hozier calls the album’s sound “eclectic,” but disjointed is more apt. Wretched lite-funk lead single “Eat Your Young,” which peaked at No. 67 on the Billboard Hot 100, sounds like Jason Mraz singing Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” in falsetto. “Damage Gets Done,” a duet with Brandi Carlile, is a callback to the big-tent indie sound of the brief moment when people tattooed cartoon-villain mustaches on their index fingers. The true nadir, though, may be “All Things End.” Hozier begins the song by listing clichés—“weight on my chest,” a broken heart, time slipping through fingers—atop smooth jazz punctuated by finger-snapping so mechanically regular it sounds like he forgot to turn off the metronome. And that’s before he brings in a gospel choir. The caution-to-the-wind lyrics—“All that we intend is scrawled in sand/Or slips right through our hands”—sound defeatist, utterly at odds with the perseverant uplift and righteous fury of the Black gospel tradition. Hopping from genre to genre, Unreal Unearth never manages to stick a landing.
Musicians who rely on co-writers often find themselves on the end of bad-faith criticism that misunderstands the creative process: Collaboration is not just natural, but necessary for growth. But there is such a thing as too many cooks. Hozier’s voice, vision, and social commentary are really only present in “Butchered Tongue”; everywhere else, he sounds like an interloper. It’s a story nearly as old as the myths he re-tells: a struggling musician records a smash in total obscurity, which lands him a record deal, at which point the powers that be smooth every unruly feather on their strange new bird. Unreal Unearth seems to chronicle the ensuing creative death.


An innovative effort to produce a contemporary classical record in the piecemeal style of a rap mixtape ends up sounding both tasteful and weirdly frustrating.

Isomonstrosity

When he’s not creating string flourishes for the likes of Selena Gomez or Shawn Mendes, producer, songwriter, and arranger Johan Lenox has spent his career attempting to bridge the gap between popular and classical music. Before the pandemic, Lenox, conductor Yuga Cohler, and composer Ellen Reid had planned a Lincoln Center concert series featuring classical compositions by pop musicians such as James Blake. As COVID hit, the trio devised a new strategy: a concept record featuring music written by contemporary composers like Bryce Dessner, Wang Lu, and Carlos Simon, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, then forwarded to Lenox, Cohler, and Reid for chopping up. The idea was to make a contemporary classical record in the piecemeal style of a rap mixtape, recruiting guest vocalists including Danny Brown and Empress Of for a collision of voices and genres that would explore loneliness in pandemic times. Despite the conceptual potential and considerable talent involved, the execution is oddly narrow-minded, and Isomonstrosity ends up both tasteful and weirdly frustrating.
Isomonstrosity’s creators aren’t new to genre experimentation: Lenox garnered attention for a Kanye/Beethoven mashup titled Yeethoven, Cohler conducted an orchestral tribute to K-pop, and Reid reinterpreted EDM at a harrowing moment in her Putlizer-winning opera p r i s m. On this record, though, the incorporation of different elements feels surface-level; tinny, hyperpop-inspired percussion and tense string swells are signifiers lacking the substance of the trio’s individual work. “Watch It Burn” with TDE singer Zacari feels invigorating at first, but fails to meaningfully develop beyond its clanging pots and pans, and interludes like “I Hope She Is Sleeping Well” with Danny L Harle don’t deviate much either. “I’m just staring at my breakfast all day/Listening to Brahms and Beyoncé,” Lenox laments on “Careful What You Wish For,” but neither influence is particularly audible.
“Careful” is ambitious in its own way, attempting a three-part structure akin to Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” (a cited influence). Between Danny Brown’s uncharacteristically low-pitched verse, 645AR’s characteristically squeaky one, and Lenox’s own vocoded musings, the erratic structure is more inert than pleasantly jarring. Songs intended as ambitious genre fusions land in an awkward middle ground: Empress Of’s melody on “Take Me Back” clutters the song, betraying its origins as a separate pop track grafted onto Phyllis Chen’s Dessner-composed piano part. More straightforward and much better is “I Used To” with Kacy Hill, an art-pop ballad that gracefully captures the isolation and nostalgia of pandemic lockdown: “I used to go out a lot/I still felt lonely then/But not the way that I’m feeling now.” As Hill’s performance morphs into a love song, the music moves with her, a glimpse of a more thoughtful, methodical approach.
There are other moments of genuine inspiration, particularly in the second half of the record. Cello-generated percussion on “Break Glass” and glitches at the end of “Wake Up” deliver on the promise of classical instrumentation filtered through modern processing; the sound of keyboard typing on closer “Losing My Mind” is endearing, an allusion to the sheer quantity of email required to coordinate an album like this. In that sense, Isomonstrosity most clearly resembles a high-minded version of Fred again…’s Actual Life records, another pandemic-borne project using fragments of other musicians’ work for sporadically affecting sound collages. Isomonstrosity doesn’t often transcend those patchwork origins, but there’s still something compelling in hearing classical musicians figure out how to improvise.


After spending years refinining their 2011 debut, the Joy Formidable's sophomore effort arrives without the benefit of multiple rough drafts. And yet Wolf's Law sounds like it's been worked over even more extensively: It's a weirder, proggier record that explores a wide range of textures.

Wolf's Law

The Joy Formidable are attempting to follow a career path that's all but impossible for up-and-coming rock bands to traverse these days. They want to play arenas, and fill those arenas with punishingly loud and hooky guitar riffs and righteous, octopus-arm drum fills that roll over enormous crowds like a monster truck assaulting a line-up of hollowed-out Chevy Malibus. The Joy Formidable have already done this as an opening act for other bands-- most notably Muse during last fall's tour in support of the ridiculous The 2nd Law-- but they burn with headliner envy. It's incredible to see the Joy Formidable take that envy, turn it into pure energy, and shoot it out as a pulverizing Death Star ray in a small club.
The band's 2011 full-length debut The Big Roar is exciting, slickly packaged entertainment more akin to a big-budget action blockbuster like Skyfall than anything currently in vogue in the insular, down-sized world of indie rock. Roar's breakout song "Whirring" became a genuine hit on rock radio, and it's a whizz-bang distillation of the Joy Formidable's strengths: Singer Ritzy Bryan's whisper-to-a-scream vocal chops, the collision of instrumental force and melodic finesse, the energetic update of the most muscular forms of 90s shoegaze (specifically Mezcal Head-era Swervedriver and Ride's "Leave Them All Behind"), and an underlying confidence that this music deserves to close out large outdoor festivals around the world.
Looked at more cynically, The Big Roar comes off like it was-- in the words of Pitchfork's Stuart Berman-- "scientifically engineered to make the Joy Formidable sound like the Biggest Band in the World." The Big Roar certainly was assembled, not by men in white coats, but by industry people who shepherded the band through years of refining the album's songs. One of *Roar'*s best tracks, "Austere", dates back to 2008; other songs appeared on previously released EPs in different versions before given a final polish.
The Joy Formidable's sophomore effort Wolf’s Law arrives without the benefit of multiple rough drafts. And yet Wolf's Law sounds like it's been worked over even more extensively, though not necessarily in a way that makes it more commercial. If anything, Wolf's Law is a weirder, proggier record that explores a wider range of textures and sounds than the relatively monochromatic Roar. The shifting time signatures of the Zeppelinesque "Cholla" and the swaggering "Maw Maw Song"-- which alternates between verses that move stealthily along a rapid metallic pulse and a chorus that stomps about with bombastic insolence-- position the Joy Formidable as the heir to Muse's grandiose arena empire.
Not that the Joy Formidable is as insane as Muse, because no contemporary rock band is as insane as Muse. But they are clearly thinking in bolder and broader terms. The songs that hew closest to the first album’s blueprint-- like "Tendons" or the excellent, New Order-like single "This Ladder is Ours"-- are the most successful, though the penultimate track "The Hurdle" shows an improved mastery of rock-song dynamics, building from a mesmerizing strum to an overwhelming, heart-pumping climax. Most Joy Formidable songs start at heart-pumping and turn up the volume from there, but on the delicate "Silent Treatment", Bryan is able to convey that same intensity backed only with an acoustic guitar.
It would be an exaggeration to call Wolf's Law the Joy Formidable's "experimental" record, but it does stretch (and occasionally overstretch) the band’s formula a bit. The operatic, Days of Future Passed orchestrations of "The Turnaround" are a little much, as are the electronic squiggles shot like laser blasts through the surly "Bats". Nearly a third of "Maw Maw Song" is an extended, exceedingly noodly guitar solo that approximates the sound of a robot dolphin pleasuring itself with a light saber.
No matter the occasional excesses, the Joy Formidable's saving grace is its songwriting: "This Ladder is Ours" is composed of at least two great hooks-- the irresistibly melodic bassline and Bryan’s declarative chorus-- that fly out of the speakers like anonymous henchmen tossed off of a speeding train. The Joy Formidable might not have the most plausible ambitions for a 21st century rock band. But Wolf's Law offers enough thrills to suspend your disbelief.


