Oft-overlooked outfit reissues two early-1990s albums with bonus tracks, giving another chance to hear its more biting and direct approach to shoegaze.

Raise / Mezcal Head

It seems that in every musical movement, there are worthy artists who get lost in the shuffle. In the case of Britain's late-1980s/early-90s shoegazer scene, Swervedriver had the unfortunate distinction of being one of those bands. Forged in the same Oxford milieu that produced Ride and Radiohead, they were positioned under the shoegaze umbrella because of their sound, not their attitude. While many bands operating in similar territory earned the title by literally standing on stage staring at the floor (which was covered in guitar pedals) and letting their lyrics get swept away in the texture of the music, Swervedriver projected a tougher image, drawing their name and much of their lyrical imagery from American car culture and films. If their counterparts were about capturing the look of a vapor trail in their guitar tones, Swervedriver's Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge were more about simulating the rocket ride that produced the trail in the first place. They sounded great on a car stereo.
Because of this, they were much better equipped to make it big in the U.S. than peers like Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, and even My Bloody Valentine; for all the usual boring reasons (label trouble, lineup instability), it didn't pan out that way. They released four albums, only three of which came out stateside, and filled in the space around them with a shelf's worth of EPs and 7"s before hanging it up-- temporarily, as it turned out-- in 1999. Their first two albums, Raise and Mezcal Head, languished out of print for years before BMG resurrected them last year, and Hi-Speed Soul is giving them a second run in America with a slightly expanded tracklist.
1991's Raise was a quality debut, and it's dated surprisingly well. The muscular, scorching guitars are the heart of the album, and they still bring the noise like nobody's business. The big distortion and interlocking riffs give most of the album a dense, bright sound with a lot of punch. "Son of Mustang Ford" rumbles like the car it's named for, "Rave Down" launches into hyperspace after three minutes of tense, grungy crunching, and "Sunset" pulls back a bit, layering cleaner guitars than usual over a bubbling bassline and unison vocals. While the band had already perfected its sonic punch, the songwriting was a bit of a work in progress. Outside of "Sunset", Raise is somewhat wanting for sharp vocal melodies, with Franklin and Hartridge trading off deadpan intonations.
Two years later, on Mezcal Head, the songs caught up to the guitars. "For Seeking Heat", "Girl on a Motorbike", "You Find It Everywhere", and "Blowin' Cool" weave laser-guided melodies through tangles of distortion-drenched guitar. The band lost its original rhythm section between albums, but new drummer Jez Hindmarsh absolutely crushes his kit, matching the intensity of the guitar maelstrom. "Last Train to Satansville" is the height of alt-rock badassery, opening with the brilliant couplet "'You look like you've been losing sleep,' said the stranger on a train/ I fixed him with an ice-cold stare and said, 'I've been having those dreams again.'" The sentiment is backed up with a monster guitar riff and chunky rhythm, and if I had to pick just one Swervedriver song to introduce the band, that'd be it. Just as every movement has overlooked artists, every movement has lost classics, and Mezcal Head really is the lost classic of the shoegaze movement, visceral but tuneful, and perhaps the nearest simulation of a rocket launch recorded in the 90s.
The reissues each add four period bonus tracks, which seem more or less to be a random selection from over a dozen available EP and 7" offerings. Mezcal Head drops the 12-minute "Never Lose That Feeling/Never Learn" meltdown that closed the original U.S. version of the album, replacing it with the shorter EP version of "Never Lose That Feeling". Overall, it's high-quality stuff-- especially Raise bonus "Andalucia"-- but it won't give a collector any closure, especially given that one of the passed-over tracks is the wicked, steel guitar-soaked headrush "Scrawl & Scream", from 1991's Reel to Real EP. Castle Music's Juggernaut Rides compilation remains the best source for Swervedriver's rarities. For an introduction to the band, though, Mezcal Head can't be beat, and it's great to have it and Raise available again. If you missed them the first time or simply weren't around to hear them, Swervedriver is worth the trip back in time.


The veteran songwriter contemplates faith on a quiet, ambitious 33-minute suite. It becomes more surreal—and even funny—the deeper into it you get.

Seven Psalms

If you have ever searched for the meaning of life in a pop song, you have likely turned to Paul Simon. The sacred comfort of being alone, the creeping anxiety of getting older, the haunted visitations that follow our failed relationships: For 60 years, he has explored these universal concerns in a tender, conversational voice, often accompanied by complex arrangements that suggest a busy, clattering world, already setting the stage for our next celebration or catastrophe.
On the 81-year-old’s latest record, Seven Psalms, he silences his surroundings. The quiet is arresting, almost uncanny—the sound of venturing into the backyard in the early morning after a long night of rain. For most of the project’s 33-minute runtime, it’s just Simon’s near-whisper and his acoustic guitar, fingerpicking his way through a spare, dewy landscape. His lyrics are similarly uncluttered. “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows,” he sings in one of the most memorable lines, “until the real deal came.”
The way Simon tells it, he was gearing up for retirement, having performed what was billed as his last concert, when he woke from a dream with an imperative to write something called Seven Psalms. “I thought: I’m not sure I even know what a psalm is,” he confessed. Never one to back away from a mysterious creative impulse, he studied the psalms of King David and began chipping away at an ambitious project that he is adamant listeners approach as a single composition. (On streaming services, it plays as one unbroken track, despite being separated into seven movements with distinct titles in the liner notes.)
Within the conceptual framework, Simon tries his hand at modernizing the language of King David. “The COVID virus is the Lord,” he tells us, more than once, suggesting an Old Testament understanding of the divine. Other times he aims for a more idiomatic, empathetic perspective on the trajectory of modern life. “It seems to me we’re all walking down the same road to wherever it ends,” he observes in “Trail of Volcanoes,” which extends a dreamlike narrative about refugees and hitchhikers, blended with Simon’s own autobiography.
From this vantage, Seven Psalms might initially scan as another wistful, self-referential entry in the growing canon of late-era releases from master songwriters contemplating the end of their journeys. But that characterization belies how singular, surreal, and occasionally funny Seven Psalms can be. There’s a bluesy movement titled “My Professional Opinion,” in which Simon assumes the role of the wise old poet mulling over his weighty subject matter; eventually he cracks a joke about cows and cuts through the austerity like a nervous host gathering guests from the funeral to the afterparty: “What in the world are we whispering for?”
Here is where we might expect the orchestra to come in—or, you know, the djembe or jazz band or choir. Instead we get a quick blast of harmonica and a low, grinding drone—as if a country ensemble were passing in a slow-moving truck. The effect is jarring, adding an eerie sense of dynamics, like the dreams where you try to raise your voice but can’t make a sound. With only a few instrumental accompaniments (strings, flute, an instrument called “theorbo”) and guest vocals from Edie Brickell and British a cappella group Voces8, it is easily the most solitary record Simon has made since his early solo work. The restraint is the point; just as he’s found inspiration in wide-ranging rhythms and textures from around the world, he now seems thrilled by just how much quiet he can conjure.
Simon has long been driven by a desire to challenge expectations, annotating his words or retracting them as soon as we’ve absorbed them. Often it’s for comedic effect: “All my life, I’ve been a wanderer,” he sang in 2000’s “Darling Loraine,” swiftly followed by, “Not really, I mostly lived near my parents’ home.” After so much godly imagery of endless flowing rivers and white light that eases the pain, there’s a similar twist near the end of Seven Psalms: Just before the final movement, he shifts his exaltation of the Lord from a distanced, metaphorical interpretation—the face in the atmosphere, a meal for the poorest of the poor—toward a role more suited to his actual surroundings: “The Lord is my engineer/The Lord is my record producer,” he announces with an arched eyebrow.
And with that, we’re right there with Simon in the unromantic, soundproof rooms where he has spent a great deal of his working life. “My hand’s steady/My mind’s still clear,” he tells us. “I hear the ghost songs I own/Jumpin’, jivin’, and moanin’ through a heartbroken microphone.” These lines occur in a movement called “Wait,” as in, “Wait, I’m not ready,” a lyric he sings in as fragile a delivery as he’s ever mustered. Brickell, the singer-songwriter to whom he’s been married for more than 30 years, joins to accompany him, and their voices build to a muted gospel climax around the word “amen.”
That’s where we leave him—standing beside someone he loves, completing the task set out for him, and accepting the inevitable with a prayer. Simon has referred to this record as an “argument I’m having with myself about belief or not,” and happy endings don’t come much clearer than this. But is anything ever so simple? When Brickell assures him that heaven is “beautiful… almost like home,” what does she mean by “almost”? And what about those questions of doubt he raises in “Your Forgiveness,” and the deliberating jury he imagines still pondering our fate? For every resounding major chord Simon strums around that final, elongated iteration of “amen,” there’s one that sounds a little unsteady, shakier and more unresolved. If there’s a comfort to be found in this music, or any certainty in the story that Simon feels compelled to keep telling us, it’s that the searching never ends.


On their second full-length outing, the young Chicago band has delivered on their early promise, with a richer sound and a better batch of songs.

