On her second album, Billie Eilish sings with unsparing honesty about her rapid ascent to stardom and all its accompanying horrors. It’s woozy, effortlessly melodic, and showcases her command over the pop landscape.

Happier Than Ever

In March of 2020, Billie Eilish began incorporating a short film titled “Not My Responsibility” into her concerts. The shadowy four-minute clip shows Eilish slowly taking off her clothing and submerging into a slick pool of black goop, soundtracked by a spoken-word monologue about the body-shaming she faced as the most visible teenage girl on the planet. Since the release of her offbeat, gothy, Grammy-sweeping debut When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? one year prior, Eilish had become the media’s new favorite specimen to dissect. Specifically, her body, which Eilish often concealed beneath loud, oversized outfits. Some members of the peanut gallery applauded what they saw as a feminist refusal to be sexualized, a “body positivity” narrative that often bordered on slut-shaming women who choose to dress differently. All Eilish could do was try her best not to let it get to her. “So while I feel your stares, your disapproval or your sigh of relief,” she murmurs on “Not My Responsibility,” “If I lived by them, I’d never be able to move.”
The clip was an imperial mic drop. Unfortunately, “Not My Responsibility” played at only three concerts before the coronavirus outbreak canceled her tour and sent Eilish back home to Los Angeles. Eilish and Finneas—her brother, producer, and co-writer—hadn’t planned to make a record during quarantine. But their mother encouraged them to establish a casual writing routine at Finneas’ home studio—a nice upgrade from their previous workspace, Finneas’ childhood bedroom—and the songs that form Eilish’s second album, Happier Than Ever, naturally started taking shape.
The tears that dampen Eilish’s cheeks on the cover suggest that the album’s title is more a dream than a reality. On Happier Than Ever, the newly bleached-blonde 19-year-old sifts through the rubble of an ascent so life-altering and littered with landmines that her teenage idol, Justin Bieber, once broke down crying with worry for her. From the jump, there’s a palpable sense of longing for simpler times. “Things I once enjoyed just keep me employed now,” she wearily croons on the album opener “Getting Older.”
The reality of a pop star is so inherently surreal that it often borders on fantasy, but Eilish’s music has never worn tiny, rose-tinted sunglasses: Her debut’s frank exploration of mental health, addiction, and self-harm had concerned parents wringing their hands while their children rejoiced at a pop star being weird and depressed just like them. Happier Than Ever is full of admissions, plainly sung, with very little left between the lines. The things Eilish knows now are stalkers roaming her neighborhood, lovers who need to sign nondisclosure agreements, and strangers poring over paparazzi shots of her body. She doesn’t pretend that these problems are relatable, but she does know that they are just more extreme versions of concerns that plague people young and old: anxiety about how people perceive you, a desire to leave your current life behind, a fear that nothing will ever be normal again.
Instead of chasing the nightmarish pop of its predecessor, Happier Than Ever retreats into a softer sound where the flashes of weirdness are subtle but inventive. There’s a lot less trap and a lot more jazz (in one interview, Eilish name-dropped torch-singers like Julie London, Frank Sinatra, and Peggy Lee). On the more subdued moments, Eilish’s soprano, so often overshadowed by low-end distortion, is allowed to breathe. “My Future” luxuriates in a soft silkiness before injecting an optimistic spring into its step. The piano-driven ballad “Halley’s Comet” likens Eilish’s caution about falling in love to the cosmic phenomenon, which notably comes around twice in a lifetime. Much to Finneas’ credit, the atmosphere of these tracks is quietly vast and full of carefully placed flourishes.
Some of Happier Than Ever’s quieter tracks drag—“Everybody Dies”’s dreary grasps at existentialism barely leave an impression. That said, as the beat change on “My Future” shows, Happier Than Ever’s best songs are the ones where Eilish and Finneas allow one small idea to mutate into two or three bigger ones. The loss-of-innocence anthem “Goldwing” begins with Eilish performing a section of composer Gustav Holst’s orchestral translation of the Rig Veda, a canonical Hindu text, and ends as glitchy thumper. A more obvious hit will inevitably be “Oxytocin,” which places Eilish’s famous breathy whispers deep inside the walls of a dark, steamy club. The track starts off sultry, all body rolls, before it turns on a dime and launches itself out a window in a blitz of abrasive synths à la Crystal Castles or early Grimes. The title track, another clear highlight, escalates from a dainty and detached critique of an ex to an eruption of hellfire. “I don’t relate to you, no/’Cause I’d never treat me this shitty,” Eilish roars, multi-tracked over a barrage of blown-out guitars so you know she means it. The barbs grow sharper and sharper—the dude ignored her mom!—until she finally screams, “Just fucking leave me alone.”
Midway through the album, “Not My Responsibility” reappears as a spoken word interlude. The statement packs a smaller punch without the visual accompaniment but sets the tone for the record’s latter half, which directly deals with sex, control, and voyeurism. “OverHeated”—ironically one of the album’s more undercooked songs—expands on “Not My Responsibility”’s woozy ambience and builds it into a thick beat that calls out the paparazzi and social media commentators who objectify her: “Did you really think this is the right thing to do?/Is it news, news to who?/That I really look just like the rest of you.” “Your Power” is more effectively disturbing, blurring the lines between Eilish’s own experiences with older men who exploit young women and those of others. “She was sleeping in your clothes/But now she’s got to get to class…” she murmurs over an acoustic guitar. “…Does it keep you in control/For you to keep her in a cage?” While Eilish’s first album was full of overtly scary thoughts—stapled tongues, monsters under beds, teen suicide—the reality presented on “Your Power” is profoundly more haunting.
The emotional manipulation at the heart of “Your Power” makes Eilish’s choices a few songs later all the more rewarding. On the acoustic guitar closer, “Male Fantasy,” Eilish watches porn to try to distract herself from a breakup only to be confronted with a warped depiction of female pleasure. Bummed out but not defeated, she lets her mind wander until she reaches the wise conclusion: Very little in this world is as cut and dry as it might seem, even her feelings of heartache. Perhaps because so much of the album is bedeviled by forces beyond her control, the best points on Happier Than Ever are the ones like this, where Eilish asserts her agency and self-worth. “I didn’t change my number, I only changed who I believe in,” she saucily dishes early on in the album, a line that should spark a round of applause. “Know I’m supposed to be with someone,” she sings more pensively on “My Future.” “But aren’t I someone?”
Recall, for a minute, the 2020 Grammy Awards. Just before the Album of the Year award was announced, a flustered Eilish—who already had won an armful of statues that evening—mouthed the words, “Please don’t be me.” It was all so much, so fast; she wouldn’t mind one moment out of the spotlight. Happier Than Ever climbs down from the gilded world of fame to offer a candid report from the coming-of-age trenches, where the past is embarrassing, the future feels excruciatingly distant, and the present is simply exhausting. Eilish doesn’t pretend to have it all figured out.