The band’s latest is geeky, restless, and stuffed with enough Barnesian minutiae to satisfy even the most dedicated fan.

Of Montreal: Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck

Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck

About twice a decade, Kevin Barnes dials back their tendency to indulge every experimental whim and emerges from the studio with an Of Montreal record that delivers a handful of solid, anthemic pop choruses. Inevitably, Barnes then wheels the band’s shiny new sound into the garage for a few years and disassembles its inner workings until it looks like a musical mecha: probably undriveable, but a transfixing, chimeric work of art nonetheless. Once the finished product is suitably unrecognizable, the cycle begins anew. Freewave Lucifer F<ck F^ck F>ck, Of Montreal’s 18th full-length album, is another snapshot of the band in a state of manic deconstruction, retooling 2020’s hooky, ’80s-inspired UR FUN into a labyrinthine dance-rock collage.
After 2005’s The Sunlandic Twins ditched Barnes’ original garage rock sound for synthpop catchy enough to land an infamous Outback Steakhouse placement, 2008’s Skeletal Lamping shattered this new aesthetic into lopsided fragments and arranged them into a stained glass window of psychosexual angst. In 2012, Paralytic Stalks used the baroque funk of 2010’s False Priest as the catalyst for some of Barnes’ earliest flirtations with the mid-century classical avant-garde. Freewave Lucifer, intricately fashioned and governed by stream of consciousness, is a direct reaction to the uncharacteristically straightforward UR FUN, which surely would have bolstered the band’s live presence had it not dropped three days before the United States’ first confirmed COVID case.
While retaining its predecessor’s heavy reliance on electronic instrumentation, the new album doesn’t seem to have been written with future performance—or any explicit purpose—in mind. The record was purportedly organized by the tenets of its namesake, Barnes’ own “freewave” philosophy, which encourages surrender to one’s own “wild and intractable” impulses. In practice, it’s similar to William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique. Non-sequitur phrases plucked from conversations, excerpts from the dust jackets of used books, and copious references to Barnes’ favorite artists are tossed like word salad.
Barnes’ polysyllabic writing style has both helped and hindered their storytelling in the past, but here, lines like “apotheosis of apotropaic neuromancers” exist outside of any narrative. They’re as much a part of the album’s ambience as a synth pad, employed more for the sound of their assonance or sci-fi inspired imagery than explicit meaning, though they do tend to dredge up old scraps of Barnes’ personal mythos along the way. On “Ofrenda-Flanger-Ego-à Gogo,” a cute barbershop melody that Barnes often used on early records like The Gay Parade and Horse & Elephant Eatery surfaces as they quote The Wizard of Oz atop dissonant fingerpicking and shimmering bells. “Blab Sabbath Lathe of Maiden,” easily the most danceable cut, calls back to the band’s indie-disco fusion of the mid-aughts, its new wave sequencing interrupted by ABBA-esque detours.
Even the suite-like song structures Barnes has relied on since the mid-2000s feel more insular and nebulous. The loosely related snippets that make up opener “Marijuana’s a Working Woman” recall the Skeletal Lamping standout “An Eluardian Instance,” but there’s no extroverted flourish of brass or soaring guitar riff vying for your ear. Whether Barnes is pounding out a lurching psych rock groove, weaving an orchestral break that could soundtrack a cartoon nightmare, or taking a stab at cocktail jazz, each section of the track retains enough restraint to mirror the hazy quality of their accompanying lyrics.
Occasionally, Barnes gets lost in this formlessness. “Modern Art Bewilders” delves into interesting textures, gradually morphing a kitschy symphonic intro into a mid-tempo industrial stagger, but there’s no daring impulse decision that allows them to briefly transcend the chaos. The following track, “Nightsift,” navigates its free-ness much more effectively, introducing a rising lead that periodically reappears throughout. It’s not quite a chorus—more like a signal flare to guide you through the knottier passages.
This deep in their career, Of Montreal aren’t seeking to draw new fans into the fold as much as they are in expanding their own creative multiverse. If Freewave Lucifer were a blockbuster flick, it’d be a reality-bending fan service fest in the vein of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Your enjoyment may depend on your investment in the story arcs and alternate identities Barnes has explored over the past 17 albums, but true heads will have as much fun poring over this record as you might have had studying Star Wars visual encyclopedias as a kid. It’s unabashedly geeky, restless, and stuffed with enough Barnesian minutiae to satisfy even the most dedicated fan. The uninitiated, however, may need to study up on their lore before diving in.


Denver slowcore artist Madeline Johnston’s memorial to a late friend is full of barren dream-pop and hypnotic, nearly wordless ruminations on the pain of loss.

Forever

Madeline Johnston, the slowcore multi-instrumentalist who records as Midwife and Sister Grotto, found her footing as an artist while living at Rhincoeropolis, a beloved warehouse venue and artist co-op in Denver, Colorado. When local officials shuttered the space in the wake of the 2016 Oakland Ghost Ship fire, Johnston and her close friend Colin Ward were two of 15 local musicians displaced. A little over a year later, Ward died unexpectedly. The back-to-back losses left Johnston feeling suffocated by sorrow, disconnected from her community in a city that no longer felt like home. She immersed herself in the songwriting process until she resurfaced with Forever, a collection of candid, minimalist shoegaze that grapples with the impermanence of life.
With the barren dream-pop of album opener “2018,” she surveys the year and forces herself to accept the truth, repeating, “This is really happening” until the words go numb. There’s always been an air of detachment to Midwife’s music—2017’s Like Author, Like Daughter sounds like anesthetized Grouper—but here she sounds trapped, stuck in the purgatory of grief. On lead single “Anyone Can Play Guitar,” which sounds nothing like the Radiohead song, a hazy wash of guitar floods the air as she lies flat on her back, fixated on the desire to outrun her life yet pinned beneath the minute hand of a clock. It’s the type of warm, melancholic drone you want to pull up to your chin like a weighted blanket, and she wisely follows it with “Vow,” a heartbreaking instrumental that spaces out its lone piano chords so each one falls like a teardrop.
Midwife is the rare artist who can wallow in pain without indulging self-pity. She performs her own kind of therapeutic practice on “C.R.F.W.,” a nearly nine-minute sprawl that opens with a recording of Ward reading an original poem about desire and fate, originally commissioned for the 2011 collaborative project Pure Becoming. His recitation is empathetic, spiritual, spoken in a flat tone with no audience in mind. In the final line, he compares death to a falling leaf: “Imagine the way a breeze feels against your leaf body when you finally don’t have to hold on anymore.” It’s not the poem itself that’s so remarkable, but the way Midwife follows his words with ambient drone and tectonic synth hums, turning it into a moving homage that feels like a hypnagogic meditation on the possibility of an afterlife.
Johnston calls her music “heaven metal,” and Forever is heavy and hypnotic, full of nearly wordless ruminations on the pain of loss. But while the album begins as an outlet for grief, it grows towards zen-like acceptance of death. Closer “S.W.I.M.” capitalizes on Midwife’s strengths—blown-out fuzz, lethargic percussion, a pop of melody that appears like a daydream—to mirror her lyrics: “Treading water my whole life/I don’t want to swim forever/Reaching for the other side.” Forever is first and foremost a tribute to Ward, but its strength lies in the power of Johnston’s singular experience to unlock communal knowledge: that the mourning process never really becomes less painful, but so long as it’s inevitable, we need not feel alone.


The latest project from the 22-year-old Chicago rapper is dour and affecting, a dispatch from a young man able to diagnose his wounds but unable to repair them.

