The interwoven guitars, synths, and cymbal crashes of Amy Klein’s second solo album are gale-force, but its opaque lyrics and muted vocals are indirect and timid.

Winter/Time

A “paracosm”—the literary term Amy Klein has said inspired her second solo album, Winter/Time—is an elaborate world of people and places formed in a child’s imagination. Klein, a punk veteran who’s toured with Titus Andronicus and performed as half of the band Hilly Eye, invites the listener into her own such fantasies on this record, offering dream logic and the occasional bewilderment. It can also feel like an escape from what she’s done so well before, its few instances of punk brashness ceding to soft, falsetto balladry.
Winter/Time’s cover art—an ethereal woman striding through a blurry, painted forest—suggests the LP’s tone and its motif of a hero’s journey. The album strikes a delicate balance throughout: Its interwoven guitars, synths, and cymbal crashes are gale-force, but its opaque lyrics and muted vocals are indirect and timid. “Come to You” begins soft and hesitant before revealing a percolating synth line, and Klein’s lyrics remain hardly discernible throughout, deployed in a near-whispered quaver that fails to suggest any emotional stakes. She sings of being chased by her past, but there’s no menace in that pursuit. On “Winter,” the opening rumble of electric chords and Cocteau Twins-style trills signal intensity, but even the crackling guitars—deep and dark like a storm front—don’t push Klein’s delivery above a shrug. “Can I see the light?” she wonders, not convincing us that she’s been on a shrouded path of any real consequence.
The album doesn’t stray from this vagueness with the exception of opener “Nothing,” the only track that finds Klein believably ferocious. Driving electric guitar jolts behind her as she wails, breathy and doused in reverb, about a snow-blindness so bright she nearly disappears within it. This urgency sets the song apart from the rest of the album; it sounds more like a psychedelic Dungeons and Dragons battle than the tentative questing heroine of later tracks. This directness—from the chorus’ imperative to the impatient guitars, their feedback underscoring urgency—serves Klein’s fevered electric riffs well.
Closer “One More Time” mirrors the savagery of “Nothing,” and is another glimpse at what Winter/Time might have been if its midsection had similar adrenaline. It offers a confident, backward glance at a former self whose “hands used to shake,” and it hums along like a ’80s radio punk anthem, synthesizers underscoring elemental mentions of fire and sparks. “I could burn right through you,” she vows, with compelling force. This is when Klein wields her axe like she’s ready for battle, a welcome departure from several songs less sure in their step. But what exactly is she fighting? Who is the “you” through whom she would blaze, triumphant? It’s frustratingly unclear. A fantasy world needs scaffolding, constraints that center us in time and place, to make it relatable. Without a glimpse of the horizon, we’re left snow-blind, too.


Wiz Khalifa smokes weed by the acre, but his career to date has been driven by his own shrewd vision for himself. O.N.I.F.C., his second major label album, is the first sign that this unwavering focus may be getting swallowed up by the haze.

O.N.I.F.C.

Wiz Khalifa smokes weed by the acre, but his career thus far has been driven by his own shrewd vision for himself. He is not a rapper's rapper, but he helped push rap into its current fixation with doing drugs instead of selling them and has rightfully reaped the rewards of an entire genre following his lead. He also became a pop star with ease in 2010, sliding into the studio with pop titans like Stargate and Benny Blanco and emerging with a No. 1 single ("Black and Yellow") that was a pure rap banger and another pop smash ("Roll Up") that applied his airy, breezy aesthetic to the radio. O.N.I.F.C., his second major label album, is a resounding misstep, and it's the first sign that Khalifa's unwavering focus may be getting swallowed up by the haze.
Or maybe he couldn't bring himself to care about the fragile nature of crossover success any longer. O.N.I.F.C. will quickly be swept under the rug by anyone but his true diehards, yet Khalifa still had a successful year by displaying his malleability. His Taylor Allderdice mixtape from March was a nice stopgap release, steeped in the same foggy, washed out beats that helped elevate him to fame. Cabin Fever 2, from October, saw Khalifa dipping into L.A.'s ratchet scene to show just how much artists like Iamsu! owe to his own mix of nonsense rapping and soft, blissed-out singing. Both mixtapes were right in his lane, and they predicted the direction Khalifa would take with the album proper.
Khalifa has already more or less disowned his debut, telling his fans that "creatively [it] wasn't my best work." That regret is evident on O.N.I.F.C. which tosses a Blanco produced single to the dogs but then retracts further into his vaporized aesthetic. The album kicks off with a suite of tracks that are meant to wash over you, and they are undoubtedly effective-- "Paperbond" is steeped in the comforting draft of chillwave while "Bluffin'", produced by Drumma Boy no less, borders on balearic. The problem, though, is that both songs would work best as zone-out instrumentals. Khalifa doesn't say anything of note-- "riding in my ride" is crushingly emblematic -- and doesn't sound particular good from a technical standpoint. He is there because he has to be, not because he should be.
Everything from there on is just an unending succession of diminishing returns that questions the relevancy of Khalifa's artistic existence. He could-- and just may-- pump music out for the indefinite future that coasts on sound design and little else. Wiz has never exactly spit quotable 16s but his rapping on O.N.I.F.C. suggests ignorance regarding his own distance instead of a conscious desire to roll with the vibes. The album's acronym stands for "Only Nigga in First Class" and sports a dour looking photo of Khalifa on the cover, but it's difficult to find any significance in either-- he hints at fatigue, but doesn't illuminate the flipside of stardom in any way.
Maybe the album's most indicative track is "No Limit", which is nearly nine and a half minutes long thanks to a three-minute instrumental interlude. It sounds pointless except that the interlude is easily the most enjoyable moment of the record. After a verse from Wiz, the song slips into beachside ambience, ice-rattle drums, and plaintive pianos. It is legitimately as good as anything Air France ever did. Then Wiz starts rapping again.


The nine tracks on the Dodos' sixth album Individ make for a exhilarating, albeit fairly melancholy, listening experience. Individ plays like a companion piece to the band's 2008 breakthrough Visiter.

Individ

Progress can be a hard thing to quantify. For bands, it’s often either measured by record sales, critical acclaim, or—as is the case with San Francisco band the Dodos—simple endurance. The twosome of Meric Long and Logan Kroeber have been making music together for the better part of a decade and by now they have honed their own distinct language. The records they make together as the Dodos are generally characterized by a kind of symbiotic back and forth—a balance composed of virtuoso playing, alternately-tuned guitar sounds, and insanely intricate drum patterns. That they have managed to create a sound that is instantly and distinctly recognizable as their own (and amass a devoted following) is no small feat, but figuring out how to push their sound forward without repeating themselves or abandoning their aesthetic has proven to be much trickier business.
After tinkering with their sound in a variety of ways over the past few years—employing additional musicians, sprinkling on layers of electric vibraphone, eschewing acoustic guitars for electric ones, sanding off the rough edges by hiring Phil Ek as a producer—the band seems to have come full-circle on Individ, their sixth album. Rather than look outside themselves, the duo rely instead on what has always been their greatest weapon—the sheer physicality of their playing.
Recorded hot on the heels of the sessions for 2013’s Carrier—an album seemingly haunted by the death of occasional contributing guitarist Christopher Reimer—Individ plays like a companion piece to the band's breakthrough Visiter. "Until now there was a reason/ Let go of it," Long sings on album opener "Precipitation". The song—a shape-shifting acoustic-and-drums affair—serves as a kind of primer for the rest of the album. What seems like a simple bit of repetition and melody grows increasingly more forceful before exploding into a stadium-size loop of riffs and pounding drums. "Let go of it/ And get out of here/ Let’s get out of here/ For good" sings Long in what seems less like a concession of defeat and more a statement of liberation. As album openers go, it’s a doozy—six minutes of triumphantly shaking off a lot of old baggage. "We’ll keep playing/ Till there is nothing," he promises elsewhere on "The Tide", further establishing what could be Individ’s most prevalent and endearing theme—a sense of acceptance paired with dogged resilience.
The Dodos began their career as avowed primitivists before eventually experimenting with ways to broaden their sound. Longtime fans of the band will appreciate Individ’s back-to-basics quality, which generally forgoes electric guitars in favor of Long’s maniacal strumming and dexterous, breakneck time changes. "Competition", the record’s first single, showcases the band at their most deceptively simple: dueling guitar lines playing against a staccato rhythm, all being tugged along by Long’s effortless vocal. In this case, the band’s reaction against perfection is what makes most of Individ so sublime. Both Long and Kroeber are virtuoso musicians, and while Long’s vocals rarely ever strain to be anything more than pleasantly plaintive, hearing he and Kroeber push themselves to the point of raggedness as musicians is what continues to make the Dodos’ music such a surprising and singular listen.
Clocking in at almost 40 minutes, the nine tracks on Individ make for an exhilarating, albeit fairly melancholy, listening experience. While the duo has not lost their youthful exuberance as players (listening to Long and Kroeber rip through "Retriever" is a potent reminder of what a thrillingly visceral band the Dodos actually are), Individ seems mostly wrapped up with very adult concerns. And while the band might never better the pop jubilance of Visiter’s "Fools", tracks like "The Tide" and the perfectly wistful "Bubble" come mighty close. On Individ’s closing track, the sprawling, seven-minute "Pattern Shadow", Long intones that "I cannot predict/ All your patterns/ You blew us away/ And I could not escape." It's unclear exactly to whom he is singing, but the shadow at the core of the song—mysterious, ever-present, ocean-sized—could be a fitting stand in for the band itself and the epic, mercurial nature of their songs. In the record’s press materials, Long explains, "This record is about accepting what is natural for you or even a part of you." Ten years deep into their career, the Dodos have never actually steered too far from their roots, but the loose, unselfconscious feel of Individ proves that there is something to be said for recognizing and playing to your strengths, trusting your chops, and simply feeling things as intensely as you possibly can.