Dye It Blonde

Smith Westerns have cleaned up nicely. Just over a year ago, the Chicago foursome were of the strictly "lo-fi" persuasion, stirring up hot, filthy garage-rock candy out of Marc Bolan and Beatles signifiers. It was youthful music in feeling and sound-- their noisy full-length debut was recorded while they were still in high school-- but the remarkable hooks buried therein were clear enough to land them on the increasingly stacked Fat Possum roster. And suddenly, they had a studio budget the likes of which they definitely hadn't enjoyed before. Though the leap is audibly huge, Dye It Blonde's many successes aren't wholly the result of its gilded production values and ambition. This band was able to furnish first-class melodies from the beginning. Now they've grown along with their resources.
You can hear the progress right away in "Imagine, Pt. 3", a song originally released as part of a split 7" in April 2010. Sped up here just a touch, it's also been re-outfitted with a far creamier set of synths and guitars. The way the latter seem to clasp hands during the coda is particularly breathtaking, frontman Cullen Omori and guitarist Max Kakacek letting their individual lines mate rather than duel. While the melodic foundation was already sturdy throughout, here, what once sounded ragged in stretches is now plush-upholstered from start to finish. Every single piece of Dye It Blonde is similarly decadent, whether it's the sweet whine of semi-titular closer "Dye the World" or the twilight jangle of "End of the Night".
In an interview not long after the album's completion, Omori noted that this otherwise new set of songs was influenced by 90s Britpop luminaries like Oasis, Teenage Fanclub, and Suede. All are present sonically and spiritually, be it in brash tones, melodic IQ or the sheer scope of these recordings. Where a Smith Westerns hook may have once sounded like another fuzzy member of the Nuggets family/genus, it now unfolds like crane-shot, mainstage festival fare. "Still New" for example floats some phasered guitar interplay before Kakacek rips a hole across the chest of the song with a woozy line so big it essentially serves as a chorus. Like "Weekend", whose central, hair-flipping lick also hugs all its parts together perfectly, the song just sounds so drunk-- drunk on love, drunk on heavy petting, drunk on drink, or maybe just drunk on a some combination of the above. In song, it all depends on the lean of Omori's voice and the whip of his chord changes, the curves of his brother Cameron's bass lines.
That moony/beery-eyed feel bleeds through every corridor of this album and in turn forms a crystalline expression of what moves this band. Their use of the studio in augmenting that never goes overboard, though: this music still retains the innately psychedelic, lamplit, tongue-kissed sense of atmosphere that set it apart. There's perhaps no better instance of all that than "All Die Young", the album's centerpiece. It's a ballad turned hymn whose grand, tumbling scale and "Oh Yoko"-indebted outro celebration are peaks on an album rich in them. In its closing moments, Omori sings what sounds like, "Love is lovely when you are young." They were convincing before, but now they seem like experts.


The 1996 album, newly reissued, finds the drone duo transitioning from their rough-hewn early phase into a more graceful, wordlessly evocative mode.

Stars of the Lid: Gravitational Pull vs. the Desire for an Aquatic Life

“I don't really expect anybody to listen to the music, to be perfectly honest,” Stars of the Lid’s Brian McBride once admitted, neatly summing up how he and bandmate Adam Wiltzie view their long-simmering, late-era success. Over the past 20-plus years, they have gone from Austin weirdos exploring the ether of college radio (McBride’s slot was wincingly called “The Dick Fudge Show”) to intrepid four-track space explorers to drone transcendentalists. In the decade since Stars of the Lid’s last full-length, 2007’s And Their Refinement of the Decline, their distilled sensibilities can be heard echoing through minimalists from Max Richter and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson to Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds. Though perhaps McBride’s statement is more reflective of the group’s most faithful audience, those just trying to fall asleep.
For all of its wide-open plains and famous “stars at night,” Texas wasn’t much known for inspiring ambient music in the early ’90s, and the duo’s earlier albums bear a rougher hew. They may have been aiming for the celestial spaces of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo, but recording to four-track in a rickety house in East Austin imparted something coarser and earthier. Found voices, thunked noises, and tape hiss inform their 1995 debut, Music for Nitrous Oxide, while e-bowed guitars and back-masked effects run throughout their 1996 follow-up, Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire for an Aquatic Life. Originally presented in a noisy and problematic pressing on white vinyl, the album finally gets a deserved vinyl reissue, 22 years on. It reveals less a dream music than one informed, as Wiltzie has recalled, by “blistering heat and massive drugs and depression.”
Looking anew at the cover art depicting a blurry view through a screen door, you can almost feel the oppressive, gelatinous humidity of summer in Texas. A sense of lethargy permeates Gravitational, something that the albums the duo recorded after leaving Austin (McBride for Chicago and Los Angeles and Wiltzie for Brussels) elegantly float above. The 19-minute expanse of “Cantus; In Memory of Warren Wiltzie” feels dark and submerged, full of seismic rumbles, storm-drain echoes, and scraped guitar strings. While the billowing drones of later Stars recordings make the listener feel weightless, “Cantus” instead casts a disorienting haze around you, never quite letting you escape.
The second side of the album is where Stars of the Lid hit their stride, tapping into the sort of hypnagogic sound that would come to be their modus operandi for the next two decades on albums like The Ballasted Orchestra and The Tired Sounds of.... Distant drones, sampled strings,  e-bowed guitar swells, and sine waves that sound like alien transmissions are blended together to sublime effect on “Lactate’s Moment.” The elements rise and fall so naturally, they come to feel like part of your own breathing. The strings that emerge toward the end lead seamlessly into the elegiac closer “Be Little With Me.” As glib and peculiar as the duo’s titles can be (see “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface”), the melody of “Be Little With Me” feels vulnerable, sincere, and heart-rending. It’s the sound of the band learning how to be wordlessly evocative, going beyond paralyzing feelings of depression and the urge to self-medicate to get at an emotionally resonant core.


The whistling, shit-talking Detroit rapper has found nationwide appeal without abandoning the core elements of his city’s homegrown style.

Young & Turnt 2 (Deluxe)

Seconds into 42 Dugg’s Young and Turnt Vol. 2, you hear him whistle. It’s not a particularly skillful whistle—it’s the type of airy sound you usually make by accident, and actually, at first it was. “I don’t even know why I did that shit, I ain’t even gonna lie,” the 25-year-old East Detroit native said in an interview. But regardless of how amateurish it may be, I can’t imagine a 42 Dugg song without it.
The whistling, shit-talking rapper has accomplished what once seemed impossible in Detroit: he's found nationwide appeal without abandoning the core elements of the city’s homegrown style. It wasn’t always this way. After being granted his freedom in 2017, Dugg began to put out unmixed and offbeat music—common in Detroit. Even though he was raw, he had a vivid touch that recalled influences like Jeezy. It made him a rising Midwest star, one who would subtly evolve when he arrived in Atlanta.
In Atlanta, Dugg formed a friendship playing high-stakes dice games with the emerging Lil Baby, who helped the Detroit rapper’s rugged raps reach the ear of Yo Gotti. Together, Lil Baby and Yo Gotti signed 42 Dugg in 2019, and released his mixtape Young and Turnt, a strong record that began to bridge the gap between Detroit and the South.
Dugg hit his stride earlier this year on a pair of great rap songs from the deluxe version of Lil Baby’s My Turn. On “Grace,” Dugg’s confessional verses are the main attraction, delivered in the same lethargic style popular among East Detroit rappers like Babyface Ray and Peezy. Then there’s the electric “We Paid,” where an animated Dugg overshadows Baby: The opening line has since become his breakout moment: “Fore I go broke like Joc/Fuck with that dog like Vick.” (Just don’t bring it up around Yung Joc.)
Young and Turnt Vol. 2 was originally released in March, but like so many major rap records in 2020, it has been updated with a deluxe edition. In its first form, the mixtape was an easy end-to-end listen, and miraculously, the added nine songs don’t take away from the fun, even though it’s clear that they’re meant to juice streaming numbers and capitalize on his rapidly growing fanbase.
Of the original 14 tracks, the most ambitious are the ones which attempt to balance Dugg’s Atlanta influences with his Detroit flair. “Not a Rapper,” featuring Southside production that sounds like it’s been collecting dust since the Obama era, should have been the typical forced major label album cut, but his signature Midwest flow—always a step ahead of the beat—keeps the song fresh. The balance isn’t perfect though; “Ride With Me” takes a swing at a scratchy melody which should be forever reserved for Atlanta crooners.
Dugg is by far at his best when he’s making traditional Detroit rap songs with a little bit of big-money polish. On “Habit,” Dugg reps his city hard: The track has bass-heavy production from local legend Helluva, and Dugg, spits the rich, boundary-pushing stories that are the norm in Detroit: “Prolly serve fentanyl to five thousand fiends.” He’s even sharper when he’s reflective. “Fell out with my best friend over six grams/Now I ain’t got a best man but I got fans,” he raps over the soulful vocal sample and jittery bassline of “It Get Deeper.”
The deluxe tracks aren’t as focused, and a pair of unnecessary remixes end the album with a whimper. Dugg stumbles back into some of the same missteps as the original record: “Free Dirt” sounds like it could have been recorded by any rising ATL rapper with a Coach K endorsement, and he once again makes us suffer through lousy vocals on “All My Life.” But there are moments that justify the deluxe’s existence beyond making Dugg’s pockets fatter. The Detroit street record “Light This Bitch Up” seems ready to soundtrack a Michigan State football postgame, and “Big 4’s” has an introduction almost as good as his breakout moment on “We Paid”: “I seen niggas hatin’ way before I ever had tints.” And, of course, none of it is complete without the whistle.


Dreddy Krueger presents "Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture" on which indie hip-hop artists rhyme over unused tracks from the Wu archives.