Freewave 3

In the summer of 2013, a year after fellow Chicagoan Chief Keef dropped Back From the Dead and around the same time Chance the Rapper uploaded Acid Rap, a 17-year-old named Lucki Eck$ put out his own striking record called Alternative Trap. While it might have lacked the blunt immediacy of Keef or the massive celebrity promise of Chance, Lucki’s project was unsparing, intermittently soulful, and it seemed to declare him as the next breakout star in a city that was already being strip-mined by major labels. He rapped about being a more reliable plug than other high schoolers with unnerving remove (“I served a few athletes/Leave ‘em lazy as old dogs”), and he did it over beats that sounded like the strains of electronic music that had been left out in the mud for weeks on end.
Lucki did not become a national star or even one of the more celebrated members of Chicago’s underground. Follow-up records like Body High and X were competent retreads but failed to get Lucki a commercial or stylistic foothold outside of the niche he’d carved out with his debut. He seemed to drift, leaving money and potential fans on the table. Drugs took a serious toll on his health and his relationships; in 2016, he became a father, and also announced a break from music that he hoped would allow him to sort through his issues with addiction. If the new music is to be believed, it didn’t help. Despite his early work being a clear predecessor, if not direct influence on some of the more catatonic lanes of current Soundcloud rap, Lucki seemed, until recently, to have run out of time to transcend cult status for himself.
If his arresting new record, Freewave 3, is a triumph, it’s a triumph of editing and stripping away the extraneous. Its 15 songs clock in at barely half an hour, and some—like the mournful “Out My Way”—cut off as soon as they’ve settled into a pocket, before the 90-second mark. More meaningfully, Lucki’s writing on the album does away with the optimism that sometimes buoyed Alternative Trap; he’s not interested in fleshing out other characters or putting together long narratives. Even his voice has become less expressive, close to monotone, hardened but exhausted. What’s left is a sometimes desperate, usually calm—eerily calm—dispatch from a young man able to diagnose his wounds but unable to repair them.
While the speaker in Lucki’s verses has changed dramatically since Alternative Trap, the production on Freewave 3 actually seems like a logical mutation from the beats on the debut. Some of the best come from ChaseTheMoney, who last year found a winning combination with Valee, and whose work here skews somber and paranoid. “All In,” which is produced by Earl Sweatshirt, is a compelling outlier, mixed differently from the rest of the album, as if it was emailed over from the sessions for 2018’s Some Rap Songs.
There are times throughout Freewave 3 when Lucki references a broken relationship (the best distillation comes from “More Than Ever”: “I know she ain’t loyal, but she make me better”), but that and everything else is secondary to the frequent and alarming asides about drugs. There are moments when Lucki can’t get his skin to stop itching; when he explains calmly to a girl that addiction is in his DNA and asks whether she ever saw herself falling for “a fiend”; when his stomach starts revolting; when the pills can’t even put him to sleep anymore. On the album’s best song, the Cash Cobain-produced “Peach Dream,” Lucki raps about his mother Googling the effects of lean on the body and sending her son literature about his endangered kidneys. Lucki sells all of this uncomfortably well because he writes in short, clipped phrases, the kinds of things you might think while you’re shivering, and because his vocals sound gruff and agitated. We’ve come to understand addiction as a thing people can’t simply reason themselves free from—and as a rational, if tragic reaction to trauma—and Freewave 3 treats it exactly as such.


On his fourth album, Jens Lekman opens up in new ways. He narrates the vulnerability of others, works with a producer, and crafts pop songs that absorb disco, calypso, and samba to soften their ache.

Life Will See You Now

“Postcard #17” is the penultimate track on Jens Lekman’s fourth album Life Will See You Now, and also its darkest. A morose Mingus-sampling piano ballad with handclaps and a disco backbeat, there’s no cute story to unfurl, no quirky character to imbue pearls of wisdom. The tune follows the internal monologue of a writer struggling to believe in himself (“If I just put this pen to this paper/If I just change the labels on the salt and pepper shaker/If I just trick myself into pouring it all out”), desperate to conquer the demons gnawing at his own sense of self-worth. Arguably the most fully formed track from his 2015 Postcards project—the album version is nearly identical to the original—“Postcard #17” is a window into the headspace Lekman was in when he resolved to write and release a new song every week that year. It’s a portrait of an artist, confused and fearful, trying to climb out of a hole of his own construction.
Lekman’s descent into darkness can be traced back to 2008, when he sat in his teenage bedroom in Sweden to pen “The End of the World is Bigger Than Love.” It was the first time he’d managed to write about the woman who had broken his heart that year, and it became the starting point for 2012’s I Know What Love Isn’t, the followup to his 2007 breakout Night Falls Over Kortedala. The album would eschew the sample-heavy chamber pop pastiche of his oeuvre to date in favor 10 sparse, “aerodynamic” takes on heartache. The subsequent tour was rough on Lekman—performing the most painful songs he’d ever written, night after night, to half-empty rooms waiting to hear the hits. His new songs were dark, and devoid of hope.
Lekman conceived the Postcards project to work through his despair. Only two of the 52 songs would make this album (#17 and #29, which became “How We Met, The Long Version”), but the songwriting bootcamp helped lay its foundation. When the project caught the ear of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, he used its commission to turn other people’s stories into songs. “There was a part of me that was really sick of this Jens Lekman character, and I wanted to write myself out of my songs,” he said. The Ghostwriting project scratched that itch, but ultimately confirmed what Lekman’s friends had already confessed to him: It’s easier to become emotionally invested in a Jens Lekman tale when he’s one of the characters.
It’s fitting that Lekman would find himself through narrating the lives of others. His best work has always been defined not by fantastical tales of intrigue, but tender moments observed with an empathetic eye. On Life Will See You Now’s opener, “To Know Your Mission,” a teenage Lekman relates to a Mormon missionary that all he wants out of life is to listen to people’s stories. When he sings “…in a world of mouths/I want to be an ear/If there’s a purpose to all this/Then that’s why God put me here,” it feels less like a prescient self-assessment from a precocious teen than it does the wizened perspective of someone reflecting on their life.
The bright, joyous tones of “To Know Your Mission” permeate Life Will See You Now, which marries the cohesion of I Know What Love Isn’t with the diverse palette of his sample-driven chamber pop. The lush production may be thanks to Ewan Pearson, whose work on the LP marks the first time Lekman has used an outside producer. Each of the album’s 10 tracks are fully formed pop songs, absorbing elements of disco, calypso, and samba, with upbeat rhythms that often belie the ache at their core. Bouncy bossa nova horns soundtrack a bride’s existential crisis (“Wedding in Finistère”), a cancer survivor consoles his distraught friend amid a barrage of sunny “doo doo doo”s (“Evening Prayer”), and Ralph MacDonald’s steel drums flutter as Lekman tortures himself with the olfactory nostalgia of an ex-lover (“What’s That Perfume That You Wear?”). He plays with the dissonance, softening emotional blows with melodic confection. As a friend (Tracey Thorn) begs him to avoid a melancholy retelling of their nocturnal mischief on “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel,” he indulges her: “Okay, if I’m gonna write a song about this I promise I won’t make it a sad song/You’ll go like this: ‘Woo!’”
A recurring theme of vulnerability dominates Life Will See You Now. Lekman’s narrator explores the way new lovers slowly reveal themselves to each other (“Our First Fight”), and the emotional distance he creates by expecting the worst to happen (“I couldn’t really see/How I built a bomb shelter under every dream,” he sings on “Dandelion Seed”). But the most striking relationships depicted here are platonic ones among men, stained by toxic interpretations of masculinity handed down from generation to generation. On “Evening Prayer,” he wants to tell his sick friend that he cares for him, but isn’t sure that they’re close enough. On the crushing Kings of Convenience-esque “How Can I Tell Him,” Lekman wonders if it’s possible to tell his best friend he loves him. The song is a crash course in what makes Lekman so endearing: the mundane anecdotes and intimate moments that colorfully illustrate why he loves his friend, the elegant arrangement of an infectious melody and timeless croon.
The album’s title imagines its characters—the tentative bride, the nostalgic ex-lover, even the young Lekman—as patients in a waiting room, waiting for their lives to start, for the nurse to pop in and say, “Life will see you now.” Lekman knows that waiting room well. It’s the place he was trapped when he wrote “Postcard #17,” stuck inside his own head, paralyzed by fear and self-doubt—feelings most writers can relate to. But the triumph of Life Will See You Now is how it suggests that the 36-year-old Lekman has never been more skilled at his craft, or had more stories to tell.


After three years of touring on 2010 LP Subiza's resplendent builds and easy choruses, the Spanish dance pop band Delorean returned to Barcelona and built a studio for themselves. The result, A**par, is a more refined and patient effort.