On his bracing collaboration with L.A. producer Kenny Segal, woods gets painfully real about his fears, his doubts and irritations, and even his mortality.

billy woods / Kenny Segal: Hiding Places

Hiding Places

As a rapper, billy woods writes about everything: The agony of romantic distress, the fear of retreading the past, the unpleasantness of talking to others. Within the first few minutes of Hiding Places, his new album with L.A. producer Kenny Segal, he ponders the financial permanence of a full-time rap career (“Quit my job to kick raps instead/So family meeting everybody gotta start bringing in bread”) and “five-dollar calls from the corner store.” Then there’s this from “houthi”: “Cut my shadow off with a dull knife/Whispered in its ear then sent it off into the night.” And on “spider hole,” woods telegraphs his disdain for humans in general (“No man of the people, I wouldn’t be caught dead with most of y’all”) and remembers a certain Queensbridge rapper's suit-and-tie gig at a famed midtown Manhattan venue in 2012: “I don’t wanna go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall.” That’s the hook.
It’s an odd choice, even awkward, but billy woods is fine if you are uncomfortable. Hiding Places lingers on discomfort as a form of catharsis: You feel it in the jarring cover art, which captures a condemned three-story home—all twisted and lopsided—on the verge of collapse, and in woods’ one-of-a-kind voice, a gruff yowl that conveys suffering and outrage in equal measure. The beats, provided by Kenny Segal, paint a tense and foreboding backdrop. Compared with Paraffin, woods’ New York-inflected 2018 album with Armand Hammer, Hiding Places feels positively haunted.
For the past 20 years, Segal has been a staple of an L.A.-based workshop called Project Blowed, home to the city’s alternative hip-hop scene, which includes artists like Aceyalone, Busdriver, and even film director Ava DuVernay in their orbit. Segal has compiled a robust collection of instrumental albums, including a recent set called happy little trees, the title of which was inspired by painter Bob Ross. Segal’s solo work is brighter and more pastoral; for Hiding Places, he darkens the canvas to match billy woods’ mix of bleakness and humor, two weapons uses to bemoan the bad ol’ days he once endured. Songs unfold like diary entries, and on “bigfakelaugh,” woods shrugs at death with a nonchalant fuck-it-all attitude. “I got a letter from my insurer the other day,” he recalls, “opened and read it, said the treatment wasn’t covered, turned to the family like ‘I guess just forget it.’”
In a way, Hiding Places plays like a complement to early-00s underground New York rap, and sits alongside early Definitive Jux records. There’s an edginess to the record, similar to Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, a feeling that the rapper will either self-destruct or nuke everything in his wake. In woods’ world, where Brooklyn dies slowly because of gentrification, and golden-age rap keeps losing to glossier, pop-focused hybrids, there’s a feeling that the old ways are fading out and his environment looks more and more foreign. Ultimately, Hiding Places is woods trying to reconcile his own history in the most direct way imaginable. Never has he been so honest about himself, his fears, and his own mortality.


Ought’s third album straightens out their sound, offering a more refined new wave palette underneath their singular and compelling lyrical style.

Room Inside the World

The best songs from Montreal post-punk band Ought contain the rapture of humble truths you might chance upon while spacing out on the subway, staring at the stars, or communing with a cup of coffee. “I am no longer afraid to die because that is all that I have left,” singer Tim Darcy posited on their 2015 album Sun Coming Down, which was a fun way of saying “I am alive.” Ought’s feverish, live-wire sound said that, too. Since their 2014 debut More Than Any Other Day, they have sprawled with groove, life-force, and oceanic poeticism. The music was convincing because it felt scrappily human and Darcy could utter knotted word clusters about civilization or milk with a flair that somehow mimicked Mark E. Smith and also felt comforting. The band seemed to suggest, with a rare spark and radiant positivity, Mundanity can be a marvel. You will find the light at the end of the tunnel. Everything will be OK.
Ought’s third album, Room Inside the World, straightens out their sound. It offers a more refined and sophisticated new wave palette, redolent of the 1980s to an extreme, and it finds Darcy really singing—about isolation, tentative feelings, self-possession and lack thereof. Most of the record is cast in a newly muted and noirish hue with flourishes of vibraphone, sax, and clarinet. (The band has noted the influence of avant-garde film icon Kenneth Anger—the man who “tipped off the Rolling Stones to the joys of the devil.”) In its more compelling moments, Room Inside the World sounds like a young Scott Walker fronting the Gang of Four, a mix of grandeur and angular tension.
The album finds Ought making considerable changes, then, if not taking many risks. On “These 3 Things,” the singer preens in the glammy way you’d expect from a guy who legally changed his name to Darcy, while the droning closer, “Alice,” is named for cosmic jazz swamini Alice Coltrane. The best Room Inside the World songs still retain some post-punk fragmentation. One of the album’s most compelling moments occurs when “Disaffectation” methodically breaks apart after building itself into a deep trance, as Darcy sings of “some liberation” that “you can order [...] online.” “Take Everything” fares better when it moves away from swirling psychedelia and towards lovely, threadbare balladeering, with images of dreaming and “the soul’s indecision.” “When the feel of a flower/Keeps you home for an hour/Throw it away,” Darcy sings, a curious and charming bit of verse.
Ought first ignited their sound with what they once called the “revolutionary spirit of radicalism and adventure” that they witnessed at the massive Quebec student protests in 2012, and their songs pushed back with subtle comments on patriarchy, gentrification, and consent. Bits of Room Inside the World also have discernible political undertones or social critiques. The gentle “Brief Shield” flips gender scripts and comments on toxic masculinity. But where the title “Disgraced in America” seems like a bold gesture, any form of dissent therein is fairly oblique. At times, the album lends itself to superfluous jamming, and it can feel overwrought and opaque. Given Ought’s radical inklings, you wish they dared to make these lovely songs say or do something a little more righteous, to twist them into more adventurous shapes.
However, Ought achieve this spectacularly on the blue-eyed soul of “Desire.” It towers over Room Inside the World like the album’s lighthouse. It begins wide-open, all wonder and shimmering drone, before Darcy unspools an exquisitely vulnerable Boss-style narrative about someone that left. A former lover is “the moon in a basket of weeds.” Two imagined characters drive through the night smiling. They escape a “petty little town.” It is a moment of romance and joy at a dead-end. “Desire was never gonna stay,” Darcy repeats like a mantra, scaling new reaches of passion and resolve with each turn, as if he were reckoning old feelings right as he recorded. A 70-piece choir eventually joins him—and when they come in, the song’s architecture feels stitched to the sky.
“Desire” taps into a universal energy of persistence through life’s endless inquisition. It is at once the simplest and most ornate song Ought have done, but it feels in keeping with their essence. The power of Ought, and of many great artists, is an uncommon X-ray vision: to see things as they really are.


The sizable talent and personalities of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus come together for a harmonious, confrontational, and all too brief EP.

Boygenius EP

In May, Richmond-based indie rock songwriter Lucy Dacus, fresh off the release of her second album, Historian, told Vogue that she, like all of us, was fatigued by the catchall genre of “women in indie rock.” “I think it’s great that people are noticing that their favorite music right now is made by women, but I just wish it wasn’t a surprise,” she explained. “The fact that we’re women is kind of the most boring that I could think of.” People were often comparing her music to that of other women singer-songwriters, including emo-tinged Tennessean and Dacus’ labelmate Julien Baker, not because their music was all that similar but simply because they were all women.
In a delightful twist on this binary categorizing, Dacus, Baker, and folk-rock songwriter Phoebe Bridgers announced in August that they’d made an EP under the name boygenius, a nod to the way we can carelessly lean on gender to telegraph meaning. A boy can be an individual genius, while women in indie rock are all the same. In advance of a tour they had coming up together, the trio of indie titans decided to record a 7" as a supergroup, and the result briefly winks at, then pulverizes the reductive labels we heap onto women musicians. With compatible interests but varied styles, the self-titled six-song EP is a blueprint for how to do a supergroup right: elevate each other’s individual talents, seamlessly blend your distinct-but-simpatico genres, and sing like hell together in lung-shattering harmony.
While the trio’s previous solo albums crossover frequently in lyrical themes, boygenius succeeds because their individual work doesn’t share one unified musical genre. Self-worth, the underlying humiliation in heartache, and confronting grief are all present in Bridgers’, Dacus’, and Baker’s songwriting—and on their collaborative EP—but each performs in distinct musical styles. For Bridgers, an intimate voice and shy guitar with a folkier bedroom softness; Baker, enormous emo minor tones and a voice that could blow down a building; Dacus, vocals that are clear and confrontational and a guitar shrouded in fuzz. When performed together, it yields an effective kind of magic.
The EP begins with “Bite the Hand,” a song infused with Dacus’ dense guitar tone and characteristic directness. “I can’t love you how you want me to,” she sings, as her collaborators sneak up behind her to harmonize, and Dacus’ guitar, innocent at first, grows to her signature forcefulness. Like half of the songs on the EP, “Bite the Hand” initially deceives as a standalone Dacus song—it would fit on Historian—but as it grows, nuance is added through Baker’s and Bridgers’ ghostly guitars, as well as vocals that twinkle in higher registers. It’s a Dacus song if it were supersized, and it almost collapses under the weight of the trio’s powerful collaboration. “I’ll bite the hand that feeds me,” Dacus sings, inflating into a confrontational voice she embodies easily, while Baker and Bridgers call back with “Bite the hand!”
Bridgers’ earnest lyrics and folkier songcraft are highlighted on “Me & My Dog,” a style that is more ballad-adjacent than Baker’s or Dacus’. “I cried at your show with the teenagers,” Bridgers sings, showcasing her talent for communicating the innocence in our emotions. “I’m fine now/It doesn’t matter,” she continues, aligning herself with a very teenage feeling. “I wish I was on a spaceship, just me and my dog and an impossible view.” Dreams and sleep and fantasy come up frequently throughout the EP, which lend the songs a generous intimacy as if eavesdropping on a group of friends as they share their deepest secrets. “Ketchum, ID” is a Bridgers-led meditation on wanting to move to Idaho, a beautiful and quiet place whose charms still fly under the radar, which was an actual fantasy that Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker all shared.
Baker is imprinted on the entire EP in protracted, cavernous melodies and crushingly clear guitar lines, but she commandeers “Stay Down,” a song in which she delivers the line “I look at you and you look at a screen” like a gut punch. (Conveniently, the song is also about learning how to fight, a spiritual companion to “Shadowboxing,” from Baker’s Turn Out the Lights.) Baker’s solo work is often defined by its literal solitude—listening to her music can feel as if you are alone in a room together—so it is a testament to her talent that she can seamlessly integrate such a lonely style of songwriting into a grander whole. It’s also a sign of the trio’s trust with one another on the EP, where individual styles are championed as often as a new collective sound is enabled to flourish.
The song that feels the most collaborative—and by extension the most emotionally affecting—is the lyrically direct “Salt in the Wound.” It is like the light that emits when the planeteers touch rings on “Captain Planet.” The trio dances on the edge of anger at a subject who repeatedly takes advantage of their willingness to please: “But you take and you take, like silks up my sleeve,” they sing. “Trick after trick, I’ll make the magic, and you unrelentingly ask for the secret.” It’s all indignation and grit, expressed by a collective of women who refuse to be fucked with.
It’s exciting to imagine the possibilities of the boygenius EP as a full-length album, and boygenius as more than just a side project. But there’s a sly message that comes baked into the short EP, a message that is better communicated briefly and then evaporated, and maybe only to those who are really listening. Dacus, Bridgers, and Baker are individual artists with individual tastes and individual styles. “Women in indie rock” isn’t a genre. For anyone still struggling to tell any woman with a guitar apart, the deft collaboration and complex collective songwriting on the boygenius EP is a great place to learn.