Various Artists: Dreddy Krueger Presents...Think Differently Music: Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture

The once-dominant "W" is there, draped in Apple-jocking color waves. The choppy, soul-sampling production is there. RZA and GZA are there. So it's a Wu-Tang Clan record, right? Well, sorta. On Think Differently, longtime Wu affiliate Dreddy Krueger has taken a concept chock with novelty appeal-- your favorite indie rappers over Wu beats!-- and stretched it into a nearly hour-long exercise in necrophilia. If the formerly ubiquitous Clan aren't yet a hip-hop casualty, they're on life support. It's been four years since Iron Flag and four years more since one of their albums made a cultural impact. Ghostface is arguably the only one of the collective who is still turning out essential albums. But Wu-Tang has an everlasting allure. Krueger only managed to wrangle the services of three official Wu members here, one of whom is U-God, the only one I wouldn't want to meet on wax. Would it really have been so difficult to get 16 bars from, say, Masta Killa? Gripes and misleading circumstances aside, Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture is surprisingly coherent and faithful to RZA's model, and it features a few unexpectedly gleaming examples of Wu-aping.
Backed by nostalgic production from Mathematics, designer of the famed W logo, and Wu tenderfoot Bronze Nazareth, each song has a stretched-out leftover appeal. Which makes sense because that's exactly what Krueger did-- he pilfered the unused Wu archives for hidden gems. The whole practice is hit-and-spliff. The tracks you think will quake, like RZA and MF Doom teaming up on "Biochemical Equation", or GZA and Ras Kass squaring off on the thrilling "Lyrical Swords" (Ras easily dominates the suddenly old Genius), are gold. Cannibal Ox's Vast Aire also makes a strong showing over the churning, sweaty harmonica boogie of "Slow Blues". "I'm like Ali, better yet Joe Louis/ I'll put my hands through you/ I don't need bullets," he sneers. Less appealing ventures-- J-Live meets R.A. the Rugged Man, anyone?-- either feel forced or ill-conceived. "Aesop Rock is weird and so is Del tha Funky Homosapien. Get 'em in the booth!"
This only raises an important question: What exactly constitutes "indie" in hip-hop right now? In indie-hop's salad days, when El-P swung a mighty sword and the word "Rawkus" didn't make you groan, this sort of project might have meant something. Now we're subjected to the likes of Scaramanga Shallah. These miscellaneous MCs are only indie because they can't get on commercially, not because they embody some sort of concrete ethos. This makes the whole venture bunk, though not a complete waste of time. Two interludes from Jim Jarmusch, reportedly a friend of Krueger's and the reason RZA steals Coffee and Cigarettes from Bill Murray, are bizarrely pretentious ("Harmony composes compatibility among the incongruous...") and reason alone to give this a listen.
While only a curio in the Wu archive, our friend Dreddy appears to have good intentions. It wouldn't have been a bad thing to hear some more accomplished MCs give these beats a shot; most recall a gloriously synth-less world of East Coast hip-hop production. Of course, that would have spared us the chance to hear Littles, La the Darkman & Byata give their Wu dream whip a spin.


Using a canvas of cosmic synth arpeggios and hissing electronics, the Colombian artist treats folk music as a living entity imbued with liberatory potential.

A Flor de Piel

A Flor de Piel, the new album from Colombian artist Montañera, cultivates clarity from communion. You can hear blunted traces of the country’s folk music across the record, but “Como Una Rama” is one of the album’s clearest summonings. At first, only her elastic vocals hang in the air, stretching and sprawling into the thickness of the atmosphere. Her voice starts reverberating into echoes, as if a chorus of ancestral spirits have joined her. Here, Montañera sings in the tradition of bullerengue, a folk style of music and dance developed by maroon communities (enslaved Africans who escaped bondage and formed their own settlements) on the Caribbean coast of her homeland. Before long, her voice short-circuits, glitching into ripples of fuzz, like a spotty radio transmission. All that’s left in the haze is the steadfastness of her voice.
A Flor de Piel transmits centuries of cultural memory, but the hissing electronics and serene synth arrangements transform the music into more than mere homage. The album chronicles stories of rebirth, transformation, and self-discovery, often via the purifying and regenerative motifs of water and flora. But even though María Mónica Gutiérrez’s journey is personal, her muted interpolations of folk styles suggest there is abundant knowledge in community-based traditions. A Flor de Piel is not just a sublime example of folkloric reinterpretation; it’s also a treatise on the liberatory gestures that are possible when you reimagine musical genealogy. In Montañera’s fluid chronal continuum, folk music isn’t an ancient artifact, but a living, breathing entity that was always meant to free us.
Take “Santa Mar,” which features Cankita (from the group Bejuco) and Las Cantadoras de Yerba Buena, a group of traditional musicians from Colombia’s Pacific coast, led by women from Tumaco. The track is an offering to an aquatic deity whose holy water possesses cleansing and life-giving properties. On it, speckled marimbas de chonta and orotund vocals, sung in the style of currulao, are shepherds for cycles of life and death. A repeated chant renders the practice of singing as a conduit for renewal: “Listen to my song, which comes and goes from the water/Wetting the earth so that new life may grow.” While pursuing her master’s degree, Gutiérrez studied vocal traditions from the Colombian Pacific coast, investigating how singing can be a tool for peace-building in the aftermath of violent conflict. Though other songs on A Flor de Piel only gesture at this kind of healing, in its lyrics, “Santa Mar” is a literal declaration of folk music’s curative capacities.
Montañera brandishes her voice as an instrument, and the masterful production across the album only amplifies its elegance. On “Tú - El Borde de Mi Arista,” her voice is fragile and light, but as the track unfolds, it morphs into meandering, Auto-Tuned melodies and crinkly murmurs. On “Un Día Voy a Ser Mariposa,” a six-minute epic of metamorphosis, vocal effects mirror the erratic, non-linear process of healing. Gutiérrez’s voice is distorted and chopped into formless but familiar syllables; soon, it quivers into gauzy harmonies, lying somewhere on the spectrum of ambient music. Sparse, resonant waves of synths drone under her voice, cloaking the production with an immersive and dreamlike kind of oblivion. It’s meticulous but free-flowing, a sensorial delight that feels natural and deliberate all at once.
The concept of “ancestral healing,” or the reclamation of age-old rituals as a radical spiritual pursuit, has become a popular decolonizing practice across the Latin American diaspora over the last few years. Many people are returning to customs that were criminalized or ostracized under colonialism and slavery, decentering Western epistemologies in the process. On A Flor de Piel, Montañera presents an antidote for a world in which ancestral spirituality has sometimes been reduced to Instagram infographics and candle-burning ceremonies stripped of their original context. But Montañera’s relationship to traditional sounds never feels extractive or facile. Across A Flor de Piel, she builds small idylls, where time and tradition coalesce into divine awakening.


The Canadian songwriter’s full-length debut is sentimental and melancholy, allowing even songs with ambiguous, conflicted meanings to be subsumed into echoey haze.

Born Again

Hamilton, Ontario’s Linnea Siggelkow decided to learn guitar at age 12, when she saw the music video for Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” As the daughter of a piano teacher, it was her first departure from sheet music. When she began writing her own songs, she found herself drawn towards melancholy. That’s the mood that defines Ellis, the dream-pop project she started in her bedroom some four years ago. A series of early GarageBand demos attracted attention, earning her opening slots for Soccer Mommy and Palehound. Her debut LP, Born Again, is an opportunity to hear Ellis in her own right. But with sentimental lyrics and familiar emo-pop tropes—gentle guitar reverb, windswept synths, overblown crescendos—the album too often falls back on cliché.
As the title suggests, Born Again charts Ellis’ disillusionment with her religious upbringing and its lingering effects on her state of mind. “In the pews I lost my hope/Where I was supposed to find it,” she sings in a soft, pining voice reminiscent of contemporaries like Nicole Dollanganger, Long Beard, and Tomberlin. She confesses to a shame “that I will carry ’til I’m dead,” but the feeling doesn’t grade into the music. There’s little specificity, nor much variation in mood, so that even songs with ambiguous, conflicted meanings are subsumed into echoey haze. The closing track takes a hopeful tone—“Had a dream I was a butterfly,” Ellis sings—but it relies on the same sparse guitar, synth overlay, and middle-eight upsurge as “Into the Trees,” a song about dysfunctional relationships and dread.
When Ellis’ unique perspective does emerge, it offers beauty like “a brief gasp between one cliché and another,” in the words of Ezra Pound. “I thought I had found freedom/When I moved into the city/I was puking out the window/I was trying to be pretty,” she sings on the title track—an image so detailed and so arbitrary, it could only be her own. By contrast, lines like, “You’re the monster that still hides under my bed/You’re the words that I thought but never said” (from “Shame”) are so wholly reliant on cliché that there’s little hope of saying anything new. At other times, Ellis struggles to put words to her emotions. “I can’t explain the feeling,” she admits on “Happy”; “I don’t know why, I just feel like a mess,” she sings on “Into the Trees.” With nowhere else to go for emphasis or meaning, she simply gets louder, adding all-caps declarations of “I’m scared” that counteract the very feeling she wants to convey.
Open-heartedness can act as a salve in an irony-hardened world, but the sweet kitsch of Born Again leaves little to latch onto. The songs are buttressed by predictable structures—soft, then bombastic, then soft again—with little room for surprise. The grungy, tuned-down guitar starts just when it’s expected; ditto the pitter-pattering drums and the starry synths that merge the other components together. All the soupy atmospherics wind up obscuring Ellis’ attempts at honest self-reflection. Uniformly and unashamedly sentimental, Born Again leaves too little to remember her by.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


More than a decade into their career, Omaha's the Faint-- now self-producing and releasing their music on their own label-- have seen their infatuation with 1980s synth pop become an indie cliché; their first album in four years balances songs about geopolitics and technology with musings on the politics of romance.