Apar

Meet the calmer, more measured Delorean. The band who once named an EP after a legendary race car driver has chosen to name their third album after a Basque word for "froth," sending thousands of music journalists scrambling to find a synonym for "froth." (Recommended: "spindrift.") After three years of touring on Subiza's resplendent builds and easy choruses, the band returned to Barcelona and built a studio for themselves. Terms like "analog production" have been tossed around, and the band has replaced their feel-good sampledelia with Actual Female Vocalists, including contributions from Chairlift's Caroline Polachek and Glasser. Singer Ekhi Lopetegi is coming off a turbulent breakup and is studying for his doctorate in philosophy. "It was a really normal life," Lopetegi said of Apar's recording process.
Some restraint was probably in order. Subiza's anthems found the band exploring the limits of their manufactured expanse. There was a thinness to their sound, like a strong gust could tear it apart. Apar takes pains to correct this. The tracks are sturdier and more patient. Lopetegi's delivery, no longer caked in reverb, is noticeably more confident and refined. On songs like "Destitute Time" he picks his spots, emphasizing lyrics that, while still difficult to parse, seem to be traversing topics broader than general good vibes. His role on Subiza was as a glorified hypeman for the band's twinkling rush; on Apar he's more akin to a traditional rock frontman, which moves the band still further away from the club music that underpinned Subiza.
The band does find some new avenues to explore. "Unhold", which features Polachek as lead vocalist, is a bold pop song that sounds like someone blowing the Cocteau Twins up to billboard size. "Destitute Time" is a graceful rock song that accelerates through its chorus and requires no arms-in-the-air bridge to amplify its coda. Similarly, "You Know It's Right" generates most of its speed with simple guitar arpeggios and suggests Delorean might be capable of indie rock as sweet, simple, and confident as New Order's "Run 2".
If all of this-- strong frontman, collaborators, fewer samples-- sounds like Apar is more the product of a "real band," that's true and it's a double-edged sword. Even if you think that samples and piano riffs are cheap thrills, they're thrills nonetheless, and there are times during Apar that the group struggles to replace them. Late-album tracks like "Walk High" and "Your Face" are well constructed and tuneful, but their pedestrian arrangements don't nod heads like Subiza's hammy piano riffs. They, are, in other words, pretty tracks that don't require dance music's repetition or excess. And even given their more refined approach and darkened mood-- that breakup, plus Spain's destitute financial situation-- the band still sounds capable of projecting only blissed-out warmth. If Lopetegi's reedy voice was Subiza's limiting factor, the band's unchanging timbre may be Apar's.
So Apar is a modest change in direction, moving the band back towards their roots as indie rockers but retaining the lilt and grandness they developed on Ayrton Senna and Subiza. Apar finds both Lopetegi and his bandmates learning to finesse their songs, to put a little touch on their big, arcing pop. It falls flat sometimes, but it offers hope that there's more to Delorean's world than bigness, that those vast expanses they convey so easily won't become, paradoxically, a constraint. A broader palate is still under development, but Apar provides a path forward without forfeiting Delorean's effortless energy.


On his new LP, Nat Love, rapper/singer/producer Kweku Collins offers intimate, hip-hop-informed bohemian rhapsodies.

Nat Love

Since 2014, Kweku Collins has been releasing small, intimate, and subdued hip-hop-informed bohemian rhapsodies on self-worth and the meaning of life. His perspective wobbles hazily between navel-gazing and philosophical musings, in a way that can only be conveyed by a late '90s-born suburban kid living just outside one of the most violent inner cities in the US. His output has been all bedroom music (literally: he produced, recorded and mixed everything himself; in his Evanston, Il bedroom) and he seems willing to save the world, but only if he can get past his own self-doubt and willing alienation. "My momma told me I am a king/ And I believe her/ Why I used to think that I wasn't shit" he sang on "Kings" from last year's rewarding Say It Here, While It's Safe EP. On the song he also said "R.I.P [to] my demons" and confessed that "today we feel like Kings/ I ain't never been this happy."
But euphoria is not Collins' constant companion; melancholy and second-guessing introspection are. And on his new LP, Nat Love—the name references the former slave, cowboy, Black folk hero, and author also known as Deadwood Dick—his tendency to turn inward and re-emerge with poetic reveries are strengths that serve him well. Thematically, Collins is more about observations than declarations, inquiry over polemic. As a former slam poet, he tends to write in circles of wordplay or elongated strands of thought that seek meaning through journal-like streams of discovery. On "Nat's Intro" he confesses that, "Well, I listen to Future and lay up/ Playin' like I am a student / I know no future is proven/ But I know some people that prove it," before repeatedly asking, both confident and unsure: "Is this what you wanted?" (His answer: "There is no answer/ “Til you answer.")
None of the music sounds as dreary or as downtrodden as the lyrics would suggest: the tracks are light and bouncy, even when they're somber. There's a celestial and cosmic grace to "Ego Killed Romance," a charming playground swing to "Vanilla Skies," and a sublime flip of D'Angelo's "One Mo' Gin" on "Stupid Roses." On "Death a Salesman"—the lone track on the project which Collins didn't have a hand in producing; instead passing off duties to his Closed Sessions labelmate oddCouple—there's an inspired and melodic take on the sentiments expressed by Ice Cube's "I Wanna Kill Sam": "See, I have this Uncle Sam/ And I hate his ass so much/With a finger in my face/ As if I should give a fuck/ He said he'll give me a gun/ And he think I should shoot for him/I say, 'Sam, I think you right'/ Then I turned the gun on him," he raps with a chuckle.
This is the kind of music that's made by someone who was a toddler when André 3000 explored a love below and k-os dropped his first LP. There are hints of trap, folk, and neo-soul coming together to form a new micro-genre of hip-hop that's part part Chance the Rapper, part Wyclef, part Future, part Chief Keef. The sounds here are immersed in the dance of lingua franca and colloquialisms and tastes and cultures defined by a generation raised on playlists and the ability to stream the history of music on their phones for less than the price of a single CD. When Collins sings, he's not singing by R&B yardsticks; when he raps, his vocals sound like rambling rocks in a river of thoughts, more indebted to spoken word than rap, but still more rap than spoken word.
"If I'm a rapper then she's a bad bitch," says Collins on "Stupid Roses," a song about marijuana that doubles as a meditation on a love half-remembered but still felt. It's not the full-on ode that D'Angelo's "Brown Sugar" was—Collins seems conflicted about his "love for cannabis"—and the double narrative and sense of self-hate and addiction feel like they're talking about his  greater conflicts with love and self-acceptance. On "The Outsider" he posits that "love is a battlefield/ Pat Benatar shit" and declares "I'ma be a legend/ I'ma be a Johnny to your Dolly." Those aren't the kind of references typical to a hip-hop song; they're the observations of an insider walking the line between finding and defining himself.


The lanky London outlaw with cement-mixer lungs delivers his most anguished album yet, in which impending fatherhood collides with his habitual torments.

Man Alive!