The second album from the Detroit hardcore collective is as ambitious as it is effective. Noise, art rock, and a surprising amount of hooks are knotted within their chaotic maximalism.

Only Love

Part of the thrill of these 11 songs is that they often sound like they’re about to burst or implode, but they never lose their course. On repeat listens to the Armed’s second album Only Love, you start to realize just how finely woven it all is—chaos careens off chaos, using the tracks before them as last-second momentum pushes before disappearing again, infusing what comes next with an extra shot of energy. From opening synth line to closing noise implosion, it’s part relay race, part punk-rock opera.
This feels like a pop record, albeit one with rabies. The Armed create nihilistic hardcore anthems that’ll find you shouting “Everything dies!” “Nowhere to be found!” and “Kill your heroes where they sleep!” The unexpected hooks are courtesy of the conceptual framework they created for the collection: The definitively punk/metal/hardcore band sought to write these songs as if they had never heard punk, metal or hardcore before, just trying to conjure the pop music of their formative years. They’re a band who’s covered Smashing Pumpkins in the past, their debut album Untitled included plenty of slower bits, and their interest in those other zones feels very genuine—which is the only way you can pull something like this off.
As might be expected, it’s hard to pin down the Armed stylistically. They create raw-voiced music that mixes hardcore dynamics, experimental electronics, and a smeared sense of melody. They have three people handling guitar, three vocalists (two male, one female), and variety of synthesizers and electronics besides the airtight rhythm section. They bring to mind a revved-up arty Liars circa Drum’s Not Dead, or maybe ’90s eccentrics Brainiac, or a more playful Converge. It’s, of course, foolish to compare a band this specifically themselves to another band; it’s maybe best to think of Only Love as one of those moments where you have leaky headphones and the sounds of traffic, car alarms, someone’s stereo blasting Fuck Buttons, and a kid crying combine to create a momentary orchestra in your brain.
Careless name-checking aside, they do share a bloodline with Converge: The sextet recorded Only Love with Converge guitarist/studio guru Kurt Ballou, who recorded their debut three years ago, as well. They also twisted the arm of Converge’s Ben Koller—a masterful drummer more than capable of staying detailed and interesting at breakneck speeds—to sit behind the kit. So far, the Armed have collaborated with a few different drummers; hopefully Koller decides to stay put because he adds a sense of control and finesse to the implosions going off around him, and is their best walk-on to date.
Only Love is more ambitiously structured than the debut—the first four songs bleed and tie together like a mutant ball of silly string. It’s the same band, but they’ve cracked things open, and it feels tighter, despite being looser. Where the debut followed some specific punk patterns, and the experiments sometimes plodded into mid-tempo toss-offs, Only Love is beautifully all over the place without losing steam.
Undeniable opener “Witness” is their cathartic Deafheaven “Dream House” moment, albeit with a more negative spin. On it, main vocalist Randall Kupfer growls like he’s trying to dislodge his insides (a bit like John Brannon of fellow Michigan band Laughing Hyenas), and amid his meltdown, shadowy clean harmonies also emerge. In an unlikely twist, the calmer “Luxury Themes” finds a way to bury vocal harmonies in a wall of noise. Now and then, I think of sped-up Flaming Lips, or Pissed Jeans if they sang about starting communes, not dying in an office.
“Role Models” creates a noise-pop anthem with little more than the words “Everything dies.” Importantly, before they remind us that you’ll one day be dust, they also suggest, like a motivational anarchist speaker reminding you to make the most of your life: “You won’t break your stride/No you can’t break your stride.” And, on the eerie, catchy “Middle Homes,” the singers croon: “Breathe/Where’s that little fire?/Gone” That’s the key to this album—as dark as things may seem, we keep going. This kicks into action during the final third of “Fortune’s Daughter,” when the drums arrive after a sideways noise meld, and you want to start punching the floor.
To illustrate the extent of their maximal approach, they’ve released a booklet called “No Solutions” with the collection. Subtitled the “Only Love” issue, it’s reminiscent of a Crimethinc. tract, gathering images (anti-commercialism collages, fashion spreads) and often thoughtful words (“Empathy is not compassion. Empathy is weapon”). There are short essays, shorter record reviews (of St. Vincent, Zwan, Lou Reed & Metallica, Lou Reed himself), comics, reviews of Detroit-area staples by a person dressed like a lawn shrub, and diagrams for how to achieve Only Love’s guitar tone. There’s plenty of tongue in cheek here, something to also admire about the band—this music is vibrant and loud and angry, but they aren’t afraid to crack jokes. (The editor of the accompanying booklet is listed as Papa Johns Emeritus.)
The Armed started in 2009, ages ago in punk rock years. A new band wouldn’t have the arsenal or know-how to create something as anti-everything and complete in all aspects as Only Love; from the packaging to the storyline to the print publication to the “vibe,” it feels like the apotheosis of years of experiments. It’s a lesson in never settling. As the singers croon on “Heavily Lined,” a song that sounds like HEALTH, Negative Approach, and Youth of Today walking into a bar together: “This iteration bores me/Everyone gets older/Only you gave up.” As Only Love illustrates, these fuckers clearly haven’t.


The surprise album from an elite rapper-producer combo is lean and beautifully crafted. Both make excellent use of each other’s light and shadow.

Earl Sweatshirt / The Alchemist: VOIR DIRE

VOIR DIRE

Earl Sweatshirt, rap’s professor emeritus of dread, has inspired a whole subgenre of rusted, wavy, micro rap songs best absorbed on headphones with a hoodie pulled over. That Earl would become one of the many formidable artists to record a joint project with the Alchemist, an old-ways crate digger adored by traditionalists, once seemed as unlikely as Ice Cube teaming up with the Bomb Squad to make 1990’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. But since 2019, Alchemist has been teasing his social media followers with claims that an album with Earl existed on YouTube under a fake name, just waiting to be discovered. Whether the beautifully crafted VOIR DIRE bears any resemblance to that project is unclear; it arrived via the unusual portal of the streaming website Gala Music, with NFT purchase options and animated artwork for each song. Accordingly, each cut feels individual, self-contained, and free from overarching themes or framework. As with most Alchemist sets, there’s no bloat, on either his uniformly excellent, laser-crafted beats or in the project’s tight 27-minute runtime.
In recent years, Alchemist has pivoted from some of the more concrete street-rap arrangements he served hardened vocalists like Prodigy, to fully indulging his eclectic ear for source material. On VOIR DIRE, samples are snatched, scrubbed, and transformed into dreamy ear candy. Opener “100 High Street” drops you right into a luxuriant string section that evokes images of sweeping island vistas. Alchemist continues to brighten the corners of Earl’s murky world with languid guitars, jazzy keys, smooth sophistipop, and vinyl-skipping vocal loops. But his sound is not so illuminating that Earl can’t find shadows.
Earl no longer hits his consonants with the rhythmic precision of his 16-year-old self—few have ever been that good that young. As he approaches 30, he lets his thickening voice meander outside the confines of a traditional rap bar. His flow whirls like it’s descending into a sinkhole, offering a gripping contrast to Alchemist’s sharp, repetitive beats. Rhyme schemes throughout VOIR DIRE are tenuous; choruses are either notional—like the lengthy repeated verse on “Vin Scully”—or nonexistent.
While Earl doesn’t spit bars in tight pockets here, his flows never feel sloppy or thoughtless. This is due in part to the gripping writing. Earl retains his taste for abstract wordplay and visceral metaphors: “Had a couple things on my chest/That’s where the demons would sit,” he raps gravely on “Sentry,” which features one of his most loyal stylistic acolytes, MIKE. On “Vin Scully,” Earl recalls “the ghost inside the crib” and his tactic to fight back these psychological demons: “Hosin’ down the problem with gin and tonic/How to stay afloat in a bottomless pit/The trick is to stop fallin’.”
Sometimes there’s a sense that the Alchemist’s cozy positivity is getting through to Earl. He echoes his stunning decade-old confessional “Chum” on the nostalgic soul of “All the Small Things” by looking backwards (“Feed the fam at 16, I wasn’t no seasoned chef”) while expressing a rare taste for life: “Cherish every moment, let it go/The cherry on top, the weight offa my heavy soul.” It’s like hearing his mood brighten in real time.
Although the structure of VOIR DIRE is freewheeling, it comes with a legitimate finale. Over a sample of pretty, fluttering vocal harmonies, “Free the Ruler” appears to be dedicated to Earl’s one-time collaborator Drakeo the Ruler, killed in a backstage stabbing in December 2021, a little over a year after being released from prison. The tragedy of Drakeo makes those old “Free Earl” shouts of yore seem kind of trivial, and maybe Earl feels that too. It’s not apparent when the song was recorded and the only obvious reference to Drakeo is the uttering of the song title on the final bar, but regardless, after a verse of Earl counting blessings and offering encouragement to those who need it, it’s a profound way to sign off.
It’s a little disappointing that Alchemist doesn’t push Earl even further out of his comfort zone. There isn’t that lift-your-head-in-surprise moment, like the first time you heard Earl rap over the prickly electronica of the Black Noi$e-produced “2010,” or the ethereal murk of his recent team-up with Clams Casino and Evilgiane, “Making the Band (Danity Kane).” But the chemistry between Earl and Alchemist comes from how naturally their styles blend together, as if VOIR DIRE is some kind of prophecy being fulfilled by the universe. It’s a record that was meant to be: simple, elegant, and always true.