Fasciinatiion

Ten years in, the Faint are a) self-producing, b) on their own label, c) still letting Ticketmaster fleece their faithful, and d) as hard to hate on as they are to get excited about. I mean, these stylish Nebraskans, whose packaging always apes vintage Russian poster art, are, in terms of longevity, where Depeche Mode was when Violator came out, and Fasciinatiion is just not Violator solid. This act might have "pioneered" the re-cooling of 1980s keyboard textures in indie rock, but (like the Mode) they've stayed themselves while others ran with their inspiration into the respective electro, dance-punk, and now bloghouse, abysses. Weirdly, bands list them as an influence on press releases these days-- like, they've been lapped by hungry hosts of the very textures they reintroduced. (For proof, consult how Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s remix of this album's first single plays like a decadent, overprocessed "update".)
Genre was never their preoccupation, though, and they've openly resented their critics'/fans' synth-related comparisons/pigeonholing. The Faint play Faint songs, see, and gosh, Fasciinatiion is awful darn Fainty-- if a tad minimal and midtempo compared to their last two platters. Ever since they became a "Societal Ideas" band on Danse Macabre, you know you're going to get some clumsy, too-little-too-late jams about the Big Issues: "Get Seduced" decries cretinous nip-slip tabloidery (kind of a writ-large sequel to Macabre's anti-gossip "Let the Poison Spill From Your Throat"), while the earnest protests of "A Battle Hymn for Children" are almost condescendingly recycled: "In the name of peace we make war," etc. Its stuff about guns-as-toys and violent video games is straight out of Terminator 2, which, like the Faint, awesomely hyper-utilized machinery and digital aesthetics to warn us about the horrific dangers guaranteed by the hyper-utilization of machinery and digital aesthetics.
"Battle Hymn" is just one part of a whole suite of tracks during which frontman Todd Fink (formerly Baechle, he chivalrously "took" wife Orenda's name-- suck it, patriarchy!) attempts to, I don't know, deal with technology. "The Geeks Were Right" (pretty much sung to the tune of their classic "Agenda Suicide") already has the folks at Wired grateful for the acknowledgement of their supreme Gandalfness. The song's dread of the future sounds both rational and like a by-product of, um, getting old. The incredible ambition of "Machine in the Ghost" just makes its choral chant more painful; Fink and his mates try to reconcile, er, everything: "Let's ask the atheists, let's ask the astronauts/ Let's ask the priests! The cults! The witches! The pope!...The monks! Shaman! The nuns! Buddha! The Holy Ghost!/... Meditators, pyramids, mathematicians, acidheads, theologians,...black magicians, physicists..." etc. To be fair, Fink lands some interesting turn-of-phrase blows during the verse part, re: mortal egos wrapped up in a culture of fasco-mystical B.S., but that wack list-as-refrain ruins the song.
Let me applaud Fink for trying. Yes, bro, it is frustrating to feel like people on this planet in 2008 need to be scolded about the bad faith inherent in killing for their god-nation of choice (see "Battle Hymn"), and, man, I too mourn the absence of philosophy-as-such in the popscape, and hey, I also sometimes get tired of songs about riding on rims and boyfriends-n-girlfriends. But the Faint are sounding way out of their depth on the Important Concepts front, while seeming perfectly at home on material about relationship-muck. Both "I Treat You Wrong" and "Psycho" are standout cuts, and they're complex, knowingly ironic self-admissions to a disrespected romantic partner. "Psycho", an amendment to  Lennon's "Jealous Guy" over sonics from the B-52's' debut, is also remarkable for giving mononymic guitarist Dapose something to do-- methinks he'll enact his Falco-esque running-in-place thing quite a bit on this tour.
"Fish in a Womb" is also excellent, a ballad that suggests OMD duking it out with Her Space Holiday for a prominent soundtrack slot in a cyborg-directed homage to John Hughes' oeuvre. But even it-- and Clark Baechle's refreshingly very human/analog drumming-- can't save an album whose knob-twisty aural flourishes too often sound like a catalog of simulated farts (from pinched whistlers to airy whorls to wet foghorns). Something's not as vital here-- the band sounds more committed to the songs, at the expense of the neato spazz-outs. Maybe the strangeness of being the elder statesmen of retro-futurism is weighing on them, but at this point, whole-heartedly embracing the imaginative possibilities of their inherent theatricality and campiness would be more revolutionary than preaching the occasional sermon.


It might seem curious that Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood ended up collaborating with Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express. But they make exultant and warmly human music together. Greenwood's role is subdued even when the riotous music is not.

Shye Ben Tzur / Jonny Greenwood / The Rajasthan Express: Junun

Junun

There are a lot of creative forces to keep track of on Junun. Receiving top billing is the Israeli singer and composer, Shye Ben Tzur, who wrote the songs. Then there's his backing band: the 19 performers, hailing from distinct Indian-music traditions, who form the Rajasthan Express. And you've also got Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood contributing rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards, and drum-programming to the arrangements.
Still, aside from the album's complex backstory and multilingual lyrics (written, variously, in Hebrew, Hindi, and Urdu), Junun is readily approachable on its own. When Aamir Bhiyani’s rhythmically crisp trumpet peals out over programmed and acoustic percussion during the first minute of the album's opener and title track, Junun establishes its celebratory side. (Instrumental virtuosity and rhythmic drive: check and check, respectively.) Then the singer comes in, delivering an attractive setting of Sufi mystic poetry. (Warmly humanistic vibe: check.) The song could easily coast from this point. But once a tempo downshift hits, midway through, the assembled performers sound even more exultant. (Are you dancing yet? I was.)
It's the wealth of smart musical touches that make Ben Tzur's songs feel so emotionally legible. The bowed strings of "Hu" have a vulnerable quality that contrasts winningly with the song’s more full-throated vocal exclamations, while Ben Tzur’s breathy flute playing complements Greenwood’s tinny digital programming on the opening of "Kalandar". And the gradual acceleration of a vocal-driven number like "Eloah" also contributes to the album’s impressive range of textures.
"Chala Vahi Des" starts out with melancholic vocals delivered by Afshana Khan and Razia Sultan, before throttling into a harmonium-and-drums groove. In the song’s final section, Greenwood’s surprisingly funky bass playing enters into a dialog with the vocalists and drums. Also making an appearance, during the chorus of the triple-meter tune "Allah Elohim", are the ghostly, sliding tones of the ondes Martenot—an early electronic-keyboard instrument that is one of Greenwood’s favorites. (He's used it on Kid A, Hail to the Thief, as well as in his score for There Will Be Blood.) Given the prominence of his guitar on the same track, "Allah Elohim" is one of the rare moments on Junun that sounds directly influenced by Greenwood's other work.
Concerning Greenwood's mostly background role: the sight of a famous British pop musician collaborating with lesser-known artists from another hemisphere can easily prompt charges of exploitative appropriation. But since Greenwood’s latest releases on Nonesuch have all focused on his work as a composer of film scores and classical music, the pop-world conversation about cultural tourism doesn’t seem all that helpful here.
A better reference point would be the tradition of modern composers looking to escape the "Eastern" and "Western" category trap. In his 2015 memoir Words Without Music, American composer Philip Glass recalled how "it was very common in the 1960s for Western musicians, even composers, to be completely ignorant of global, or world, music." Glass, for his part, famously followed up his studies of the Western canon (at Juilliard and in Paris) by traveling to India, where he eventually worked for Ravi Shankar. Other composers associated with the minimalist movement, such as La Monte Young and Terry Riley, spent decades investigating Hindustani raga with Pandit Pran Nath.
As a post-minimalist himself, Greenwood is a natural heir to that history. And so after happening upon a composer like Ben Tzur, he’s apt to decide to "discover more about him." What Greenwood found was a composer splitting his time between the Middle East and India, who has managed to develop a unique fusion form that is constructed from several traditions—including Bollywood-style brass exuberance, the devotional Qawwali music of Sufi Islam, and bowed-string instruments associated with the Manganiar community.
The result is a mix that includes folk feel and studied arrangements. Naturally, with Greenwood's participation comes that of longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, who succeeds in presenting this detailed music with precision. While Greenwood's presence guarantees a certain level of interest, the newsiest takeaways from this album involve the skill of Ben Tzur and the musicians of the Rajasthan Express. The ensemble’s playing and the leader's compositions make Junun an easy stretch—though, crucially, not a condescending one—for listeners otherwise unfamiliar with the great variety of methods often obscured by "world music" market-speak.


Tory Lanez sets the bar very, very high and he does not hit it. At all.

LoVE me NOw

Tory Lanez tries so damn hard at everything he does—just take a look at his painful jump shot. His second studio album of the year, LoVE me NOw, is Tory attempting to cement his place in R&B’s upper echelon, but even before the first song is clicked, the album is drenched with head-scratching ideas: the tracklist is printed like a ransom note written with magazine letter cut outs (“IF iT Ain’T rIGHt”) and it features an album cover in the style of “The Brady Bunch” with a muppet version of Tory. There is absolutely no reason for any of this—unless Tory is secretly a Jim Henson head—it’s the Toronto-bred singer/rapper desperately trying to be different. Instead, he creates some of the most generic hip-hop and R&B music of the year.
In the intro to Tory’s “DrIP DrIp Drip” music video, a reporter walks up to him and says, “Rumor has it that after you release this LoVE me NOw album you will be the greatest artist of all time,” to which Tory responds, “I am the greatest artist of all time,” right before diving into an Auto-Tune sing-rap style that half of the guest artists on his own album do better than he does. His singing is mediocre, his use of Auto-Tune isn’t creative, and as a rapper he’s forgettable. He doesn’t know if he wants to be a rockstar like Lil Uzi Vert or make throw-your-panties-onto-the-stage R&B like Trey Songz.
The glaring issue with LoVE me NOw is how uninteresting and generic the album sounds. For a project that is supposed to be Tory Lanez’s moment, much of the best moments come from his guests, a who’s who of Hot 97 heavy hitters. On “IF iT Ain’T rIGHt,” A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie upstages Tory by spitting a soft, melodic verse about failed murders: “Hit him in the stomach and he still did not die.” On “DrIP DrIp Drip” Meek Mill channels Young Thug with newfound melody. On “KeeP IN tOUcH,” Tory’s lack of R&B chops get exposed next to Bryson Tiller, who shows him what lovestruck and horny slow jams are supposed to sound like: “Kiss right in the street, fuck if anybody sees/Just friends/I don’t think anybody believes.”
There isn’t anything new LoVE me NOw will teach you about Tory Lanez. He still craves respect and wants to be recognized by his peers and fans alike as the hip-hop and R&B savant that he thinks he is. And while at times he can crank out catchy tracks destined for the charts, most of the time, after all of the big talk, we’re left with an artist who doesn’t live up to the expectations he set for himself.


For those of you who skipped out of zoology classes to get baked\r\n\ behind the bike sheds, bonobos ...