The man behind King Krule’s barbarian howl is a lover, not a fighter, but lean in close and the boundary gets foggy. The violence in Archy Marshall’s music arises from a romantic pathology—one that Marshall, who sings love songs the way Johnny Rotten sang “Anarchy in the UK,” knows intimately. “There’s a love in me to kill good things,” he once told an interviewer. Affection, fear, abandonment, fury—they’re all elements of Krule’s misery.
On his best albums to date, The Ooz and A New Place 2 Drown, the South London songwriter turned troubled waters into exquisite fountains. Aquatic symbolism, meticulous production, and pearly embellishments made his grotto feel, for a while, like somewhere you could bathe. His third album as King Krule sounds like what it is, which is anguish. The putrid air of Man Alive! turns even the sweetest songs sour, as if they were stowed inside his body so long they became dank and light-fearing.
That’s unlikely to alienate the fanbase for whom Marshall scoops out his guts. In a recent video for the narcotic lament “Don’t Let the Dragon (Draag On),” Marshall burns at the stake, martyring himself. Down in the comment section lurks his attendant brood of fatalists (“Clinical depression season is upon us, lads”), apostles (“If the moon could listen to music, he would listen to King Krule”), and solemn connoisseurs (“Like all great poetry, only a few will appreciate it”). Little surprise that this cult, formed during his teen explorations as Zoo Kid, has endured: The lanky London outlaw with cement-mixer lungs and a disastrous report card, redeemed by a volatile and monstrous talent, has a cute fairy-tale ring to it.
Into this mythos steps Man Alive!, aesthetically dire and fatefully timed. The record was halfway finished when, during a spell of habitual boozing, Marshall learned that his partner, Charlotte Patmore, was pregnant. Moving with her to North West England, he dredged his blues and completed the album as a requiem to urban ennui. It plays as a sort of diptych: First the wily escapades—four steely, corrupted punk blasts—then a trove of laments filled with despair, despondency, and occasional knives of light.
Marshall played and recorded nearly every instrument on Man Alive!—saxophonist Ignacio Salvadores also howls away—and the hollowed-out sound turns the darkness chilly. The opening suite’s Martin Hannett-style drums and weathered ambience evoke first-wave post-punk, when warped effects and dub spaciousness hinted at new worlds. But these songs are hammered into reality. In the barrens of “Comet Face” we encounter Marshall groggy, bloodied, and half-naked after being ambushed in a park in Peckham. But rather than seek vengeance, he mulls his hometown’s social cleansing, comparing London undesirables to “the pesticides in your vegetables”: Both have been erased in the quest for an organic utopia.
A vaporous interlude called “The Dream” partitions the album; after that, Marshall retreats into his head. On the luminous folk of “Slinky,” he takes an emotional pounding before flashing back to the “Comet Face” assault in a nightmare. Dial tones and answering-machine messages drift in and out, suggesting crossed wires and deferred responsibilities. A devotee of sound-art tinkerers like Dean Blunt, Marshall has a skill for collage that subtly points you beyond the song. If it all sounds exhaustingly conceptual, consider a recent playlist pick that, like Man Alive!, begins with grim newscasts, dips in and out of dream scenes, and hinges on a dramatic narrative lurch. It’s not some Lynchian exercise in obscurity; it’s “A Day in the Life,” by the Beatles.
Holding to Marshall’s wavelength requires a little more investment than the dingy music asks for, but that’s not to say his shadowland of the heart lacks nuance. The profound love—or perhaps addiction—described on “Perfecto Miserable” is double-edged, promising salvation by bottling up unresolved rage. Even the therapeutic mantras of “Alone, Omen 3” devolve, as an ambient fog descends, into nightmarish ravings.
Impending parenthood stabilizes Marshall, or at least offers relief from his exhausting lifestyle. “Passport in my pocket’s getting old/Feel the weight of the world dissolve,” he riddles on “Airport Antenatal Airplane.” Amid his innate playfulness, I’m often struck by Marshall’s intensity with words, the way he threads and knots them like jute rope to hoist himself out of psychic craters.
As for Man Alive!, Marshall has framed the title as a reaction to our diabolical political landscape. Given his fondness for aquatic metaphor, it could just as well herald a person saved. On this album of shipwrecking, there is a brief final act—played out in songs like the beseeching “Please Complete Thee”—that hints at this rescue, a dipping of toes into domesticity. Indeed, in a glowing photograph last March, Marshall and Patmore introduced us to their newborn daughter, Marina. Man Alive! maps an underworld of new places to drown; next time, he’ll finally have somewhere to dock.


The Pulitzer-nominated experimental producer finesses acoustic samples from the Third Coast Percussion ensemble into dazzling rhythmic workouts.

Perspective EP

In the six years since Jlin’s last proper album, the genre-shattering Black Origami, the bounds of her musical practice have exploded. With conceptual artist Kevin Beasley, she transfigured the sounds of a cotton gin that Beasley installed at the Whitney Museum and performed in the gallery alongside the machine. Her soundtrack to choreographer Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography underscored the power of her music to inspire movement outside the club. Kronos Quartet, fixtures of the contemporary classical vanguard, commissioned the gutsy, virtuosic “Little Black Book,” which required cellist Sunny Yang to stomp out Jlin’s heavily syncopated beats on an actual kick drum while she ripped into a contrasting bassline.
Despite the diversity of these collaborations, and their footing in institutional contexts, they retain all the grit and ingenuity that have been Jlin’s signature since she emerged on the fringes of footwork over a decade ago. The tessellating rhythmic cryptograms that made Black Origami an enigma worth both pondering over and dancing to have remained central, even if they fill a concert hall rather than a nightclub. Her new EP Perspective, a collaboration with Third Coast Percussion, is a more complex venture that moves in multiple directions at once.
The project began with Jlin recording raw materials in the Chicago ensemble’s studio. “It was bliss for me,” she recently told Passion of the Weiss. “I went there and I got as many sounds as I could: the marimbas, the xylophones, a lot of bells and bowls. We were there for eight, 12 hours… I have a whole library of these sounds.” She imported these raw materials into FL Studio, where she sculpted them into bouncing backbeats, adrenaline-rush whirrs of high end, and majestic pulsations. She gave her compositions—which were nominated for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for music—to the four members of Third Coast to translate back into their own language; the title reflects the idea of approaching the same material from different angles.
On Third Coast Percussion’s recording, released last year, they occasionally sounded hesitant, as if more focused on keeping up with the score than harnessing the elation that produced it. But the obvious joy Jlin felt in the process of creating this music shines through in these electronic versions—not only in the emotions conveyed, but in the depth and detail of the productions. Where Third Coast’s recording was limited to the acoustic timbres available to the ensemble and the physical limitations of their playing, Jlin’s originals, which Third Coast based their own versions on, employ a staggering range of frequencies, from body rumbling sub-bass to chirping melodic accents so high-pitched they might not be audible to many listeners over a certain age.
The brisk four-on-the-floor that leads off “Obscure” mutates less than a minute in, doubling back on itself and leaving pockets of space that destabilize the rhythm. “Derivative” feels like it runs at two different tempos at once, the kick-snare groove heavy enough to inspire a head nod (or booty shake) while a manic synth line darts about anxiously. You can practically hear Jlin smiling through each bar, twisting each rhythm and twisting it again until it surprises even her.
The suite’s final two pieces come closest to achieving a cohesive dialogue between Jlin and Third Coast; that’s particularly true of the marimba- and bell-dominated minimalism of “Duality.” It retains the multi-dimensional shifts that make the previous pieces so engaging, but they happen in more subtle ways and within a more strict, pulse-based rhythmic system. On “Dissonance,” Jlin leaves her sample library mostly untreated and unprocessed; it’s the least electronic-sounding piece she has recorded yet, and the lack of digital bells and whistles reveals new subtleties in her rhythmic and timbral investigations.
Jlin’s nomination for a Pulitzer for this work is a remarkable achievement, as well as a promising sign of progress in elite institutions’ engagement with culture outside the bubble of “high art.” It’s too bad that it required collaborating with a classical ensemble to attract the attention of the Pulitzer committee; her music is rigorous and groundbreaking regardless of context. Perspective is the sound of an artist stretching herself and succeeding—not because of any embrace of the Western classical tradition, but because she challenges its norms so effectively.


Liverpool death metal pioneers Carcass' immaculately produced, linguistically rich comeback album might be calculated, but it doesn't feel forced: Surgical Steel is a document of middle-aged lifers trading ponderous maturity for the visceral thrills they relished in their prime.