The idiosyncratic Australian band’s most streamlined album to date is risky only in that it is their first to be downright boring.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Fishing for Fishies

Fishing for Fishies

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s fourteenth release since 2012, Fishing for Fishies, is vaguely about the environment, but mostly about goofing off with expensive equipment in service to the concept of “boogie oogie ooging.” While in the past, this highly prolific Australian band toyed with messy elements of garage, psych, and space rock, here, they attempt a soulless blues with the aid of unbridled harmonica. At first blush, the resulting album might be their riskiest endeavour yet: more streamlined than anything they’ve released before, it offers no wall of noise to hide behind. What actually manifests is a 43-minute slog, risky only in that it is the first King Gizzard record ever to be downright boring.
Fans worship this band for more or less for legitimate reasons: They’ve written music in an infinite loop, released five albums in one year, played with two drum sets, and crafted lyrics that are both hilarious and fun to dissect. Fishies has none of that. The title track is one such culprit: Taking up an “anti-fishing” agenda, King Gizz attempt to tackle conservationism, but a lazy Mellotron flute and seemingly endless swampy guitar make them sound like they’re auditioning to score a Shrek spin-off instead. “Boogieman Sam,” one of three songs with the word “boogie” in the title, is equally banal. Built around two foot-stomping, Led Zeppelin-indebted drum parts and a grating harmonica line, the song is about a Slenderman-type figure who “ate mumma’s babies, and shot the policeman.” Eventually you begin to feel that perhaps you have heard enough tailgating rock’n’roll scuzz, but the harmonica refuses to quit. “Yeah, yeah, boogie, boogie, boogie,” sings frontman Stuart Mackenzie, until your eyes roll into the back of your head.
Throughout, Fishing for Fishies pulls generously from the pantheon of classic rock. When done right, stacking an album with riffy guitar and proggy synthesizer can be compelling and enjoyable: Take the equally prolific Ty Segall, the decidedly less prolific Sheer Mag, or anything King Gizzard released prior to 2019. At its worst, culling sounds from the past can sound like paranoid, derivative vampirism. The band’s proclivity to the latter is most evident on “The Cruel Millennial,” about a millennial who feels prematurely old and washed up. “I was only born in ’92/Yet I rust the cruel millennial,” Ambrose Kenny-Smith laments over a noodling guitar that sounds a bit like a chicken squawk. He continues: “Berenstain Bears/Read to as kids/It’s a glitch in the matrix/Can’t relate face to face with the modern day youth.” One would hope there’s a degree of irony at work here, but with a sound so stubbornly entrenched in the past, perhaps a fear of being replaced by younger and more talented people is warranted.
While cynicism is undeniably Fishies’ operative mood, a couple of moments feel goofy in a good way. “Acarine” imagines a world where Giorgio Moroder became deeply invested in the Who’s “Baba O'Riley,” complete with a subterranean synthesizer warble and a variegated guitar part that flickers like a strobe light. “Reals Not Real,” meanwhile, breaks up mosh pit-inducing nu-metal guitar runs with major-key piano melodies. But these delightful little oddities are staunchly in the minority, and compared to other songs from King Gizzard’s discography, still qualify as some of their weakest offerings to date.
It’s a shame to see a band with such clear skill and experimental prowess release an album as doltish as Fishing for Fishies, especially considering that, not so long ago, they managed to release five good albums in a single year. There is very little joy involved in listening to these nine songs; they sound like a stoner’s tribute to the music of “Guitar Hero,” sprinkled with a dash of Baby Boomer complacency. After a remarkably weird and great run, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have gone fishing in murky waters and caught only an old shoe.


As part of an ongoing reassessment of pioneering composer Julius Eastman’s work, the London electronic musician presents originals loosely inspired by signature pieces like “Stay On It” and “Femenine.”

Loraine James: Building Something Beautiful for Me

Building Something Beautiful for Me

Within the canon of classical-music misfits, a formidable lineage including scruffy luminaries like Harry Partch, John Cage, and Lou Harrison, it’s possible no one has ever not belonged as fiercely, as pointedly—or, at this point, as famously—as Julius Eastman. A Black gay man with an astonishing array of musical gifts as a composer, singer, dancer, and pianist, Eastman gained admission to the prestigious Curtis Institute in 1959, five years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act and only nine years after Nina Simone herself had been rejected due to her race. Eastman spent the rest of his short, eventful life surfing turbulent sociopolitical cross-currents, earning a Grammy nomination in 1974 for his stunning vocal work on Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King while also performing his music at gay pride festivals, playing in jazz combos, and fighting against perpetual economic precarity. It was the kind of tortured duality out of which grand allegories are fashioned and dynamite biopics are made, but which mostly felt, for Eastman, like constant struggle: As anyone who knows Eastman’s name by now knows, he died homeless and alone at age 49 in a New York hospital.
Over the last decade or so, there has been a slow-dawning recognition of the singularity of Eastman’s voice, catalyzed by the restoration work done by composer Mary Jane Leach, without whom it’s conceivable Eastman’s music would still be forever lost, as well as committed patrons like Jace Clayton, aka DJ /rupture. In 2013, Clayton released a tribute album that concluded with a piece, called “Callback From the American Society of Eastman Supporters,” daring to imagine a world in which Eastman’s acolytes had grown so numerous they had to be turned away via a polite outgoing message (voiced, as it happens, by Arooj Aftab). It is both a testament to the efforts of people like Clayton and a bittersweet irony that, nearly a decade later, the world envisioned by “Callback” has been slowly taking shape, in the form of multi-part public radio tributes, studies, countless articles, and, most importantly, a fervent new crop of musicians, performers, and artists who found themselves enraptured by the spirit of Eastman’s music.
One such performer is Loraine James, a London-based experimental electronic musician and relative newcomer to Eastman’s music, a fact she writes about in a poignant Guardian editorial: “When the label Phantom Limb got in touch about me creating music inspired by the late New York avant garde composer and pianist Julius Eastman, I had barely heard of him,” she admits, noting that even with a modern-day syllabus that touched on his peers, “it felt like there was effort made to leave him out.”
James begins her album, a collection of originals loosely inspired by specific Eastman works, with one of two variations on Eastman’s signature piece, 1973’s “Stay On It.” Eastman’s score pairs a flirtatious little eight-note phrase with loosely contrasting motivic cells, each one stressing and striating the pulse until the entire piece starts to fall—pleasingly, maddeningly—apart. It’s a perfect piece of rhythmic DNA for a producer like James to play with; the repeated “stay on it” command already sounds like a chopped vocal loop fit for any manner of club track: hip-hop, footwork, house. James takes that skipping motif and plugs it directly into her machines, reproducing it as an arrhythmic heart blip, over which she sings in a confiding murmur. Where performances of “Stay On It” usually feel antic, mischievous, an invitation to swing your hips a little, James’ take is subdued and vulnerable, twisting the emphatic “stay on it” mantra to “maybe if I stay on it,” so that an exclamation shades into a melancholy question mark.
James’ work has drifted into moodier climes lately, away from the destabilized rhythmic propulsion of her 2021 album Reflection and into tone painting and texture. As a fan of both her work and Eastman’s, it’s hard not to see some missed opportunities in their meeting. Eastman made a life’s work out of exploring extremes—juxtaposing quasi-religious chanting with projected images of dog shit for his performance at Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia; giving incendiary titles to beatific works and vice versa. But he staged these collisions in service to larger ideas, hoping to generate sparks through which his wholeness might become better illuminated, and his music was never so alive or engaged as when grappling with irreconcilable truths.
James has also mined opposing forces— communal uplift against introversion, club hedonism against cerebral experiments—for visceral and idea-rich music, but on Building Something Beautiful, she appears more interested in weightless washes of tone, often drifting and beat-free, which is a curious approach for Eastman‘s work, particularly because it fails to illuminate much about what James found in it. Her titles hint at a profound autobiographical identification: her piece based on Eastman’s incendiary “Crazy N*****” is called “The Perception of Me,” while the piece inspired by the 1971 piano work “Femenine” is called “Choose to Be Gay,” but the results are often strangely blank.
Take “The Perception of Me”: In the original “Crazy N*****,” four rumbling pianos surge and abate unpredictably, the gathering storms and wisps of Romantic tonalities suggesting all sorts of possibilities, some baleful, some potentially exhilarating; listening to it is like watching a shifting thunder cloud, unsure if you want it to blow over or burst open above your head. James’ piece does away with those shifting harmonic tensions, generating with her synth tones a cool, clean-lined space in which “contemplation” feels like a friction-free process.
Of all the works on Building Something Beautiful, “Femenine” undergoes the most compelling transformation, an extended improvisational meditation that James freezes in place and turns personal: “You say that I choose to/Let me say what I want.” The synths that wash in and out of headphone space, panning and fading and hiccuping slightly, call to mind the “organic” process of composition Eastman theorized about in his essays, but the result feels not at all like the work of tribute, homage, or acknowledgement. It feels, instead, like a partial map of James’ own complicated emotional terrain, one in which signposts of Eastman’s work—the incessant chiming sleigh bells indicated in Eastman’s original score pop up here, sounding smeary and distant—reappear like symbols in a dream.


The pop heartthrob’s lovestruck fourth album comes across like your friend who just got into a relationship and won’t shut up about it: You’re happy for them and also tremendously bored.