Animal Magic

For those of you who skipped out of zoology classes to get baked behind the bike sheds, bonobos are a species of chimpanzee. Whereas your regular chimp is a vicious, antagonistic bag of misogynistic rage, the bonobo is a peaceable, female-respecting soul who loves to have sex just for the fun of it. Bonobos are Pitchfork's kind of primate. So when we received Animal Magic, the debut album by downtempo Brit Simon Green, the 'Fork knew that the collection was bound to get us all super-relaxed and ready for some smooth, sweet loving. So with a several tubs of fresh whipped cream, a punnet of strawberries and a French tickler or two, I set about scoring some love action while assessing Animal Magic.
In keeping with his chosen alias, Green never screams, throws tantrums, or is stupid enough to allow primatologists to force him to learn a simple noun-predicate dialect. Green's language is already highly developed-- though he borrows slightly from previous Ninja Tune releases, he's more in sync with Memphis Industries' Blue States or Broadway Project, and as wryly humorous as Fort Lauderdale.
Animal Magic stumbles initially: Green's gaffe is to include one of those hokey master-of-ceremonies intros in which some suited-and-booted jerk-off intones for the enjoyment of ladies and gentlemen. That schtick got mildewy yonks ago and for perpetuating such a cliché, Green needs to be roundly rebuked. Once the intro is over, none of Animal Magic is impeachable. Though Green sifts through the same thrift-store record bins as Bent, he manages to combine his samples so as to produce tracks that transcend their constituents. In other words, Bonobo avoids the wretched hamfistedness of Lemon Jelly.
The bewitching vocal sample that anchors "Sleepy Seven" reminds me of Blue States' "Your Girl." Green doesn't make extensive use of the sample, instead dropping it in to subtly spice up his languid groove and melodica lines. "Dinosaurs" is appropriately more muscular: Greer selects beats that are less geared to bob heads as to snap necks. But to counter the violence, Green arranges somnolent trombone and sax snippets. The acoustic guitar appeggios and swooshing sounds that begin "Kota" remind me of the intricate yet sleepy vibes of my favorite Swiss downtempo-er, Seelenluft.
During "Terrapin," sitars and subdued strings weave the wordless story of Shiva's horizontal journey to the center of his pleasure zone. "The Plug" tells the tale of how Shiva, upon reaching the center of his pleasure zone, begged never to return to the realm of strife and woe, and how he pleaded to remain surrounded by the sounds of gentle cymbal strokes, maracas, strings, and a melody played on an oboe-ish instrument of ineffable serenity.
Though Animal Magic breaks no new ground for chill-out, I'm overjoyed that after its initial slip into cliché, Green makes his debut album much greater than the sum of its parts. Green has a real flair for dynamics which, in chill, is a remarkable achievement. Animal Magic is clearly the creation of a musician rather thar that of a zany bricoleur who has absorbed too many broadcasts of "The Goons." With his debut securely a success, it'd be nice to see Greer follow the path of J. Swinscoe's Cinematic Orchestra and apply his composer's abilities to human musicians rather than an array of sound files. Now. May I tempt you with a cream-dipped strawberry, sweet thing?


Despite working in an increasingly rich and crowded ambient-pop field, Grouper's Liz Harris continues to own her distinctive sound on these LPs.

Grouper: A I A : Alien Observer / A I A : Dream Loss

The tools Liz Harris uses to make music as Grouper tend to be pretty basic: piano, guitar, synths, drones, hiss, and lots of reverb. If you've been following along with the twists and turns of noisy ambient music these last few years, this collection of elements may sound familiar, possibly bordering on cliché. But it's all in how you fit the pieces together. Despite sharing characteristics with a lot of other current music, Harris' has a distinctive sound that she pretty much owns. These short LPs, released at the same time and that share an overall aesthetic, sound beamed in from another realm, and they also sound like they could have come from no one else.
Part of the distinctiveness can be traced to Harris' voice, which floats above the music and can sound delicate and shrouded and mist and can also evince an approachable earthiness. Particularly on Alien Observer, she layers her voice in a way that occasionally brings to mind Julianna Barwick, but Harris sounds comparatively distant and less immersive. Her voice haunts these songs instead of leading them; it's a presence and not a personality, and the voice and instruments are in balance, serving each other without any one element becoming more prominent.
The other aspect that sets Grouper apart is an approach to sound that feels somehow both cruder and more sophisticated than the majority of the lo-fi crop. It's crude in the sense that it seems to hearken back to the dark, home-recorded songs of an earlier era. David Pearce's music as Flying Saucer Attack, recorded mostly during the 1990s, was often referred to as "rural psychedelia," and that description would fit this pair of records. This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them. The sophistication comes from the care in presentation. This music doesn't sound like it was built from mistakes or thrown together, it seems precisely ordered and arranged even while it's often muffled and warbly and distorted. Every sound exists for a reason.
Alien Observer is the more accessible of the two discs, and also has a slightly better arc. The opening "Moon Is Sharp" begins one of those impossibly beautiful vocal drones that just tears out your insides, as Harris begins in shapeless ethereality and gradually finds her way to an unadorned but breathtaking melody. The title track does away with the drone and puts Harris' vocal over a quivering keyboard line. On "Vapor Trails" and "She Loves Me That Way" the record turns a few shades darker, but a twinkling music box melody that opens "Mary, on the Wall (Second Heart Tone)" feels like awakening from an uneasy sleep, groggy and halfway hallucinating as you re-enter the world. The closing "Come Softly (For Daniel D)" feels like a proper conclusion, as Harris' naked voice over a skeletal keyboard figure gradually disappear over the horizon.
Dream Loss is heavier on the distortion and EQ, and with an atmosphere that alternates between the hissy, open drift of the stratosphere with the thick, all-encompassing immersion of the ocean floor. The tracks here feel less like songs and more like moods, studies, and shapes. "I Saw a Ray" flirts with noise music, with a bit of industrial grind added to the held tones, while "Soul Eraser" seems to crumble into dust and regenerate itself simultaneously.
Harris has indicated that the two records, dating from different periods (the tracks on Dream Loss are older), have threads connecting them. They certainly feel like companions. Dream Loss is only slightly less engrossing than its counterpart, and the differences are minor. But placed on a continuum, these records highlight how 2008's luminous Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, her last full-length album, was an unusual entry in the Grouper catalog. That record was built almost exclusively with acoustic guitar and voice, and the songs had an ancient air to them, like they'd been carved into petrified wood with a hammer and chisel. These records are closer to the narcotic drift of earlier records like 2007's Cover the Windows and the Walls. But it all feels like Grouper, and whether she's working in realm of rough-hewn folk or amniotic drift, this is music that takes you places.


The pioneering composer and guitarist's latest album *Pythagorean Dream *is a simultaneously giddy and calm mix of the high-minded and the lizard-brained.

Pythagorean Dream

Rhys Chatham was a flute player until he heard the Ramones and switched to guitar. That's an oversimplification of the pioneering musician and composer's history, but it still says a lot about his unique methods. Throughout his 45-year career, Chatham has translated styles associated with instruments like the flute—classical, formal, studied—into the primal power of rock-based electric guitar. This mix of the high-minded and the lizard-brained holds when Chatham plays other instruments, even when he conducts 400 of them.
Chatham revisits his formative flute/guitar dichotomy on Pythagorean Dream, an album he made by himself—a rarity in his heavily collaborative discography. One side focuses on repetitive, ringing guitar, while the other offers a fluid, morphing flute drone. But the approach for both— devout minimalism seeking transcendence via preset forms—is clearly unified, to the point where the two 19-minute pieces rhyme with each other. Both sides loop and build, mimicking the hypnotic repetitions of nature.
Chatham uses tape delay to create overlapping lines, in the tradition of Terry Riley’s tape loops. This allows Chatham to accompany himself, slowly reflecting sounds back and forth in a hall of sonic mirrors. On side one, he also employs Pythagorean tuning. I’m not technically versed enough to hear what difference that makes (nor are most listeners), but I do know there’s a precision to each note and chord that gives Chatham’s guitar a patient reverence, like we’re witnessing wordless prayer.
Side two feels even more intimate. As Chatham’s flute tones progress, they get smaller and closer. At points, it sounds as if they’re being whispered in your ear. Throughout, both pieces tremble with giddy energy, but also exude a calm atmosphere in their chiming overtones. In the end, flute and guitar fully unite: The former folds into the latter in a triumphant refrain that soars so high it sounds light-headed, as if Chatham is dizzied by his own playing.
Lightness might be seen as a drawback by some of Chatham’s contemporaries, but it’s always been welcome in his multi-toned music. His sunny, humorous personality shines through in everything he does, whether he’s playing with different musicians every night or simply directing an army of players from behind a conductor’s stand. But there's something more naturally personal about Pythagorean Dream, in the way its multitude of vibrations emanate from Chatham alone. He’s using a language that he created—a language that's not hard for other musicians to learn or interpret, but one that only Chatham speaks fluently.


Wolfgang Voigt treats the seventh album from his beloved ambient techno moniker like a retrospective, filtering familiar tropes into a comforting pulse. But a disturbing hint of tinnitus lurks in the margins.

Der Lange Marsch

A sea of strings swims into view, and the crackle of vinyl reaches out of the mix like tendrils. The tone is tense, urgent, paranoid, and minor-key, interrupted by long exhalations on a major-key chord. There’s no beat, but anyone familiar with GAS might find themselves already smiling with anticipation: It’s coming. Sure enough, the kick drum that undergirds most of Wolfgang Voigt’s revered ambient techno project slowly fades in, accompanied by a martial snare that first showed up on his last album Rausch.
It’s not the only familiar scene on Der Lange Marsch, the project’s seventh album. Voigt’s label Kompakt has hinted this might be the last GAS album, and Voigt treats Der Lange Marsch like a career retrospective, threading bits and pieces of his previous works into a constant four-on-the-floor pattern. Fans will recognize the pneumatic burbling from “Pop 1” on “Der Lange Marsch 8,” the urgent fox-hunt horn from “Konigsförst 5” on “Der Lange Marsch 9,” the glistening drone from “Zauberberg 1” on “Der Lange Marsch 11.”
The GAS project has developed so incrementally that Voigt plundering his past isn’t unwelcome or unexpected, and there are enough subtle developments for Der Lange Marsch to strike a distinct tone. The string samples are less dense than usual, clustering close to the beat rather than blossoming through the stereo field. And while it’s structured as a single piece, like Rausch, it moves more quickly, never staying on one idea too long; the rhythm runs completely uninterrupted for the central hour of the 67-minute album.
The most shocking rupture in the project’s harmonic framework is the creepy choir that drifts like a ghost through “Der Lange Marsch 10.” It’s the first time recognizable vocals of any kind have ever showed up on a GAS album, and it’s easy to wonder what an album that incorporated more voices into the usual sampled stew might sound like. I think GAS still has places to go: I can picture a GAS album with 20- or 25-minute tracks, one that switches up the drums a bit, one that leans even further into Der Lange Marsch’s more inward approach and embraces the low-end murk of William Basinski or Akira Rabelais.
There’s one development, though, that has already made Der Lange Marsch the most divisive GAS album: the high-pitched beep on every other beat. Some listeners don’t notice it, others seem able to tune it out, and for many, it’s an impassable barrier to entry. Voigt used a similar frequency on Rausch, but only in short intervals. Here, it literally never lets up except during the brief bits at the beginning and end with no drums. Once you realize you’re going to have to learn to live with that beat, the album starts to earn its title: The Long March.
It seems like an odd artistic choice to throw such a jarring and potentially alienating sound over your career-spanning retrospective, especially considering that this is otherwise the sunniest and most euphonious of the three GAS albums Voigt has released since bringing the project back from hiatus in 2017. Voigt suffers from tinnitus, and it’s possible that he’s asking the listener to empathize with his condition. But is putting a beep over an otherwise perfectly enjoyable album the right way to go about it? If there’s a new GAS album to look forward to, it’s a fan edit that cuts that frequency right out.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The pop-rock superstars attempt a concept album about virtual reality that is almost perverse in its inability or unwillingness to develop its premise beyond the most basic and obvious elements.