Surgical Steel

Swansong, the final LP of Carcass' initial run, wasn't much of one. That 1995 album-- on which the pioneering Liverpool band broke definitively with their grindcore roots, opting for a groovier, more hard-rock-oriented sound-- had its moments, but in retrospect, it plays like a period curiosity rather than a worthy cap to one of extreme metal's most impressive evolutions. The band members seem to agree. As guitarist Bill Steer told Decibel recently, "To me, it's really evident when you listen to Swansong that it's a band on the decline."
Carcass haven't explicitly framed Surgical Steel, their new comeback LP, as a gesture of atonement, but all signs suggest that they're engaging in some savvy revisionist history. Instead of picking up where Swansong left off, this record rewinds the tape further. Surgical Steel reconciles choice elements from the band's early classics-- records like 1989's Symphonies of Sickness and 1991's Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious, which married grindcore's primitive blurt to gross-out lyrical tongue-twisters and a refreshingly progressive compositional sense-- with their mid-period masterpiece, Heartwork, perhaps the greatest example to date of an extreme-metal band nodding to the polish and swagger of above-ground rock while retaining their core ferocity.
Surgical Steel is a nostalgic statement, seemingly designed to trigger a Pavlovian response in fans. Not only does the album mark the return of the machine-gun tempos that were absent from Swansong and the animalistic back-up growls, jettisoned on Heartwork, of Steer and original drummer Ken Owen (who suffered a brain hemorrhage in 1999 and doesn't appear behind the kit here); it also features a pulse-quickening instrumental intro, "1985," on which Steer expands a fragment from a vintage rehearsal tape into a triumphant multitracked overture. Surgical Steel's immaculate production values are familiar too; the band worked here with Colin Richardson, who helmed every Carcass record from Symphonies through Swansong. Even the album art is a blatant riff on an old image: the cover of the band's 1992 EP, Tools of the Trade. So it's a testament to the strength of the material-- a set of fast, fun and, thanks to vocalist-bassist Jeff Walker, witheringly witty songs-- that Surgical Steel is as enjoyable as it is. The record might be calculated, but it doesn't feel forced; like A Different Kind of Truth, Van Halen's 2012 reunion with David Lee Roth, it's a document of middle-aged lifers trading ponderous maturity for the visceral thrills they relished in their prime.
The strongest songs here sum up how Carcass bridge two proud British traditions: filthy grindcore and flashy rock'n'roll. "Cadaver Pouch Conveyor System" finds Walker unleashing his patented sneering rasp over a blastbeat-accented thrash gallop. His longtime foil, Steer-- also an early member of Napalm Death, and an avowed blues-rock junkie who founded his own bellbottom-friendly retro act, Firebird, in 1999-- seasons the track with a Thin Lizzy–worthy melodic lead, lending Walker's gory polemic ("Total arousal/ A frigid wanton wargasm engaged/ Bloodlustmord") an air of throwback pomp. The William Blake-referencing "The Granulating Dark Satanic Mills", Surgical Steel's catchiest track, employs an Iron Maiden-esque midtempo feel that harks back unmistakably to Heartwork. The more relaxed pace allows the band to flaunt the unlikely skill they honed in their heyday: seamlessly integrating extreme-metal moves into the context of old-fashioned anthemic songcraft. Despite Walker's typically arcane lyrical turn-- a grim evocation of the Industrial Revolution-- it's not hard to imagine a rabid crowd fist-pumping along.
Surgical Steel features tons of outstanding playing from Steer, as well as some of the tightest drumming in the band's discography, courtesy of new recruit Daniel Wilding. But the star of the record is undoubtedly Jeff Walker. The frontman returns to some of his pet themes here-- the horrors of the meat industry, the senselessness of war-- but he sounds improbably inspired. Though he established himself in the early 90s as one of the wittiest lyricists in metal, a connoisseur of perverse puns and obscure terms mined from a medical dictionary, Walker has lacked a proper literary outlet since Carcass imploded. (Other than a short-lived continuation of the Swansong lineup-- sans Steer-- under the name Blackstar, Walker's most high-profile project during Carcass' lengthy break was a 2006 record of offbeat country covers, Welcome to Carcass Cuntry, credited to Jeff Walker und die Fluffers.) On Surgical Steel, he's overflowing with ideas, as though he'd been saving up an album's worth of zingers in case his main band ever returned to active duty.
The record's linguistic barrage features playful tributes to John Lennon and the Stones-- "A working class hero is something to bleed," "Exiled on maim street"-- a venemous namecheck of humane-slaughterhouse advocate Temple Grandin and, on the masterfully sardonic dis track "Noncompliance to ASTM F 899-12 Standard", the coining of a new term ("dearth metal") to call out tediously derivative extreme-metal practitioners. While Walker seems most at home with barbed, often darkly comedic social critique, his tone turns introspective on "316L Grade Surgical Steel", a disturbing portrait of a blackened heart. "Always love the ones you hurt/ Passion killer with no time to mourn/ Cold comfort that your heart is torn/ I wish you hell-- sealed with a kiss," Walker spits, reminding the listener that his fixation on bodily incision extends to emotional wounds as well.
Most of the record lives up to the high standard set by Walker's pen. Whereas Swansong yielded only one live staple ("Keep on Rotting in the Free World"), it's clear that the band designed Surgical Steel with the stage in mind; despite these songs' off-the-charts shred quotient and countless baroque flourishes, many of them are as immediate and unshakeable as great punk. Tracks like "The Master Butcher's Apron" and "Unfit for Human Consumption" epitomize the fiendish hookiness that established Carcass as one of the most trusted brands in extreme metal. Occasionally-- as on the almost comically nimble speed-picked bridge of "Captive Bolt Pistol"-- the band can sound like they're straining, as though they were overly concerned with convincing fans that the old maximal Carcass is back. And though 8-minute album closer "Mount of Execution" is a potent effort in its own right, the song's acoustic-guitar intro and proggy multichapter structure feel out of place on this otherwise admirably compact LP.
As a whole, though, Surgical Steel succeeds brilliantly in its return-to-form mission. The record plays like a big, bloody kiss planted on the cheek of longtime fans; at the same time, it's clearly a selfish statement, the overdue fulfillment of Walker and Steer's desire to rewrite their pet project's final chapter. The end of Carcass' first phase was a disappointing peter-out, but this vigorous do-over effectively reframes Swansong as an archival footnote. So long, dearth metal; hello, Surgical Steel.


Michael Nau has been the frontman for Page France and Cotton Jones. On his solo debut, he displays his penchant for uplift: Sumptuously warm, the set feels invitingly casual, loose-strung, and slightly accidental, a collection of messy indie-rock demos that he fleshes out into surprising songs.

Mowing

From the pastel indie pop of Page France to the Americana of Cotton Jones, there’s an airiness to frontman Michael Nau’s songwriting that belies its melodic durability. His masterful instinct for arrangement, along with his reedy voice, earns Nau a place in the rock’n’roll underdogs’ Hall of Fame. It’s nearly impossible, hearing Page France’s giddily twee "Trampoline" or Cotton Jones’ roadhouse shuffle "Blood Red Sentimental Blues," to resist the resulting rush of companionable good feeling that Nau and his bandmates create. He is very good at uplift.
His solo debut came together over Cotton Jones’ post-Tall Hours in the Glowstream hiatus, as he started a family with wife/bandmate Whitney McGraw. Constructed from old demos, Mowing casts a drowsy, hypnotic spell that unites the genres and subgenres it visits. Sumptuously warm, the set feels invitingly casual, loose-strung, and slightly accidental. Hushed, hesitant doot-doot-doots and tinkly keyboards dot "So, So Long"; splashes of sampled, icy piano prod the shuffling, lovely Nau/McGraw duet "Maralou" forward. A Mellotron winds and wends its way through "Winter Beat," the song’s sweet’n’sour melodic sense and tramping rhythm section seemingly piped in from the far side of a blizzard. The scratchy, indistinct "Your Jewel" marries washed-out reggae to sleepwalking gospel, a synthesis that gels far better than it has any right to.
Album closer "In There" undergoes an unlikely yet convincing metamorphosis that sets it apart from the rest of the album. Bird calls loop, while strings cycle inconclusively and distortion encroaches. A snatch of stentorian dialogue peeks out of the noise, and is cut short; this all seems to add up to the introduction of a very esoteric sound collage. Then lonesome guitars pluck out a velvety, countried blues soaked in pedal steel as Nau begins to sing, double-tracked and with great feeling, a tear-jerking hymn suited both to mid-20th century railroad tramps and lost souls at any point in history. The grain and twang in his vocal tone is startlingly, authentically wizened, and it’s equally possible to imagine him performing this song on the Mississippi delta or an artfully-aged 45 version hoodwinking the next Harry Smith. In a way, "In There" is classic Nau: crystallizing the essential sadness of life before dispensing morsels of hopeful life advice. But it’s also the moment on Mowing where the evolution of his voice leaps into its sharpest focus, when it becomes apparent that, stylistically speaking, he may be capable of anything.


On these two EPs, the R&B singer doesn’t simply revive her hit-making approach from the early 2000s; she uses her powerful voice to make the sounds of the moment her own.