Wonder

Shawn Mendes wants the world to know: He is madly in love. As the 22-year-old singer explains in the recent Netflix documentary Shawn Mendes: In Wonder, every song he has ever written is about his pop star peer and girlfriend, Camila Cabello. Like all lovestruck wordsmiths, Mendes finds his true feelings too powerful to fully express. “I think it’s like when you see a moon or stars and you try and take a photo of it with your iPhone and then you just can’t, it just doesn’t look good,” he muses. “It’s not supposed to be captured, it’s just supposed to be for us.”
But bless his heart, because Mendes’ fourth record, Wonder, sure does try. Across 14 songs (on the non-deluxe edition), Mendes spends nearly every minute bowled over by the power of love. It’s nice to see his cup overflow so bountifully, but the near-constant awe quickly grows tiresome, especially when conveyed through clichés like, “Your body’s like an ocean, I’m devoted to explore you” and, “You’re my sunlight on a rainy day.” At one point he croons that he “heard that once a wise man said, ‘Only fools go rushing in,’” as if this is supposed to be a seismic revelation. Mendes comes across like your friend who just got into a relationship and won’t shut up about it: You’re happy for them and also tremendously bored.
According to In Wonder, Mendes and Cabello have been dating for a little over a year, but first met as teenagers—he was a guitarist who found fame covering pop songs on Vine, she was one-fifth of a girl group (can I make it any more obvious?). Mendes’ elevation of Cabello as his eternal muse is surely meant to be romantic, but it comes across as naive—and vaguely terrifying. It also reflects the biggest problem of Wonder: What’s stacked up to be the love of a lifetime feels a bit empty in presentation. All-consuming passion is reduced to familiar imagery of popping bottles, dancing on rooftops, and fantasizing about marriage; the sex scene is always safely off-screen. Yet Mendes’ desire to satisfy is as steadfast as his falsetto, which puts in the work on Wonder. On the somewhat funky “Teach Me How to Love,” featuring Anderson .Paak on drums, Mendes asks his partner to “draw a map” so he can properly pleasure her.
Even if the subject matter is more than a little vanilla, Wonder is Mendes’ most musically adventurous album, touching on hip-thrusting R&B-lite, Beach Boys harmonics, and the occasional Tame Impala synth line. But every song is plagued by the same problem: Production that attempts to compensate for lyrical blandness by forcibly inserting drama. The title track circles around compelling themes like authenticity, the influence of toxic masculinity, and how it would feel to “live inside a world that isn’t black and white,” but Mendes soon brushes these aside in favor of a more pressing quandary: “I wonder what it’s like to be loved by you!” Every time he repeats the line, it’s with startling intensity, like Benjamin Franklin getting struck by a bolt of lightning. Lest you miss the profound stakes of this reflection, the production smacks you in the face with massive drums and soaring choral vocals. Even Mendes’ dreams are scored like IMAX movies.
The beginning of “Call My Friends” offers a momentary reprieve from the onslaught: Over a melancholic piano, Mendes longs for the good times that have passed him by, mourning missed birthdays and yearning to put life on pause. Though his voice is undeniably beautiful, it’s quickly swallowed by a vortex of synths as he sings, “I should call my friends and go get hi-i-i-gh.” Wonder’s biggest swing-and-miss might be “Monster,” a duet with Mendes’ childhood inspiration, recovering-bad-boy-turned-wife-guy Justin Bieber. The two Canadian lads lament the psychic toll of fame, singing of pedestals, false confidence, and “sin,” achieving a level of insight so superficial that it’s entirely meaningless.
In a sea of wannabe Biebers and sad Brits with guitars, Mendes has always been the nice guy, the boy next door who also could be an Abercrombie model. But he has yet to make a statement that truly sets him apart. Wonder offers a few intriguing hints of something deeper—nods to depression, loneliness, and rejection. All are quickly bypassed in search of a silver lining, but sometimes it’s worth lingering in those heavier feelings, if only to develop perspective. Near the end of Wonder, Mendes refers to “the boy who’s really underneath/all the scars and insecurities.” Who is that?

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The L.A. producer's head music, which pulls from jazz, hip-hop, videogame sounds, IDM, and more, is more dense and rewarding than ever.

Cosmogramma

Talking to us over the summer about his then-forthcoming album, Steven Ellison said he felt like he was progressing as a producer. "I'm finally getting to the point where I can make the kind of records... that I wanted to make when I was younger, things that I dreamed about making," he told us. That sounds modest-- he's been persistently pursuing a singular vision for years now-- but his first two albums did share common traits with his forebears. Even the excellent Los Angeles from 2008 took some of its cues from J Dilla, one of Ellison's idols. But with Cosmogramma, it's not enough anymore to talk about Ellison's sound as "post-Dilla" or even "post hip-hop." It's his sound now.
Indeed, Cosmogramma is an intricate, challenging record that fuses his loves-- jazz, hip-hop, videogame sounds, IDM-- into something unique. It's an album in the truest sense. Even on Los Angeles, which hung together well as a full-length, there were moments you could pick out as singles or highlights-- the distorted pop of "Camel" or the maniacal electro-house of "Parisian Goldfish". But Cosmogramma is conceived as a movement-- bits of one song spill into the next, and its individual tracks make the most sense in the context of what surrounds them. In this sense, it feels almost like an avant-garde jazz piece, and so it takes more than a few listens to sink in-- one or two spins and you're still at the tip of the iceberg.
Jazz is a big influence on the record, and it's a good place to start talking about the individual sections that make up the whole. Ellison is, of course, the nephew of jazz great Alice Coltrane and has said in interviews that his albums are in part dedicated to her. That's clear on Cosmogramma, as there are distinct passages that pursue an elaborate kind of digital jazz and the album is constructed to move through different sections, as one of Coltrane's might. There are roughly three of these passages-- the first is an aggressive three-song suite based loosely on videogame sounds. On "Nose Art", FlyLo puts raygun squiggles alongside woozy synths, grinding mechanical noises, and about 10 other sonic elements. Like much of the album, it sounds almost frustratingly unstable until you hear it a few times and the pieces begin to interlock and congeal.
True to its title, Cosmogramma then moves through a heady astral stretch and finally a more downtempo jazz-heavy period. The latter partly serves as a necessary breather from the complicated sounds earlier on. FlyLo shows ridiculous talent in each section-- the things he can do with and to beats just aren't common. In "Zodiac Shit", he makes a heavy, loping bass thump sputter out on cue, creating a physical rumbling quality. The beat of "Computer Face // Pure Being" trips over itself again and again like clothes tumbling in a dryer. These aren't just tricks-- in each case they push the song toward a groove. And it's not just beats: "Satelllliiiiiiite" is as dreamy as anything FlyLo's done to date, its distorted vocal samples and steam-building arrangement not unlike something out of Burial's repertoire and frankly just as good.
The song that will likely get the most attention here is "...And the World Laughs With You", a collaboration with Thom Yorke. Obviously an electronic-music fan, Yorke has done these guest spots before (for Modeselektor and others) and with such a high-profile contributor it's easy to make the song all about him. But FlyLo doesn't pay Yorke any undue deference, just treats his vocals like another element to manipulate and weave into the mix. It's so subtle, in fact, that if you're not paying close attention you might miss his appearance altogether. It's this level of confidence and commitment to his vision that ultimately makes Cosmogramma so fascinating. FlyLo is working at the height of his creative powers right now, and the scary thing is it's reasonable to think he could get better.


With her 10th album, Björk is grounded back on earth, searching for hope in death, mushrooms, and matriarchy, and finding it in bass clarinet and gabber beats.

Fossora

Hope springs eternal in Björk’s fantastical world. Her optimism is one of the most spiritually nourishing things about her work, as if she’s dressing the emotional wounds of the world despite making increasingly avant-garde music and becoming the world’s first Animorph. At times her lyrics have urged the listener to accept a lack of control as an opportunity—the way there are “unthinkable surprises about to happen” on Vespertine’s “It’s Not Up to You,” or how Post imagines romantic hope through self-possession. You can always find the spark or glimmer of light in Björk’s music, whether it’s in the outlook or the instrumentation.
Of course, her emotionally complex canon, spanning nearly 30 years, also shows that unthinkable surprises can be catastrophic, most acutely on 2015’s Vulnicura, written about her painful divorce from the artist Matthew Barney. Without the lows, there would be no hero’s journey for Björk, no abyss, no transformation, no return. She embraced new love on 2017’s Utopia, a fantasia of flute and birdsong, and she has been embraced herself, as a blueprint of autonomy for women artists and as some kind of experimental-pop “mom” for young fans. With her 10th album, Fossora, she is grounded back on earth, searching for hope in death, mushrooms, and matriarchy, and finding it in bass clarinet and gabber beats.
The most poignant songs on Fossora are the towering twin tributes to her mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who died in 2018. The first, “Sorrowful Soil,” is Björk’s attempt to mimic Iceland’s traditional style of musical eulogy, consisting of melodramatic melodies delivering dry biography, but from a matriarchal POV. “In a woman’s lifetime she gets 400 eggs but only two or three nests,” she sings, pausing for emphasis and buoyed by women’s voices from the Hamrahlid Choir. With a baroque choral arrangement and bass chords that function like a church organ, the song sounds solemn, to be sure, but there’s something strangely funny about boiling down a woman’s life to her menstrual cycles and prevailing worldview (Björk seems to recognize this, grinning over the lyrics’ oddness in our recent cover story). Certain phrases cut through and carry the melody: “emotional textile” (what a mother’s nest is made from, naturally), “self-sacrificial,” and “nihilism.” Björk’s mother was a nihilist, a fact that is dramatically emphasized in a vocal hook; despite her nature, the musician seems to say, she did her best to raise children, an act that disregards one’s own nihilism for the future.
“Sorrowful Soil” was written before Björk’s mother passed, and “Ancestress” was written after, as a more personal eulogy. Built from anthemic strings, sparse beats, a sprinkling of chimes and gongs, and vocals from Björk and her son Sindri, “Ancestress” is among the singer’s most striking songs about hope because it shows the limits of it. The lyrics reflect the arc of a mother and daughter’s love passed through decades: As childhood memories merge with scenes of hospitals and pacemakers, Björk steps into the role of valiant “hopekeeper” for her mother while the clock ticks down (literally, there is a ticking clock in the song). I love Björk’s generous articulations of her mother—that Hildur’s dyslexia made her the ultimate improviser, the way her “vibrant rebellion” requires trilled Rs—but the more cutting lines are the things left unsaid or hard to face: “Did you punish us for leaving? Are you sure we hurt you? Was it just not ‘living?’” and “You see with your own eyes/But hear with your mother’s/There’s fear of being absorbed by the other.” It’s that push and pull of not wanting to lose your mother’s voice in your head, combined with not wanting to make her same mistakes.
Life cycles are at the heart of Fossora, whose title translates to a Latin feminine form of the word “digger.” The abstract a cappella interlude “Mycelia,” named for fungal root systems, is a beguiling mix of calm and hyperspeed that could soundtrack a time-lapse video of moss and mushrooms overtaking a forest. “Fungal City” moves the record toward the light of new love—but not too bright—with techno beats, bemused bass clarinet lines, and the supporting coos of serpentwithfeet (something of a musical hopekeeper himself). At times, Fossora’s mushroom-centric imagery can feel a little like an overwrought metaphor. But the theme of personal growth is inextricable from her mycophilia: She finds so much nourishment and possibility in the dark, mossy understory of life.
One standout, “Victimhood” conjures, with its creeping industrial-orchestral pulse, the folk terror of Ari Aster’s horror films; the lyrics are part shadow work, part feminist thought. Which is to say, the scariest thing I’ve heard on a record this year might be a half-dozen clarinet players, an industrial beat, and Björk’s voice weaving out of each ear with familiar phrases like “took one for the team.” She’s referencing a trap of womanhood, wherein being treated poorly makes you feel entitled to compassion, respect, sympathy. “Rejection left a void that is never satisfied/Sunk into victimhood/Felt the world owed me love,” Björk sings, and the only solution to transcending this archetype is a bird’s eye view. This level of reflection—an inventory of personal wounds bleeds into psychological self-evaluation and cultural context of women’s lives—is impressive on its own, but she sculpts the sound to mimic the disorienting, walls-closing-in sensation of questioning the story you tell yourself about yourself. It becomes a masterpiece.
Fossora’s final song, “Her Mother’s House,” is a meditative coda, a shift from grieving daughter to empty-nester, sung with her own daughter Ísadóra. The tone is peaceful—muted keyboard chords, curls of falsetto, a cor anglais solo—as Björk maintains the role of hopekeeper from afar. “When a mother wishes to have a house/With space for each child/She is only describing the interior of her heart,” she sings. At the end of the song, when she returns to the metaphor—“Her most loved ones already live in the chambers of her heart, the four chambers of the heart”—you can imagine her reaching out towards her ancestress, Hildur, who died from heart conditions.
In the lyric book, the last lines of “Her Mother’s House” are “curved buildings, matriarch architecture,” which is hardly audible in the recording, but that phrase—“matriarch architecture” is a handy one for considering Fossora and Björk at this point in her career. Matriarchy is not synonymous with new motherhood so much as the act of losing one’s mother, of assuming her role in the family and carrying on a specific legacy. And so, Fossora is not her mushroom record, her grief/hope opus, or even her Iceland album as she put it. It’s the sound of Björk building her home as the mother of it all.