Give Me the Future

The future Bastille imagine on their new album, Give Me the Future, dates at least as far back as 1951, when Ray Bradbury published his short story “The Veldt.” Among the first entrants in a rich vein of science fiction about the perils of virtual reality, it concerns a family whose children become so attached to a VR room in their house that they murder mom and dad when the parents attempt to tear them away. Seventy years—and many stories, novels, films, and television episodes—later, with Facebook investing billions in its “Reality Labs” metaverse division, the question of what happens when people start to like a simulated world better than the real thing is more urgent than ever. If an extremely popular band had anything new or interesting to say on the matter, now would be a good time to say it.
Readers of this website probably know Bastille’s slick synth-driven rock best via “Pompeii” and the Marshmello collaboration “Happier,” two songs you would almost certainly recognize, even if you couldn’t necessarily place where from, or who’s singing. To an outsider, they’re one of those hugely successful artists whose success seems to flow from machinations bigger and more mysterious than such petty concerns as, “Does anyone actually choose to listen to this stuff?” But singer and songwriter Dan Smith has more idiosyncratic ambitions than the caricature of the faceless yet hugely popular rock band suggests. Give Me the Future is a full-fledged concept album (not Bastille’s first, incidentally) with an elaborate backstory involving a fictitious company called Future Inc, whose products allow users to escape into virtual worlds limited only by their own imaginations.
Bastille clearly approached their subject matter with the right critiques in mind. In a promotional interview outlining the Future Inc concept, Smith talked about how tech companies advertise themselves with earnest appeals to humanity while making big money by harvesting personal data. And the shopworn nature of the concept isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker; as recently as 2016, the television series Black Mirror found a new angle on the simulated reality problem by drawing out the pathos of a relationship between two people living in computer-assisted bliss. There’s no reason Bastille shouldn’t be able to find their own spin on the story. But Give Me the Future is almost perverse in its inability or unwillingness to develop its premise beyond the most basic and obvious elements.
Drop the needle at any point in the album, and hear Smith’s proclamations that he is in the future, and he can do anything, and be anyone, and the simulation is like a dream, a dream that is good but perhaps so good that it’s also bad. The songs are virtually interchangeable.
Here’s the chorus to “Distorted Light Beam,” delivered over pumping drum machine and noir-disco synth: “When I’m dreaming tonight, I can do anything/When I’m dreaming tonight, I can go anywhere/When I’m dreaming tonight, I can be anyone.”
Here’s the chorus to “Back to the Future,” delivered over pumping drum machine and noir-disco guitar: “In the middle of the night, I can dream away/I can change what I like, and go back to the future again.”
Here’s the chorus of “Give Me the Future,” whose drum machine, to be fair, pumps a little more slowly than the other two: “Give me the future/It’s golden and bright/Catch a fever dream/In the flash of the lights.” If that one isn’t similar enough to the other two, don’t worry; Smith reminds us he can “be anything” in the song’s third line.
The arrangements are stuffed with ear candy: Giorgio Moroder-sequenced synths, Daft Punk vocoders, palm-muted guitars played with mechanistic precision—a sound that gestures at commonly accepted ideas of what the future might sound like, but is actually pretty old-fashioned in 2022. Everything is executed with the utmost professionalism, and there are a few undeniably big moments, like the way a cluttered mix clears out to almost nothing for the chorus of “Thelma+Louise,” or the sax solo of “Shut Off the Lights,” which wiggles like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. But on the whole, the sound is plagued with the same lack of specificity as the songs.
Smith seems to want every track to be a thesis statement, encompassing every theme and sound he has in mind for the album, and as a result, they all sound the same. His constant sloganeering and sci-fi references—there are namedrops in two separate songs for Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in addition to nods towards 1984 and Aldous Huxley—leave little room for the unpredictable texture of humanity. One conspicuous exception is “Promises,” an interlude featuring a spoken-word verse from Riz Ahmed. To my reading, he seems to rap from the perspective of a post-apocalyptic cad, professing his love for a former one-night stand now that she’s the only partner available: “Babe, you were just my best lay, and I never planned to hold hands/Until the whole of human history aligned so we could slow dance.” Kind of skeezy, but also kind of beautiful. Most importantly, it sounds like it came from the strange and flawed mind of an actual person, not a neural network trained on Twitter trending topics and Philip K. Dick titles.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Give Me the Future’s best song is “Shut Off the Lights,” the one with the most tenuous ties to the larger concept, sonically or lyrically. “Close off your hands around, hands around me/Grace-landing onto your bed, there you are,” Smith sings to a paramour in the first verse. Given the way the music sounds—jubilant, lighthearted, with perhaps a touch of South Africa in the backing vocals—it’s fairly safe to assume that the slightly awkward portmanteau is intended as a nod to Graceland, Paul Simon’s global fusion masterpiece, about as far away as possible from the neon-lit doom and gloom of the other songs. (Elsewhere, Smith also paraphrases the opening line from “The Sound of Silence,” for whatever that’s worth.) Unburdened with the need to deliver a message, and genuinely fun, “Shut Off the Lights” is everything the larger album is not. Smith, addressing his partner in a romance that might not last past the night, at one point urges “no talk about the future.” He manages to keep his promise, if only for the rest of the song.

Buy: Rough Trade


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 Alicia Keys’ outstanding 2001 debut, a self-produced, Chopin-inspired R&B album that blazed a unique path to mainstream superstardom.