Amerie: 4AM Mulholland EP / After 4AM EP

4AM Mulholland EP / After 4AM EP

Stung by file-sharing losses and the decline of physical retail, major labels at the end of the last decade tended to leave artists hanging. New stars were stranded in the purgatories of endless album delays, stalled singles, and fizzled publicity campaigns, their futures suspended in contractual limbo. One of the most frustrating examples was R&B belter Amerie, a D.C. singer whose go-go-rooted 2005 single “1 Thing” climbed to the top 10 of both Billboard and The Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll. Despite killer singles like the raucous “Gotta Work,” her follow-up, Because I Love It, was delayed and largely waylaid by Columbia, who soon dropped her. After releasing In Love & War on Island Def Jam in 2009, Amerie left music for a while. She launched the lifestyle vlog Books Beauty Ameriie and edited a young-adult anthology of fractured fairy-tales. She released the occasional EP and single, but she seemed more focused on books, her clothing line, and the birth of her first daughter. Could you blame her?
But last week, Amerie reemerged with the surprise release of her first proper album in nine years. 4AM Mulholland and After 4AM are actually two simultaneous EPs, but, given the vagaries of the digital age, you can consider each 20-minute-plus half the side of a single LP. Amerie took much more creative control over the 4AM diptych than those major-label releases, writing, recording, and engineering the songs herself. “It was really creatively freeing,” she told Billboard about what is essentially a two-sided concept album draped in late-night vibes and musings on love. It is a particularly sweet triumph, given the jerking around she received a decade ago.
4AM Mulholland opens with Amerie’s soprano—still bell-clear and confident, with a touch of hopeful breathiness—before melting into the swirls of surrounding synthesizers. She coaxes an off-screen lover to come closer on “Curious.” Don’t expect the now-liberated Amerie to return to the big beats and chopped-up soul samples of “1 Thing”—she’s operating in R&B’s now on the album’s first half, swathing her voice with electronic processing and framing it with insistent snares and swelling synths.
On first listen, the sprawl of sound takes center stage as it does on so much modern mood music. Listen closer, though, and Amerie’s thoughtful songwriting, detailed production, and muscular voice—which, even when heavily filtered, has the same commanding presence that made her earlier singles leap from the speakers—add detail and shape. The moody “A Heart’s for the Breaking,” for instance, counters Amerie’s legato wail with spiky arpeggios; during the bridge, she switches cadences briefly to match her backing track for a sneering confessional before reverting to those long notes.
After 4AM is bedheaded from the start, Amerie working in her lower register on “4The Lovers.” Its piston-like instrumental portends the stronger backbone of this half of these songs. “Give It All Up” struts along in a way that recalls In Love and War’s similarly gloom-stricken “Why R U,” although its layers of strings and piano hint at extra drama. There’s a bit of throwback action here, too: The rubbery synths that acted as the fulcrum for the 2008 Ne-Yo smash “Miss Independent” and its mid-2000s radio counterparts spangle the surface of “Midnight Rain,” while the swaying rhythms of the gentle ballad “I Remember Us” update the strummy R&B-pop of Stargate.
Despite these subtle callbacks, it shouldn’t be surprising that Amerie isn’t reveling in ’00s revivalism. Back then, after all, her label tsuris stemmed somewhat from her artistic restlessness, a possible liability amid plummeting record sales and a more complex commercial environment for R&B artists. The marketplace has finally caught up to Amerie—she can experiment with sounds and ideas without the pressure to go platinum, and she can release those experiments as she sees fit. “The speed at which everyone’s listening to things and digesting things, it allows a singer—especially if you’re independent—to get it off your chest and go to the next thing,” Amerie told Billboard. These unexpected EPs, which fuse Amerie’s thoughtful craft to R&B’s current wave and reveal more pleasure with each listen, make that tease of “next things” quite enticing.


Gunplay recalls the manic personalities of late-'90s hip-hop: Redman, Busta Rhymes, Rawkus-era Eminem. The MMG rapper's Def Jam debut is being released four years after "Rollin" first sparked his street buzz nationally. For a rapper with such a bombastic presence, his official debut feels slighter than it should.

Living Legend

Gunplay is a blast from the past for rap obsessives. His precise lyrics and fluid rap style reflect the studious flows and manic personalities of hip-hop in the late 1990s—Redman, Busta Rhymes, or Rawkus-era Eminem. Had his debut album emerged in those years, he might have become a larger-than-life star. As it stands now, he is more living anachronism than Living Legend. The MMG rapper's Def Jam debut is being released four years after "Rollin" first sparked his street buzz nationally. Anyone expecting a classic in the vein of Muddy Waters will leave disappointed; for a charismatic rapper with a bombastic presence, his official debut feels slighter than it should, less a late '90s renaissance than a fading reminder.
Living Legend isn't bad, exactly. It's a consistent release with no substantial misfires, full of densely packed verbiage and grand gestures, reminiscent of a time when technique, style, and personality seemed inseparable, interrelated qualities in a rapper's arsenal. The best songs have a profundity that transcends the packaging around them: the wistful Miami sunset of "Just Won't Do" recalls his earlier career highlight "Bible on the Dash", its opening lines mirroring that song's most famous couplet ("I asked the pastor, what's the fastest way to heaven…?") before shifting into a spare narrative that sketches the hard-earned wisdom of a damaged man onto a twilight canvas. The recklessness of his public image—and sometimes, his real public behavior—belies, even magnifies, the earnest reflection that illuminates moments like these.
He recaptures this potency only occasionally. Closer "Dark Dayz" comes closest, with no wasted lines and artful, writerly composition that suggests simultaneous moods of pride and torment: "Happy-face sticker on the brick, still feeling miserable." Images pop, as he shifts effortlessly from the visual to the abstract, an interconnected web of ideas that suggests the craft of a detail-obsessed aficionado. As a writer, Gunplay is one of the best in rap, when he wants to be. And he's not limited to "deep thoughts"-type records; on more brolic cuts, like "White Bitch", his lyrics are vividly original: "Skinny as pasta with a big ol' mossberg/ Squares in my trunk and white all in my nostrils."
The album's midsection sags under its relative banality: Rick Ross feature "Be Like Me" sounds like a generic version of records Ross has been releasing over the past four or so years. And "Chain Smokin'" wastes a clever hook with a song that feels like a kush coma for more than three minutes, a must-fast-forward dead zone until Gunplay's verse. Lead single "Wuzhanindoe" is solid, but also dated, a cutting-room-floor version of guest rapper YG's spring 2014 release My Krazy Life. It also draws attention to the relative disparity in quality between the two artists' album statements. By any standard, Gunplay is the superior talent: bar-for-bar, emotional resonance, depth of feeling. But while his lyrics fill the page with evocative, fully-rendered ideas, his album feels like a half-step; YG's revitalization of '90s West Coast tropes, meanwhile, found the rapper exceeding his limitations song after song.
And that's Gunplay's major weakness: his art is focused on some powerful particulars at the expense of the whole. Perhaps, as a 36-year-old rapper who's lived quite a life—most of it, in fact—outside the studio, it's unfair to expect more. The distance between his standout records—"Rollin", "Jump Out", "Bible on the Dash"—and the average Gunplay song is considerable. Concept-driven cuts like "Tell 'Em" and "White Bitch" are lyrically strong, but are easily forgotten once the album has receded. The pathos of his unrealized potential deepens the colors of his best work, hinting at artistic depth that remains out of our sight.


The North Carolina songwriter’s outstanding second album spans grungy rock and colorful, hi-fi pop, illuminating her impressive voice and her ability to wring out every last drop of emotion.

Any Shape You Take

Some nights you go out, and along with the usual sky-high Uber receipt, return home with an iridescent, forever-memory. How beautiful your friends look under the soft gel lighting, cocking their heads back and grinning lazily; how liberating it is to whirl with them drunkenly as the DJ plays another song. In the right company, you don’t have to say much to be understood, yet there’s a kind of tacit oath: that you’ve known each other then and now, and you will care for the successive versions of each other that follow.
This sublime, uncomplicated devotion illuminates “Hold U,” by the 24-year-old Saddle Creek artist Indigo De Souza. Its music video celebrates the communal warmth of a queer party; friends brush eyeshadow onto De Souza’s lids and tangle together on the couch before getting glittered up on the dancefloor. “You are a good thing, I’ve noticed,” she murmurs to them—and soon a stylish, tapered groove kicks in to warm up the mood, becoming even more triumphant with the addition of clapping percussion and stratospheric wooos. De Souza’s language is minimal, but she imbues her words with such ardent sincerity that even the most elemental ideas are electrifying. With just one line, she seems to promise everything: “I will hold you.”
“Hold U” is a highlight of De Souza’s second album, Any Shape You Take, which traces a loose narrative down a rocky path towards self-discovery. Following her charming indie rock debut, 2018’s I Love My Mom, De Souza finally left a long-term relationship that she’s described as like “be[ing] buried and lost in my own body.” And so the songs on Any Shape You Take, written over the course of many years, are about wretched, ravenous kinds of love, love that alerts you to your own mortality. But they’re also about finding compassion for yourself and your loved ones. Musically, the record refines the roaming fluidity De Souza displayed in her early EPs and singles, where she flirted with smoky jazz crooning, Sylvan Esso folktronica, and even rapping. Co-produced with Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee), it seamlessly integrates grungy rock and colorful, hi-fi pop elements, with spare lyrics enlivened by her immaculate sense of melody.
In De Souza’s presence, bare-bones remarks take on tremendous feeling—and the magic is in how her tactile voice kicks through the skin of every line she sings. She can manipulate it into a wounded tremble like Angel Olsen and scratchy, ringing yelps; she rivals Frances Quinlan of the band Hop Along with her vocal agility. Reliving a sleepless night on the squalling “Bad Dream,” she tosses from tormented pop-punk howl (“I’m AL-L REA-DY GO-NE”) to flat intonation (“Please. Send. Help. To me”), eventually soaring into a keening, operatic falsetto (“I’m having a hard time sl-EEEE-ping.”) Unconcerned with places and names, she drills into simple phrases until they’re all-consuming. A haunting, unresolved question hangs over “Darker Than Death”: “Was it something I said?” At the end of “Way Out,” she repeats “I wanna be a light” for almost a full minute—at first with breezy self-assurance, then with ragged breath that hints at desperation.
Because her voice is so naturally arresting, it’s unexpected to hear her warp it with Auto-Tune and vocoder on the synth-pop opener “17.” Its saccharine production recreates a kind of guilelessness, as she casts her gaze at a lover from adolescence. “Darling… won’t you just bend?” she asks sweetly, before her voice seizes into something uncannily pinched and chirpy: “This is the way I’m going to bend.” It’s a bit of a red herring; nothing else on the album sounds like it again. From there, Any Shape You Take embraces unpredictability in its sound and sequencing: self-destruction (“Kill Me”) shadows life-affirming catharsis (“Hold U”) and placid wisdom (“Pretty Pictures”) follows obsessive thinking (“Die/Cry”). Midway through the centerpiece “Real Pain,” which opens with a clear-headed meditation on the inescapability of grief, the song climaxes in a din of crowdsourced screams. It’s overwhelmed by heavy-metal shrieks, barks like a rabid dog, and what sounds like someone exasperatedly repeating “fuck, fuck, fuck”—until it suddenly zips back up to crisp indie pop.
Is there a more honest and real response to hurt than screaming? Doesn’t it feel good to just let yourself cry? It can seem easier to stay guarded and cool, to furiously maintain control by trying to out-analyze your emotions. But it’s impossible to outrun them. On Any Shape You Take, De Souza commits herself to being undone, to experiencing the terrible feelings and the beautiful ones. Even when she’s fucked-up, there is something ecstatic in her attempts at loving, her hunger to absorb all she can from life.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The London duo’s second album boasts a sharpened, more streamlined sound while sticking to its roots in ’70s Anatolian psychedelic pop.