The pop star teams with her brother Finneas for their third album together, expanding the cooly dark vision of their sound. It’s an honest and ambitious album when it’s not inert and repetitive.

HIT ME HARD AND SOFT

This is the least we’ve known about Billie Eilish going into an album. For years, the star’s journey was documented in yearly Vanity Fair interviews and candid documentaries; even Carpool Karaoke visited Eilish’s childhood home, where she still lived until recently. That seeming lack of boundaries between the pop star and her audience is increasingly standard for megastars, but Eilish’s intimate music made her a particularly strong candidate for parasociality. Her 2021 album, Happier Than Ever, was largely a response to public scrutiny, more reserved and mature than her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? In the ensuing years, Eilish kept a low profile, surfacing every now and then to soundtrack a Pixar film or win an Oscar before retreating to work on the next record.
To hear Eilish say it, the goal for HIT ME HARD AND SOFT was making an “album-ass album,” citing Coldplay’s Viva La Vida and Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory as influences. Those records are also ambitious pop mini-epics where established artists show off their range, but there’s usually an outsider like Brian Eno or SOPHIE to get the musician out of their comfort zone. With Finneas once again at the helm, HMHAS is more of the same. For the first time, Eilish’s live drummer Andrew Marshall is on board, as well as the Attacca Quartet, playing arrangements orchestrated by Finneas and the prolific David Campbell. Never one to subscribe to a single genre, Eilish flits from minimalist trance to massive stadium rock, and the album has the same dense vocal layering and inventive percussion that make Finneas one of the most excessively documented producers in pop. But there’s no true swerve, just bigger versions of what they’ve already made—even Coldplay dabbled in shoegaze! What experimentation exists here demonstrates the siblings’ strengths and limitations as they enter their third project together, but it’s diminishing returns.
Thematically, HMHAS focuses mostly on falling out of love with a narcissist (as documented on “Blue”) and falling in love with a woman for the first time. Opener “Skinny” teases another record about the perils of fame, in the vein of Happier Than Ever, and it’s hard not to blame her: When Eilish casually confirmed her bisexuality in a larger Variety profile, that’s all the press wanted to talk about. When it’s addressed on the album, it’s on her own terms, as if the years of insensitive “queerbaiting” accusations never happened. It’s hard to stand out in the age of Spotify-sanctioned sapphic playlists, but “Lunch” is delightful for its matter-of-fact sexuality and the record’s best line deliveries: “I bought you something rare/And I left it under… Claire.” Though the syncopated piano and guitar riffs recall the most generic of 2010s alt-pop, Eilish maintains her irreverence with double entendres and zilch-entendres (“I just want to get her off,” she mumbles). The “Last Christmas” chord progression of “Birds of a Feather” feels engineered to soundtrack wistful coming-of-age stories, and sure enough, you’ll find it in the trailer for the wistful coming-of-age Netflix show Heartstopper. Both these songs are uniquely effervescent departures in her catalogue, but they never sound like a pop star playing catchup to pop radio—just the earnest enthusiasm of someone falling in love.
Other times Billie and Finneas might as well have switched on a large neon sign that says “this is a masterpiece.” Sometimes that big ambition works: The moody “Chihiro” revisits the uptempo sound of early single “Bellyache” but swaps the acoustic guitars for big, expensive synths, making up for the lack of real chorus with density. Several multi-part suites feel like they’re just retreading familiar territory. Despite a career-best belt from Eilish, “The Greatest” can’t escape the shadow of “Happier Than Ever”; “Bittersuite” devolves from its deep-sea dub intro into “Billie Bossa Nova 2” before timidly segueing to the closer. The nadir is “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” a relatively standard breakup ballad with a second half marred by chintzy synths and production that tries for negative space and comes up empty: After years of reinventing bedroom pop for stadiums, Billie and Finneas finally made something that sounds thrown together in someone’s bedroom.
Eilish does stake out new ground in her storytelling, delving into relationship messiness with a newfound maturity. On “Wildflower,” she describes her burgeoning feelings for her current boyfriend’s ex: “You say no one knows you so well/But every time you touch me, I just wonder how she felt.” The album highlight also thrives on those ambiguous readings: “The Diner” is a stalker song from the point of view of someone breaking into her kitchen, as if one more creepy letter will finally win her heart. Yet lines like “you could be my wife,” out of context, recall the same-sex attraction explored elsewhere; how much of herself does Eilish see in the role of the obsessive romantic? This is, after all, the person who wrote in “Hostage” about wanting to crawl inside her lover’s veins. Text the phone number she whispers in the outro and you’ll get repeated automated texts saying “it’s billie, call me,” drawing a marketing gimmick into the world of the story.
Every song on this big album has some detail worth hearing, but the insistence on multipart epics and ballads kills the momentum. When “Wildflower” and “The Greatest” crescendo back to back, it gets aggravating. The much-hyped live instrumentation is more window dressing than it is integral to the artistry, and Jon Castelli’s brightly saturated mix leaves the extraneous elements to fight for space in the more crowded sections. All these enhancements cancel each other out until HMHAS is just another good record from Billie and Finneas—certainly tasteful, and arresting sometimes, but all the session musicians in the world can’t make it a masterpiece.


Chicago band leaves the math-rock musicianship of previous releases behind, turning their quirks into something diverse and accessible.

Perch Patchwork

Maps & Atlases released a few EPs before Perch Patchwork, their debut full-length, and the band has done a fair amount of growing up in the meantime. Those early releases were classic math-rock, typified by busy guitar lines borrowed from 90s bands like Don Caballero. Maps & Atlases are far from the only band from Chicago to use that sound as a starting point, but they're one of the few to try and move it forward and successfully translate it into pop songs. Perch Patchwork almost leaves the flashy musicianship entirely behind; when it is there, it puts it to good use-- here they turn their quirks into something diverse and accessible.
Foremost among those is Dave Davison's voice-- a reedy, almost froggy baritone. (Think Mark Morrison of "Return of the Mack" and you're not far off.) Yet he sings naturally and confidently, and even carries many of the songs here on the strength of his performance. "The Charm" builds to layered, clattering percussion with no melody at all save for Davison's vocal line-- the anchor and selling point of an affecting love song. Elsewhere, the band is at its best when it leaps furthest outside of its comfort zone: "Solid Ground" forgoes complicated instrumental lines in favor of layered production, where guitar, bass, and voice contribute only a fraction of the song's many earworms. The same goes for the bubbly power-pop of "Israeli Caves"; these are melodically busy tracks, but every addition is balanced and thoughtful, no performer stepping over another, all serving the song.
On the second half of Perch Patchwork, the fingers get a little more fleet and the math-rock woodshedding shows, and all those busy notes start to run into each other, making the beginning and end of each track less discernible. But taken on their own, many of those songs feature creative left turns, whether it's the Latin instrumentation that crashes the sparse, rubbery riff of "Pigeon" or the campfire strumming between the jagged acoustic licks of "Was". That track might remind you of the mellower moments on Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca, and the brief instrumentals that serve as interludes on Perch Patchwork have the gentle folksiness and thick atmosphere of Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. But while Maps & Atlases are milder and less daring than either of those bands, Perch Patchwork is eclectic and consistent enough that each detour offers its own small reward.


Winston Cook-Wilson’s second album of sly, extravagant sophistipop is sleek music for a cursed place, and a heartfelt cry for lonely city strivers.