Songs in A Minor

Alicia Keys had a near-complete version of her debut album, Songs in A Minor, in the summer of 1998 when her label, Columbia Records, decided she should go in a different direction. Yes, she was a classically trained pianist and the rare 17-year-old prodigy who sang, wrote, arranged, and produced her own music, but maybe she could play piano less and be more like, say, Christina Aguilera? Maybe she could lose a little weight and show some skin, too?
“They wanted me, the tomboy from Hell’s Kitchen, to become the next teen pop idol,” Keys wrote in her memoir. The label had already brought in big-name producers to strip away the retro-soul sound that separated artists like Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Maxwell, Jill Scott, and Keys from the stream of sex-driven R&B in the late-’90s. Keys found the recording process crushing and chose instead to partner with producer Kerry “Krucial” Brothers to create a dexterous blend of classical music and soul that merged young-adult melodrama with Beethoven. Columbia execs told her it sounded like one long demo.
The label was, of course, laughably wrong. Keys left Columbia in early 1999 to sign with Clive Davis at Arista Records and later his new label, J Records, where she could pilot her own vision. By November 2001, she had a No. 1 album and Rolling Stone had crowned her “The Next Queen of Soul.” By March 2002, she’d gone five-times platinum and won five Grammys, including Best New Artist and Song of the Year for her No. 1 hit “Fallin’.”
Songs in A Minor arrived amid the birth of iTunes and the sensual empowerment of Destiny’s Child. Britney Spears and JC Chasez’s boy band were on their third albums, and Usher was gaining momentum for 8701, about to crush pop music off rock-hard abs alone. Then came Keys with her self-produced, Chopin-inspired compositions about self-worth, survival, and practical pursuits of happiness. She sang of profound love and desire, emotional and career stability. But this was also a dark time. Songs in A Minor spent a third week atop the Billboard charts in the same week that Aaliyah’s self-titled album bowed at No. 2—just before the singer’s death and a month before 9/11. Keys found herself at the center of a pop landscape where she and India.Arie became the new ambassadors of neo-soul.
Keys’ accolades were much-deserved, but they were also rich with subtext. She was a biracial girl from New York who performed in crop tops and blazers and wore beads in her cornrows like Stevie Wonder. She subverted expectations of what a classical musician should look like in a genre associated with stately white composers in starchy suits. Keys played up the culture clash, often seeming to materialize on stage in leather Going Out tops, headscarves, and floor-length furs—and suddenly in front of a grand piano. On the intro of Songs in A Minor, “Piano & I,” she embraces her position as a star over an instrumental that builds from the operatic hum of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to jolting drums. “I didn’t know I was here,” she says. “Do you know my name?”
Before she legally changed it, she was Alicia Augello Cook, raised in Hell’s Kitchen by her mother, Terri Augello, a part-time actress and paralegal. Keys avoided publicly addressing her father’s absence in her life early on because she didn’t want to play into stereotypes about Black fathers—her mom is white, her dad Black. She discovered classical music when her kindergarten teacher introduced her to a piano. Keys became enchanted. At age 7, she began practicing the Suzuki Method and took up jazz at 14. Hip-hop, soul, and classical music all spoke to her. “Biggie and Marvin told me, write what you know; you don’t have to make it up, it’s right there,” she told Rolling Stone in 2001.
When Keys was 14, a vocal coach at the Harlem Police Athletic League’s community center introduced her to his brother, Jeff Robinson, who saw in her an artist who could comfortably embody Mary J. Blige and Mozart and became her manager. Keys was 16 when she dropped out of Columbia University, a few weeks into her freshman year, and moved to a studio in Rosedale, Queens, where she and Brothers built the bones of Songs in A Minor. In the interim, Keys raised her profile through compilations. In 1997, she placed the silky Badu-esque record “Dah Dee Dah (Sexy Thing)” on the Men in Black soundtrack and contributed “Little Drummer’s Girl” to Jermaine Dupri’s 12 Soulful Nights of Christmas.
Even after Clive Davis signed her, though—he’d launched J Records after being ousted from Arista—and after she completed Songs in A Minor, Keys struggled to find an audience for “Fallin’,” a Jackson 5-inspired ballad about a relationship that pivots drastically from despair to precarious bliss. Urban radio didn’t get the vibe. Keys was the type of performer you had to witness in person. Davis pulled his Ace of Spades and sent a letter, along with a demo video of Keys on the piano, to a media figure known for making cultural entities out of hidden talent and who happened to have a talk show with millions of viewers. In June 2001, Keys stood next to Oprah in a tuxedo jacket with pink satin penguin wings and made her nationally televised debut on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
“Fallin’” is the type of ballad so robust it feels spiritual. Keys swings from a swelling falsetto (“How do you give me so much pleasure,” she begins) to a hoarse alto (“And cause me so much pain,” she exhales), expressing shades of fatigue in each line. She told Rolling Stone she “thought it’d be so ill for someone really young to sing a crazy deep song that you’d be like, ‘How does that person know what that feels like?’” She got the idea for the music video—which follows her on the way to visit a boyfriend in prison—from an article in F.E.D.S. magazine about a woman named Santra Rucker who received 13 consecutive life sentences. The record became so ubiquitous, it prompted Simon Cowell to later playfully ban contestants from singing and ruining it on American Idol, the sign of a song becoming an undeniable piece of the pop canon.
Her follow-up hit, “A Woman’s Worth”—a feminist anthem inspired, in earnest, by the L’Oreal slogan, “Because you’re worth it”—is Keys’ “Respect” for a budding digital generation. It’s not as bombastic as Aretha’s masterpiece, of course, but it pulls off the difficult task of turning message music into sultry pop goodness. The video opens with a shot of Keys walking down a sidewalk in full 2000s regalia—hip-huggers and a bomber jacket—pulling a young boy aside to school him on the meaning of chivalry.
At the heart of the album is a teenager exploring emotions. Keys wrote “Butterflyz” at 14 and “Troubles,” when she was 17, but her youth shows more in songwriting than in vocals or arrangements. On “Butterflyz,” she describes the sweet ascent into love with childlike brevity: “Joy is what you bring/I wanna give you everything.” Reading the lyrics on paper undersells the song’s tangible charm. In sequence, the track transitions smoothly into the wounded refrains of “Why Do I Feel So Sad,” a clear-eyed meditation on the familiarity of heartbreak. But Keys is at her most captivating lyrically on “Rock wit U,” a whirlwind of strings and flute dashes performed by Isaac Hayes and paired with a pompous bass that makes it perfect for the soundtrack of Shaft. (The song did appear on the soundtrack for the 2000 sequel.) “There’s no escape from the spell you have placed/Leaving my heart and my mind,” Keys sings in a hauntingly low tone. “Foolish am I if I was to try/To ever leave you behind.”
Over 16 tracks, Keys’ voice cracks beautifully and curls into tender, sometimes sanctified moans, her vocals neither straining nor very robust but rather incredibly persuasive. In a 2001 review, Mark Anthony Neal describes her vocal quality using a quote from singer Abbey Lincoln in Farah Jasmine Griffin’s book If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. “She didn’t try to sound good or anything, she didn’t try to prove that she was a great singer,” Lincoln said of Holiday. “[But] she never made one sound that was insincere.” This profound sincerity saves Songs in A Minor from slipping into maudlin territory, yet the album’s most melancholy parts leave me wishing for more moments like “Mr. Man,” featuring the euphonious tones of Jimmy Cozier over swirling strings. The two sound as if they’re literally waltzing as they sing. Keys’ cover of the less widespread Prince record “How Come You Don’t Call Me” (née “How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore”) honors the original’s seductive funk while adding crescendoed moans and wails at the end: “Why must ya torture me,” she sings as the track fades into “Fallin’.”
The album’s most dated tracks are the ones whose concepts seem to mirror the scandalous club records of the 2000s, like Blu Cantrell’s “Hit Em Up Style (Oops!).” In this case, it’s “Jane Doe,” where Keys gets territorial with another woman, and “Girlfriend,” a throbbing, New Jack Swing number about irrational jealousy. Both times, Keys’ heartfelt enthusiasm and bravado on the piano make the records more compelling and unique than they should be. She practices more vocal restraint on this album than she does on some of her later records (“Superwoman,” “Girl on Fire”) that feel as if she pulled them from a grab bag labeled “Empowerment Anthems.”
Keys’ second and third albums, The Diary of Alicia Keys and As I Am, fine-tune the classical blueprint of Songs in A Minor into elegant throwback soul. Her best songs—“Wreckless Love,” “Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart”—find subtle ways to pair her shameless idealism with real urgency. Sometimes she overdoes it, but not here.
The summer before college, I listened to “Troubles” in pensive reflection while sobbing into a book of bad poems. Alone on my basement futon, I wondered the same thing as Keys did: “Why does it feel that my mind is constantly trying to pull me down?” (No answer.) And “How long will I feel so out of place?” (Forever, it’s OK.) On the shiny gospel soul of “Lovin U,” Keys both embraces and frets over the promise of committed love, above saintly organs. “If I gave you forever/Would you take care of me?” she asks a hopeful life partner. As ever, she’s posing life’s eternally simple rhetorical questions.

Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here.


The singer and composer’s wondrous fourth album deepens the sound of her boundless folk-jazz style. Its gestures are bold, romantic, and often unforgettable.

Night Reign

It isn’t easy to say something new with “Autumn Leaves.” The 1945 torch song is surely one of the most performed standards in the jazz repertoire, not only by the likes of Miles Davis and Nat King Cole, but also by the beginners taking lessons in the back rooms of your local store music store: sitting down at a piano to play its wistful minor-key melody is a bit like the jazz version of picking up an electric guitar and going straight for “Smoke on the Water.” Putting your rendition on a new album in 2024 is either a conservative move or a bold one. For Arooj Aftab, the Brooklyn-via-Lahore singer and composer who moves freely between jazz, folk, and Hindustani and Western classical music, it is decidedly the latter.
Aftab’s “Autumn Leaves” comes early on Night Reign, her fourth solo album, and renders it as a ghostly incantation. Metallic percussion clatters in the background. Linda May Han Oh’s upright bass lines follow Aftab’s vocal like an elongated shadow follows the protagonist of a noir film. Without a chordal instrument to support it, the familiar tune becomes skeletal and spooky; Aftab’s chromatic embellishments make it spookier. Her take on “Autumn Leaves” is emblematic of the way she works: drawing from tradition while at the same time estranging it, stripping away clichés and stock devices to reveal the mysterious longing that gives the old poems and songs their lasting power.
Two of Night Reign’s songs take their words from Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, the 18th-century poet who was the first woman to publish a collection of work in Urdu. Other lyrics are Aftab originals, in both English and Urdu. Still another is based on an offhanded poem that the singer’s friend, the Pakistani actress Yasra Rizvi, posted to Instagram. Aftab unites her source material’s mix of the centuries-old and the ephemeral with her wondrous voice, sometimes soaring but just as potent in its husky lower register. And with her compositions, which patiently gather and dissolve, favoring long arcs of development over sudden dynamic shifts. Though Night Reign has plenty of distinct zones—grungy bass guitar takes the lead on “Bolo Na”; Auto-Tune drapes Aftab’s voice on “Raat Ki Rani”—as a whole it can have the feeling of a single sweeping piece of music.
Aftab, who produces her albums herself, deserves as much credit for her composing and arranging as she does for her singing. Night Reign’s palette is similar to Vulture Prince, her 2021 breakout album, and features many of the same players along with a few new ones: harpist Maeve Gilchrist, whose instrument is second only to Aftab’s singing as the signature sound of her music; Aftab’s Love in Exile bandmates, jazz piano star Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily; guitarists Kaki King and Gyan Riley; flautist Cautious Clay; percussionist Jamey Haddad; an unlikely Wurlitzer cameo from Elvis Costello. Their instruments drift like a breeze of dandelion seeds, in the same general direction but with independent and unpredictable paths between one point and another. Even Moor Mother, whose stentorian spoken-word is one of the most distinctive sounds in left-of-center music, becomes just another element of the melange when she arrives to deliver a guest verse on “Bolo Na,” the percussive edges of her delivery swept up in the song’s half-time rhythmic churn.
Though actual percussion remains sparse, Night Reign grooves harder than its predecessor, which featured almost no drums. Even when the rhythm instruments sit back, there’s almost always a sense of an insistent pulse, an effect that’s especially pronounced on opener “Aey Nehin”: an acoustic guitar carries it, then a harp, then some hand percussion—all sharing the responsibility for keeping up momentum, tossing it back and forth, and dancing a little more freely when it’s someone else’s turn to hold it down. (Whether or not he’s a direct influence on Aftab, Gyan Riley’s father Terry, the master minimalist composer, sometimes comes to mind in moments like these.) On “Last Night Reprise,” a setting of an English translation of a poem by Rumi, Petros Klampanis’ bass is the lone pace-keeper, pressing on with a simple ostinato as the rest of the players wander into clamorous free improv during the instrumental middle section. They cohere again behind Aftab when she returns to the mic for the thrilling finale. “Last night my beloved was like the moon,” she sings, alternating between heroic long tones and frantic rushes of syllables. “So beautiful like the moon.”
Vulture Prince, which Aftab recorded in the aftermath of her younger brother’s death, is an album haunted by grief. Night Reign is less tethered to a single theme: Aftab originally conceived it as a collection of settings of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda’s work, then abandoned the idea when it began to feel constrictive. But if there’s one situation or emotion that persists across its songs—even “Autumn Leaves”—it is loving someone who isn’t there. It’s in the words, whether adapted from 18th-century poetry or an Instagram post, and in the mixture of tenderness and tough resolve that characterizes Aftab’s singing. It’s also in the music itself, in the vaporous way the instruments hover around some unspoken center, drawing as much attention to the negative space as the sound, and in the pulse that seems to keep going even when you can’t actually hear it. Almost anyone can relate to the feeling Night Reign renders in sound: the object of your affection may be gone, but the memories and desire that linger on are just as real.