Melodi

Kit Sebastian’s music is made for the introspective hours between last call and daybreak. The London duo specializes in a kind of cinematic funk noir whose dusty grooves both amplify and soothe the rush of ego calculations that only emerge in the small hours of the morning. By the time vocalist Merve Erdem stops to gaze up at the clock on “Elegy for Love,” the midpoint of their second album, Melodi, they’re still wading neck-deep through the interminable twilight that they’ve staked out as their territory. “4:50 in the morning/Walls around me/Dreary and wrinkled,” she observes in a breathy monologue, lamenting her imminent surrender to a lover’s call and a cold return to “a distant past we both despise.”

Sonically speaking, the past is not quite so distant for Kit Sebastian. The inebriated backbeat, crumbling piano chords, and steady drip of horns are clear, if reliable holdovers from Mantra Moderne, a slice of seductive Turkish funk that set them up as serious contenders to be the darlings of your favorite crate-digging producer. Melodi occasionally succumbs to that impulse, sinking deep into the clouds of smoke billowing out from their psychedelic speakeasy and settling for bursts of rose-tinted head-nodding. But like the narrator of “Elegy for Love,” Kit Sebastian are haunted by a desire for more than quick-fix nostalgia, and they work quickly across their record to cut down on the brooding sprawl. Harnessing Erdem’s sharpened vocal talents and scrubbing off the lo-fi grit that obscured their debut, the band returns with a streamlined album that more confidently shoulders the weight of their retro-futuristic balancing act.
Similar to the way fellow revivalists Khruangbin use the lyrical guitar work and peculiar bends of ’60s Thai funk and rock records as an anchor for their global influences, Erdem and co-conspirator Kit Martin never stray too far from the ’70s Anatolian psychedelic pop that brought them together. But while the Texas trio can overextend its songwriting and lapse into an unsatisfying genre soup, Kit Sebastian commit even more narrowly to plumbing the depths of this primary influence on Melodi. The slinky, keyboard- and bass-driven sound of Turkish singer-songwriter Şenay steps out swinging on effusive album opener “Yalvarma,” and the stomping, soaring epics of rock musician Barış Manço come pouring out of “Affet Beni”’s winding boogie. Though Martin’s eagerness to emerge from beneath the tape hiss gives the album a bit more weight, it’s Erdem who shines as Melodi’s breakout star. Her shifts from English to Turkish, used to excellent effect on Mantra Moderne standout “Senden Başka,” work even better here: The sudden change of verbal pacing gives the chorus of “Agitate” a particularly majestic lift that tears it out of the track’s plodding shuffle. But she truly finds her center on “Yeter”’s Turkish-language vocal, which climbs into the upper reaches of her range in a swooning, theatrical performance that would’ve been swallowed whole by the Manatra Moderne’s buzzy mix.

While this decluttering does clear space for Kit Sebastian to bounce around within their influences, working from a stricter blueprint finds the band exhausting any surprises within their instrumental palette all too quickly; seductive in small doses, Melodi at times plays like an extended songwriting exercise. “Inertia,” a late-game highlight buoyed by infectiously swaggering horn fanfare, can’t muster enough energy to push past the deja vu, and all the traditional Turkish instrumentation that producer Martin stuffs into penultimate track “Ahenk” isn’t enough to hold your attention. When the creative dam finally bursts on closer “Please Don’t Take This Badly,” a winking, acoustic-guitar-led ballad that ends by accelerating to a thrilling jazzy swirl, you’re left wishing that the band had been more eager to chase those influences across the map.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The shadowy creators behind Topdown Dialectic make electronic music as ceaseless as it is cryptic.

Vol. 2

Six years after Topdown Dialectic put out their first limited-run cassette, we still know little about them besides what can be gleaned from the crackle and throb of their recordings, which take the facelessness of techno to Vantablack levels of opacity. Anonymity in music is often a ploy, but it can also be a form of world-building, a tactic for letting the work speak for itself. In Topdown Dialectic’s case, it’s tempting to speculate that mystery may be just a byproduct of their process.
Peak Oil, the label behind this LP and its 2018 predecessor, has said only that the music is the result of feeding unidentified audio materials through unspecified procedures. How much human input goes in, we don’t know. Perhaps Topdown Dialectic are attentive sound sculptors, their fingers in constant motion on the controls; perhaps they’re more hands off, akin to a digital dance mom shepherding around her talented AI offspring in the virtual minivan. Doesn’t really matter, because the music is as ceaseless as it is cryptic, a mesmerizing swirl of vapor and grit.
Topdown Dialectic’s aesthetic was already fully formed on that first, self-titled cassette, and it hasn’t really changed much since. All of their output remains untitled, except occasionally by date or catalog number; most of their tracks are exactly five minutes in length. The music is clearly descended from a dub-techno lineage that includes Basic Channel and Vladislav Delay; it contains traces of Vainqueur’s churning pulses, Dettinger’s elliptical loops, and Pole’s white noise. But if most dub techno already sounds like dance music that’s been exposed to bleach and a power sander, Topdown Dialectic’s music is further dissolved, further eroded.
For fans of this style, Vol. 2 is that rare, perfect scenario: It sounds exactly like its predecessor, yet each of its tracks carves out new territory. All of Topdown Dialectic’s music is remarkably similar, and even the most attentive listener might be hard-pressed to tell two of their early tracks apart. But the music grew decidedly heavier on their Peak Oil debut, with beefier drums and denser clouds of fog; Vol. 2 continues that trajectory. With its rippling arpeggios and hard, bright conga thwacks, the opening “A1” summons the most crystalline sound Topdown Dialectic have ever made, and so does the clanking “A2,” its blasts of radiator hiss sculpted and sharpened to a fine point. The sound evokes a zone of confusion between lo-def and hi-def, where the individual grains of static are thrown into vivid relief.
Everywhere you listen, there’s some detail clamoring for your attention. In the drum’n’bass-paced “A3,” it’s a looped voice recalls the pinballing samples of Massive Attack and Mad Professor’s No Protection; in “B1,” a plaintive, wordless vocal permeates the murk like a tendril of memory. There’s a weird, three-dimensional quality at work, reminiscent of holograms or lenticular images, as bits of sound pop out of the mix; the relationship between foreground and background is in constant flux.
For something so dependent on generative processes, Topdown Dialectic’s music is remarkably expressive, and it’s tempting to want to peek behind the curtain at its makers. But I suspect that the who, how, and why aren’t really the point. Topdown Dialectic neither exploit their anonymity nor fetishize obscurantism. Perhaps they simply want to invite us to pay closer attention. We are surrounded by secretive processes; do you really know how your router works—or eyeglasses or gravity or THC, for that matter? Yet we never second-guess their functioning. Beauty is mysterious business too, and perhaps an arbitrary one.