A Life of Crime

On their second album of sardonic soft rock, Office Culture stage a doomed venture into the big city. Deals are brokered, schemes devised, savings drained; love withers and melodies teeter; everything, it seems, is collapsing together. The title is A Life of Crime. Maybe the crime is stealing time back from the metropolis, or not scamming hard enough. The city sounds exhausting, the band thrilled to be there.
When Office Culture recorded their debut, I Did the Best I Could, in 2017, the Brooklyn outfit was building on the scrappy solo demos of Winston Cook-Wilson, a songwriter and journalist. (Full disclosure: Cook-Wilson is also an occasional contributor to Pitchfork.) The follow-up’s lavishness suits him: Office Culture at large sound clumsy yet suave, as if honoring the social imperative to project extravagance while scrambling to get by. A Life of Crime toys with this and other modern ironies, not least in its palette of schmoozey lounge jazz for jittery loners. Flirtatious licks sneak beyond the songs’ borders and into illicit fifth bars. Synths gouge space from under the vocals, Cook-Wilson crooning and pirouetting like a drunk trespasser in the Hamptons.
The vocals are theatrical, the sophistipop textures faintly ludicrous. But what might scan as faux sincerity transpires to be heartfelt affect, perhaps with an air of class performance. Money isn’t a theme of the record so much as the water in which its characters swim. Some of Cook-Wilson’s sharpest lyrics are relationship riddles that riff on the deceptions of the free market, like the whirlwind romance styled as a “Ponzi scheme for two” on “Monkey Bone.” His transactional wordplay gestures toward a millennial quandary: the way precarious living conditions and hyper-monetization test our faith in love, too. As received wisdom lets our industries fail and planet burn, why cling to any old myths at all?
Drift and instability trickle from the lyrics down into the music, tilting schmaltz into the realm of the uncanny. Hovering between Talk Talk bliss and the netherworld of Scott Walker’s Climate of Hunter is “Diamonds,” a Silicon Valley satire over a morass of slap bass and brass. “A Sign” is so smooth it haunts, somehow suggesting a sax solo that isn’t there. It’s sleek music for a cursed place, opulent like a ritzy hotel lounge.
Given its soft-rock lineage, A Life of Crime could probably bluff through a shift on the strip-mall speakers, but it pitches to the nerds and crate-diggers, by turns summoning the Blue Nile, Gaucho-era Steely Dan, and the Destroyer of Kaputt. “Diamonds” delights in antic concepts and cadences (“Munching on that crudité…. pogo-sticking ’round the Valley”), though where a songwriter like Dan Bejar would exude playful self-assurance, Office Culture’s camp feels desperate to please, as if Cook-Wilson were a bumped-up understudy for some less florid singer. His vocal calligraphy might be overbearing were it not for the luminous backdrop, where no note is wasted and economy is king.
The result, a jaunt around the urban imagination, could scarcely be better company. Like cigar-jacket city pop or a penthouse Postcard Records, the music charms as it pontificates, swept up in the alchemy whereby songs redeem otherwise terrible places. On the right backstreet, a tune like “Hard Times in the City” could exorcise an abandoned building and make its ghosts sing, elevate the dive bars and the loneliness we take there. For all its intricacies, A Life of Crime plays like a half-remembered travelogue, comprising diary entries from the cities you passed through while finding your way home. How far we can drift, it muses, even when it feels like we’re sinking.


The Japanese avant-garde vocalist Phew got her start in O.G. punk band Aunt Sally before collaborating with members of Can in the ’80s. Her latest set of analog bedroom productions recalls Suicide.

Light Sleep

Like many British teens in the late 1970s, when Hiromi Moritani heard the Sex Pistols, she started her own punk band. But even by the standards of punk and post-punk, Japan’s Aunt Sally stood apart: dirge-y psychedelic rock, piano waltzes, spiky outbursts, a whistling take of “Heart and Soul.” And when Moritani struck off on her own in 1980 as Phew, she bushwhacked her own path. She had Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto produce her experimental first single. And for her debut album, she tapped a German dream team: producer Conny Plank and Can’s rhythm section of Holger Czuaky and Jaki Leibezeit, who cast a pulsing, harrowing sound. In the almost four decades since, she’s continued to carve out her own peculiar niche in rock, often working with legends who abet her vision, including Anton Fier, Otomo Yoshihide and members of DAF and Einstürzende Neubauten. You can hear Jim O’Rourke’s turn on bass on her 2010 album Five Finger Discount—covering Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” no less.
But since that time, Phew has taken to holing up in her own bedroom with an array of analog electronics and old drum machines, bending sine waves, screwing down drum sputters and warping her voice to add another layer to the din. Even within her own discography, it was a stranger and far more foreboding sound, but one only audible if you bought CD-Rs at her shows in Tokyo. Culled now into a six-track album, Light Sleep is the sound of a depopulated urban streetscape at 3 a.m., at times veering into the realm of nightmare. Through such clamor and darkness, Phew’s voice emerges as a brief bit of consolation.
“New World” starts off spare, its oscillators flatulent and bleating. A mechanized hi-hat hiss slowly gathers steam and a ghostly mist of electronics start to thicken, Moritani’s voice alternating between plainspoken and assuaging. The furious “CQ Tokyo” returns her to her early punk roots, barking against a deliriously fast cha-cha beat, as if Yoko Ono snuck into Suicide’s practice space and stole one of Martin Rev’s rejiggered drum machines back in 1974. Menacing snarls of electronics roar alongside her increasingly fraught yells, the drums lurching faster and faster until they lash like a whip.
On “Usui Kuki,” Phew sets up a snare roll on that old Ace Tone rhythm box that threatens to cohere into Sly Stone’s “In Time,” but Phew is deft enough to never let it settle into a steady beat. Ungrounded wire hum and other electromagnetic turbulence eddies around her, the components and her processed voice increasingly hard to differentiate. “Echo” returns to the strobing pummel of early Suicide as Phew overlays a flickering beat with one in double-time. But rather than intensify the track, Phew instead lets in more space and hum, her voice increasingly desolate as feedback and hiss slither in the background.
“Mata Aimasho” centers Phew’s calm speaking voice as metallic subway drones scrape all around her. As she moves through the song, pacing her words as if describing a dream, an incessant buzz begins to resemble black outer space around her. Phew suddenly whistles along like a mockingbird—which, rather than lighten the mood, turns it more menacing, like Robert Mitchum’s bellowed hymn in Night of the Hunter.
In the present moment, it’s no thing to hoard old analog gear and fetishize vintage-sounding equipment so as to give a sense of “warmth” to a recording. But in Phew’s hands, she roots in these components for a sense of uncertainty and unpredictability. Light Sleep signifies her coming back full circle to the kind of relentless music she made as a young punk. There’s something both harsh and hopeful in her latest, as exemplified by a performance she gave a week ago in New York City. With her devices she conjured a sound that roiled like an oil fire. But just when it seemed blackest, her voice would begin to emerge from such harsh noise, tempering it. On Light Sleep, Phew strikes an uncanny balance, in control of all the sounds around her, allowing them to slip from her hands.


This odds-and-ends compilation from the Finnish indie-pop band contains demos, B-sides, covers, and a couple of new tracks.

Dealing in Antiques

In a typewritten note tucked within each copy of the first White Town 7", self-released in 1990, leader Jyoti Mishra is very specific about his aims. "We want to create music that will make you want to dance, cry, sing, laugh, music that elevates, depresses, and declaims," he wrote. "Not just some form of aural wallpaper or something to try and impress your friends, but something you understand and that understands you." Setting aside any questions about a record's powers of comprehension, that modest manifesto sounds a lot like the goals of plenty of indie pop today, too.
Cats on Fire cover White Town's fluke 1997 hit, "Your Woman", to open the 20-track odds-and-sods compilation Dealing in Antiques. By the time White Town released the track, Mishra was working solo, and his bedroom-produced gender-bender was recognizable in part by a horn sample that some people used to guess (wrongly) came from the Star Wars theme. These four Finns do it the way Mishra & co. might have a few years earlier, stripping the dancefloor-friendly arrangement down to sun-splashed post-C86 guitars, bass, and drums. Dapper Cats on Fire frontman Mattias Björkas' drowsy, eternally Mozzy warble barely resembles Mishra's field-mouse hush, and it's a deftly executed cover, but beyond that, it can't really do better than the original at making people dance, cry, sing, or laugh, at elevating, depressing, or declaiming. And that's the point, isn't it?
Dealing in Antiques is rewarding and disappointing in much the same ways as its first track. Coming after 2007 debut The Province Complains and 2009 follow-up Our Temperance Movement, each warmly received in indie-pop circles, the current collection reaches as far back as a 2002 demo, bringing together out-of-print B-sides and EP cuts as well as unreleased material from the intervening years. The tracks show that Cats on Fire's jangling style has been in place since early on, that the intimacy of a home recording suits their bedsit songwriting, and that they perform their songs with precision. If you like Felt, Orange Juice, or the Orchids, you'll probably like the sound of this. In that sense, it's a shame New York City Popfest had its The New York Times moment in 2010 rather than last year or the year before, when Cats on Fire were there.
On Dealing in Antiques, however, no matter how tasteful or well-played, the songs eventually start to blur together-- it'd make exquisite aural wallpaper, no kidding, but as indie pop, the compilation leaves some room for improvement. Björkas is prone to cramming ill-fitting syllables into his verses to make awkward rhymes work (see "Crooked Paper Clip", especially, or "Stars"). And the occasional jaunty uptempo number, piano part, or female backing vocal amid all the minor-key strums does little to separate the bookish-pop wheat from its chaff here. Then again, as with American contemporaries Pants Yell!, Cats on Fire are all about subtle understatement, and devotees will surely lose themselves in the ambiguities of like-not-love song "Never Land Here", the ironic twists of snob send-ups "On His Right Side" and "The Smell of an Artist", the shy neurosis of "Something Happened", the nuanced doublespeak of "Solid Work", the funny romantic near-miss of "Your Treasure".
Besides "Your Woman", the only other new recording here is "The Hague", and even that one originally appeared earlier this year on The Matinée Grand Prix label comp. "These are my ideals," Björkas croons, over a delicately pretty acoustic guitar with walking bass lines. "If you don't like them, I might have to change them." If Cats on Fire's ideals are at all like White Town's 20 years ago, Dealing in Antiques shows the group is well on its way to achieving them, but they'll have to move further beyond nostalgia-- and, dare I say, bring their charms higher up out of the 1980s-scented decor-- in order to get all the way there.


Inspired by true crime and accompanied by Mary Lattimore, Emma Ruth Rundle, and others, the gothic songwriter’s latest feels newly textured and symphonic.