Fusing bookish indie jazz with emo and math rock, the Boston quartet explores the complications of identity while dismantling stale indie-rock paradigms.

Really From

If deciphering self is the ethos driving Really From, the band’s main objective is amour-propre. The group’s name, the result of a restructuring in 2018, is derived from a question often aimed at its mixed-race members: “Where are you really from?” On the Boston emo/math-rock quartet’s exuberant third album, this invasive inquiry is ambitiously dissected at every turn. “If you ask me where I’m from/I’ll say the rage, the lights, the sea,” co-lead singer and guitarist Chris Lee-Rodriguez yowls on the anthemic chorus of “I’m From Here,” the album’s thorny crux. It’s a catharsis that carries an electric charge. Really From is self-titled, and with good reason: It’s a bursting still life of a band boasting an emboldened sense of identity.
The group took a stab at such weighty ideals in 2017 with the unpolished Verse, but their first release in four years wields a presence and confidence cultivated from time spent ruminating on more significant questions. “Mom and Dad/They told me separately/They come from different parts/So what does that make me,” Lee-Rodriguez broods on the album’s candid acoustic closer, “The House.” It’s just one instance of pensive curiosity in an album that’s consistently probing. Elsewhere, some of the more archetypal math-rock songs, like the spirited “Quirk,” bravely detail the clumsy, often ugly path to self-actualization and acceptance, particularly when pertaining to bloodlines. Its frantic, odd-metered shuffle accents such inelegance.
Declarations of cultural insecurity run throughout the album. “I smile like I understand/But my mind reminds me I can’t,” vocalist and synth bassist Michi Tassey sings on “Try Lingual,” which documents the struggle of communicating with a family member in a foreign language, before a romping salvo of palm-muted riffage ramps up the song’s frustrated message. Such moments of raw power flesh out the picture of a band raised from the mid-aughts school of post-rock mathdom.
This heterogeneity is unbound. Tassey’s cool, wry delivery on the crunchy intro of “Yellow Fever” reads more Mitski than TWIABP; the exploratory “Apartment Song,” the album’s jazzy, ethereal opener, leans more Kamasi Washington than American Football. Songs like these accent an assertive truth: Really From aren’t afraid to garnish a genre predicated on gatekeepers and semantics with more interesting flavors. On “Last Kneeplay,” the album’s sole instrumental track, classical guitar and trumpet squirm in a playful exchange. The band unfolds layers like these, sporadic as they are, honestly and without hesitation.
Behind their union of bookish indie jazz and principled punk, Really From are an alliance in which every voice counts, as highlighted on “I Live Here Now,” the album’s most Midwestern emo emulation. Its leadership isn’t beholden to the person singing each verse or chorus, whether that be Lee-Rodriguez or Tassey. Matt Hull takes a calculated, regal trumpet lead when the music veers into an oddly timed phrase, while Sander Bryce’s unbridled drumming is crammed with flourishes and freakish chops. In the kinetic turbulence of clean-toned guitar arpeggios and zippy flams, the chaos feels somehow blissful, even beautiful, as they systematically dismantle post-rock’s white-guy paradigm.
Dig into Boston’s dense underground circuits of math rock and emo revivalism over the last 20 years and you’ll find a lot of bands with bleeding hearts. But not many are so willing to untangle such complex subject matter with such earnest interest. What demarcates Really From from the rest is the ability to self-examine their unique cultural and musical idiosyncrasies with the intention of transcending diffidence. Really From emulsifies the grief and the peace of it all, the inheritance and its friction, the antipathy and its resolution; from within these blurred lines, they’re reborn.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The soundtrack to the Shaka King-directed film, featuring heavyweights like JAY-Z and Nas alongside newer stars like Polo G and Pooh Shiesty, exploits Hampton’s image to peddle liberation-lite Billboard hits.

Various Artists: Judas and the Black Messiah: The Inspired Album

Fred Hampton was a galvanizing, historic figure. Even through weathered footage, choppily pieced together on YouTube, the Black Panther Party leader’s unyielding flame is present and palpable. Take this clip, for example. In lighting that nearly renders him a shadow and muddy audio, his words sometimes come out so fast that they roll into each other like an avalanche. But by the end it’s impossible not to feel moved to act in service of the people. You may not even know who “the people” are, but after listening to the former Illinois chapter chairman, you certainly want to find out.
Though the Black Panther Party officially dissolved in 1982, their cultural influence has shown up consistently in the years since, particularly in hip-hop. Thanks to Beyonce’s black leather and beret at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show, the Panthers reached new levels of visibility. Her performance, while commanding, did little to transmit the actual politics of the revolutionary group. Prior to this a number of films, documentaries and YouTube clips have filled in the contextual gap that music and outfits couldn’t bridge, but major crossover appeal for the Panthers’ ideology has remained elusive.
Director Shaka King’s latest film, Judas and The Black Messiah, aims to find a balance between appealing to the mainstream and representing the party’s radical ideals. The film centers around the FBI’s plot to weaken and ultimately kill Hampton in Chicago. Told through the dueling lenses of Hampton and Bill O’Neal, the informant recruited by the federal agency to infiltrate the Chicago chapter, the film intentionally reads more as a crime drama than a portrait of Hampton. In a recent interview with the Atlantic, director King frankly stated, “If you don’t give a fuck about the Black Panthers, or any history, you could still be like, ‘I kind of want to see that, though. Because I like The Departed.’ This is an incredibly commercial movie.”
It seems the same approach was taken with the film’s “inspired by” soundtrack (none of the songs are actually in the film), which boasts a who’s-who of hip-hop and R&B’s brightest stars. With superproducer Hit-Boy and executives Dash Sherrod, Ryan Coogler, and Archie Davis at the helm, old heads like JAY-Z and Nas stand alongside current heavyweights like Lil Durk and H.E.R. and more recent breakthrough artists like, Polo G and Pooh Shiesty. As an exercise in commercial appeal, the A&R is masterful. Hampton’s hometown of Chicago is represented through its most popular figures, while bigger names and hip-hop holy grails (a verse from the late Nipsey Hussle, a whole new Rakim track) could guarantee the album’s success.
But as a tribute to Hampton, the album, like the film, misses the mark. Hampton was a staunch anti-capitalist who took inspiration from Marx, Lenin, Che and Mao. He was someone who had no qualms tearing down Black capitalists and reaching across the color lines to unite all working class people. It’s hard to believe that the bulk of the project was inspired by anything that Hampton said. Instead, it exploits his image to peddle liberation-lite Billboard hits over anything remotely revolutionary.
It’s not all terrible. The most memorable track, out of a whopping 22, comes from relative unknown Nardo Wick. The young rapper’s stark delivery—reminiscent of 21 Savage—on “I Declare War” most closely mirrors Hampton’s fearlessness. Chicago rap stars G Herbo, Bump J and Polo G rail earnestly against police brutality, racism, and the violence and poverty that plagues their hometown. On “No Profanity,” Gucci Mane signee Pooh Shiesty makes decent use of a beat that samples Hampton’s voice in a marathon verse that compellingly considers an increasing threat of betrayal. Rakim’s bonus track lovingly recounts the facts of Hampton’s life, although the cloudy quality of his vocals are distracting.
Elsewhere, would-be standout moments from Rapsody, Lil Durk, Smino, Saba, and H.E.R. languish under sleepy production and poor sequencing. Black Thought provides some capital-R raps on the wannabe protest anthem, “Welcome To America,” featuring singers C.S. Armstrong and Angela Hunte. But the song’s obvious engineering—marching drums and a churchy vocal sample—make it feel formulaic and empty. Cozy love songs courtesy of BJ the Chicago Kid and SiR play to both artists’ strengths but feel disconnected from the album’s supposed theme and the film’s minor love story.
There are quite a few moments that scan more like an ego trip for hip-hop’s biggest names, who seem happy to latch onto Hampton’s image while failing to reflect his working-class first views. Yes, it’s refreshing to hear Nas call out the suspicious surveillance tactics of big tech on “EPMD.” Similarly on “What It Feels Like,” JAY-Z’s acerbic bars on the Capitol Riot are jolting. But they soon lose credibility when backed up by tired motifs of opulence and braggadocio from the former’s “condos in different time zones” to the latter claiming himself as a “black messiah” despite his open embrace of capitalism. A newly released Nipsey verse might’ve saved “What It Feels Like” were it not eight years old and obviously unrelated to the project. With “Broad Day,” it’s unclear if Hit-Boy even watched the film. The song centers around a clumsy hook where even he confirms he should stick to producing (“I should A&R the game, pick you niggas beats”). Dom Kennedy and A$AP Rocky seemed to have also missed the pre-screening as one confusingly offers his own unrelated personal reflections over blissed out G-Funk and the other distastefully whines about the downsides of fame and feeling overlooked. With lackluster lines like “How they got 20/20 vision but don’t see a nigga vision till 2020,” Rocky is not making a strong case for himself.
Radical politics is not within the purview of Hollywood, and the film made that abundantly clear by focusing more on the story of the informant than that of Fred Hampton. But soundtracks, though not a perfect medium, are often opportunities to address the shortcomings of a film. This soundtrack could’ve featured the same exact cast but held everyone to task lyrically. It could have attempted to reflect Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition by inviting lesser-known Latinx or Indigenous artists. It could have taken greater risks with production and style—Noname and Kendrick Lamar are notably absent—to reach closer to Hampton’s revolutionary ideas. Instead it remains in a lukewarm present, with no consideration of what a revolutionary future could look like. In an undated speech printed in the New York Times in 1971 Hampton declared, “If you ain’t gonna do no revolutionary act, forget about me. I don’t want myself on your mind if you’re not gonna work for the people.” We can only hope that whoever undertakes the next Hampton-inspired project will take those words to heart.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.