The Path of the Clouds

Before there were true crime podcasts, there were murder ballads. The gothic singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler has long held a fascination with the form, populating her songs with characters who died lonely or unusual deaths. “I’d rather watch crime TV than see you again,” she sang on 2014’s July, a threat she’s now followed through with on her latest album, The Path of the Clouds. Following a move from Boston to Nashville, Nadler experienced writer’s block while locked down in her new home, watching Unsolved Mysteries instead of picking up her guitar. Eventually, she began taking notes, hoping the stories would spark inspiration.
On The Path of The Clouds, Nadler doesn’t parody the true crime form, but she replaces its sensationalism and conservative moralism with narratives of control, following the lineage of  country songwriters like Dolly Parton and Patsy Montana. Whether singing about the only known escapees from Alcatraz prison (“Well Sometimes You Just Can’t Stay”) or the disappearance of wilderness explorers Bessie and Glen Hyde (“Bessie Did You Make It?”), Nadler projects both universality and specificity onto these stories, exploring what it means to shapeshift, vanish, and start life anew.
The Path of The Clouds is the first self-produced album in Nadler’s nearly 20-year career. Primarily written on piano—an instrument she learned to play during lockdown—the album doesn’t rely on muscle memory; it’s more purposely and musically constructed, as cerebral as it is intuitive. She enlisted a gothy all-star cast to help build the songs, including former Cocteau Twins bassist Simon Raymonde, harpist Mary Lattimore, doomy singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle, and multi-instrumentalist Milky Burgess, who adds a cinematic luster following his contribution to the score for Panos Cosmatos’ psychedelic horror film Mandy. Each of the musicians recorded their parts remotely and without much instruction, emailing files back and forth. The album doesn’t  suffer from the strewn approach, however, and the sound is newly textured and symphonic.
The music itself coheres to the subject matter. On “Bessie Did You Make It?,” Nadler fingerpicks two chords—one dour, one light—as though depicting the moods of Bessie and Glen Hyde themselves. On the dream-pop track “If I Could Breathe Underwater,” large and marauding waves of guitar shore up against Nadler’s light and flute-like voice, which sounds like a skidding cloud while carrying a heavy and anchoring resonance. Submerged within the mix, Lattimore’s harp glitters like sun-diamonds on waves, bringing the conceit in the song’s title to life.
True to the ballad form, the songs that explicitly reference true crime stories sound fit for oration, more like speech than poetry. While Nadler favors literalism over literary devices—she lifts details like “a bullet in the skull” straight from the stories themselves—she seems to possess a near-classical sensitivity to the sound and shape of words; she’s playful and precise with her assonance, letting each vowel augment and curl over into the next line. The thrills of The Path of the Clouds are far richer than most true crime fiction, but like the best examples of the genre, it leaves you breathless.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Although not without its inspired moments, Harley Streten’s third LP confirms that he’s most creatively free outside the album format.

Palaces

At his best, Flume is chaotic, weird, and kind of naughty. His most memorable tracks feel a bit wrong: They sway against the beat and break into harsh noise when another producer of his stature would probably prefer to insert a euphoric hook or ecstatic drop. His biggest look in the press to date—the first time his profile as a celebrity seemed to match the astronomical popularity of his music—sprung from Burning Man 2019, where he pretended to eat his then-girlfriend’s ass during a DJ set. It was the rare moment in which the Australian producer, born Harley Streten, seemed to genuinely be living the Diplo-meets-Arca fantasy that his best music conjures.
Flume albums show off this puckish streak in fits and starts. 2012’s Flume and 2016’s Skin nestled jagged instrumental gems like “Helix” and “Wall Fuck” amid more forgettable, down-the-line producer/vocalist collabs; 2019’s Hi This Is Flume mixtape suggested that Streten feels most at home when working with artists like Slowthai, JPEGMAFIA, and SOPHIE, unpredictable pop tricksters able to meet him on his level. That mixtape, and a handful of one-off collaborations with Toro Y Moi, London Grammar, Vera Blue, and Reo Cragun released around the same time, indicated that, like Charli XCX or Lil Wayne, Streten is most creatively free outside the album format.
Palaces, the first Flume “album” in six years, confirms this unreservedly. Although not without its inspired moments, Streten’s third record most often feels like Skin 1.5—a collection of ideas that might have been novel before Hi This Is Flume, but which now feel stale in comparison to the more interesting fare that’s come since. With little penchant for bedlam, it’s an album that lacks the exact thing that makes Flume’s music exciting.
At its worst, Palaces feels downright formulaic. Three songs—“Highest Building,” featuring French vocalist and producer Oklou; “Escape,” with mainstay collaborator Kučka; and “I Can’t Tell,” with British musician Laurel—all use the same clash of vaporous vocals and fragmented synths that Streten has been leveraging since the start of his career. It’s a predictable kind of chaos, and, as ever, lyrics feel largely unimportant: Lines like “Help me elevate, I just wanted to escape” and “Where’ve you been, where did you go? How can you sleep knowing you don’t know?” loosely evoke pathos without coalescing into anything genuinely resonant. Streten still largely treats his non-rap vocalists like samples, a trick that’s fun on the first go-around and frustrating on the fourth or fifth.
These songs, along with hypnotic, sample-heavy instrumentals like “DHLC” and “Love Light,” attempt to recreate the atmosphere of Skin, contrasting intense tension with moments of relief and weightlessness to mimic the build/drop dynamic of an EDM track without sounding quite like EDM. But Palaces is most successful when Streten removes himself from this zone and instead puts his own spin on entirely different styles. “Say Nothing,” featuring the husky-voiced 20-year-old Sydney musician MAY-A, is built around a metallic baile funk beat that adds a rhythmic consistency uncommon to a Flume track. Although MAY-A’s lyrics still feel relatively lightweight—“It hurts to love and leave, I don’t love you lеss/I saw it on your sleeves, you made such a mess” goes one particularly word salad-y couplet—she glides over the track unencumbered; without Streten chopping and reshaping her vocals, she feels more like a genuine collaborator.
On the whole, these kinds of songs—where Streten chooses to leave a featured artist’s presence intact, building tracks around them rather than splicing them into the fabric of the song itself—fare best. “Only Fans,” a squelching sci-fi banger featuring the underrated Madrid techno artist Virgen María, is the most impishly fun song here, one that recaptures the lawless feeling of Hi This Is Flume’s Slowthai collaboration “High Beams.” Over a skeletal beat, María raps breathily about sex work and puritanical gatekeepers with invigorating glee (“Fucking censorship, oh my god!/A break to the sex shop/Only Fans, that’s my job!”) while Flume’s laser-like synths fire underneath. María rarely gets to be so wordy on her own songs, which mostly take the form of raucous techno tracks; “Only Fans” gives her the space to weave her idiosyncratic outlook into Flume’s more mainstream world.
“Only Fans” is one of two moments on Palaces that portends a more limber, sophisticated future for Flume, in which Streten feels more confident to mold himself to his collaborators as opposed to the other way around. The other is the lucent, beautiful Caroline Polachek collaboration “Sirens.” Over anxious, scraping synths, Polachek sings in her highest register about the early days of the pandemic, when ambulance sirens were all you could hear on the street: “And if I could/With just a sigh/I’d stop the tide/Of siren cries.” As Polachek’s wishes come crashing down (“No wand of mine/No end in sight”) so do Streten’s synths, splintering and refracting in an instant. On “Sirens,” Streten and Polachek work in perfect harmony: It’s an abstracted portrait of crisis that’s vivid in its evocations. On an album that often feels like it’s going through the motions, it offers a tantalizing glimpse into what could have been.


The New Jersey trio's latest EP may be half as long as their 2012 full-length, Ugly, but it's twice as musically diverse, taking its predecessor's psychedelic influences into more sophisticated emotional terrain for some of the hookiest, most melodic songs Screaming Females have ever recorded.

Chalk Tape

Screaming Females compensate for one half of its moniker not being entirely accurate-- two-thirds of the New Jersey trio is male, after all-- by redoubling its efforts on the other half. Last year's Steve Albini-produced Ugly was a ferocious post-punk, post-90s, post-patience for your sorry ass guitar-rock record. It sprawled like a double gatefold classic rock LP, but the tone was intensely, if not narrowly, aggressive. The group's sole Screaming Female, singer/guitarist Marissa Paternoster, tore through a series of loose songs spotlighting her unpredictable vocal and six-string contortions. Any bruises left in her wake were intentional.
The new Chalk Tape EP is half as long as Ugly, but twice as musically diverse. The record's short, economical songs expand on the psychedelic influences broached on Ugly, and take them into more sophisticated emotional terrain. Chalk Tape even subs in an acoustic guitar every now and then, and changes up the band's grunge/sludge template with Middle Eastern grooves and new wavey basslines. These subtle yet unmistakable musical flourishes accompany some of the hookiest, most melodic songs Screaming Females have ever recorded.
In a way, Chalk Tape feels like an act of reconnaissance, a cautious feeling-out to gauge whether fans will appreciate a relatively poppy follow-up to Ugly. Chalk Tape is composed of songs recorded throughout 2012 in a manner that deviated from the band's usual "jam it out in the studio" approach. These tracks started out as concepts written on a chalk board; the band then translated these ideas into songs, and laid them down quickly without further revisions. For the standout "Bad Men", the original concept could have been "Tusk-era Stevie Nicks ballad with a doom-folk twist"; that's what it ended up sounding like, anyway, thanks to Paternoster's surprisingly tender vocal and a demented, druggy coda that takes romantic desolation to a disquieting place. On the opposite end of Chalk Tape's spectrum is the brilliant "Crushing the Kingdom", a Dio-esque metal epic in 63 shred-filled seconds. In the middle is "Sick Bed"; a rubbery bassline gives the song an extra dose of sinister psych rock evilness, but it's Paternoster who nails you to the floor, double-tracking her voice on the verse and turning it into a duet between ghostly, undead witches.
Chalk Tape isn't completely removed from its predecessor; "Green Vapors" and the hellacious blast of white noise that is "Wrecking Ball" offer plenty of sudden, violent interruptions and skin-crawling rants. But now more than ever, Screaming Females can grab you with songs, rather than just an overpowering instrumental attack. "Poison Arrow" might be their best song yet-- Paternoster hangs back for the first part, letting the swinging rhythm section of Jarrett Dougherty and King Mike do most of the heavy lifting until slashing out some space for a choked, inverted guitar solo that stops just short of exploding. This is an exciting new direction for a very exciting rock band. Chalk Tape could wind up as an important transitional milestone on the way to a future breakthrough but for now, it's a very engaging record on its own.