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Asheville-via-Bhutan gutiarist Tashi Dorji has made a handful of diverse releases in the past decade, mostly on cassette. He and Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny chose tracks from those (and some unreleased tapes) for his first, self-titled LP. There are only six pieces here, but each feels like its own planet.

Tashi Dorji

One fascinating paradox about art is that limits can prove freeing. Narrow your parameters and you might find solutions you wouldn’t have if your choices were infinite. It’s why entire movements have been based on self-imposed restrictions: take the Oulipo group, whose Georges Perec wrote an entire novel without the letter e, or Dogme95, in which directors such as Lars Von Trier and Harmony Korine adhered to rules about hand-held cameras and on-set sound.
It might seem odd to compare those contrivances to the simple act of making solo instrumental guitar music. After all, the form is not exactly unusual, having been around longer than jazz ensembles or rock bands. Still, to play guitar alone is to submit to restrictions—not only in the finite number of sounds you can make, but in what little innovation is still available. So much has been done and so many legends loom large—especially, for anyone picking strings now, the two-headed monster of John Fahey and Derek Bailey—that playing something new seems nearly impossible.
I’m not sure Tashi Dorji has made anything completely new yet, but the range of creative solutions he’s found while trying to avoid the well-worn paths of instrumental guitar music is thrilling. Raised in Bhutan and based in Asheville, N.C. since 2000, Dorji has made a handful of diverse releases in the past decade, mostly on cassette. He and Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny chose tracks from those (and some unreleased tapes) for his first, self-titled LP. There are only six pieces here, but each feels like its own planet. They occupy the same sonic universe but are different enough to suggest Dorji has traversed light years between each.
Dorji covers a lot of ground inside each piece. Often he’ll counter a dizzying cluster of high-speed plucks with subdued phrases and full stops, in the process echoing blues, classical, new age, and idiom-less free improv. As a result, “Improvisation II” feels like a baroque exercise and a spaced-out head rush, while “Still III” is both meditative and hyperactively impulsive. Dorji seems to cram everything he can think of into closer “Sunder”, whose ringing cycles have a hypnotic persistence, like an image you can’t get out of your head no matter how long you close your eyes.
It might sound like Dorji’s playing is so all over the place that it’s jarring—and it can be—but that’s also what makes it unified, because everything on *Tashi Dorji *sounds like the tugging and jostling of a single brain. Each piece is a reactive internal monologue wherein previous pushes echo in later pulls. Follow all the darting notes and you can practically see Dorji’s neurons firing at each other, every one a point or counterpoint in an ongoing argument he’s having with himself.
Of course, not everyone likes to watch a fight, and Dorji’s string-wrangling will likely appeal most to those already inclined to wordless note-battles. From a distance, it might even look like his style is not that much of deviation from the patterns honed by the many storied players who preceded him. But sometimes when you zoom in close enough, you can find infinity inside the infinitesimal, and Dorji has managed to turn what could have merely been small variations into some pretty grand spaces.


On Yelawolf's major label debut-- featuring guest spots from Eminem, Mystikal, Killer Mike, and Kid Rock, among others-- the Alabama rapper's attempts at crossing over make a potentially great album go off the rails.

Radioactive

There's a curious moment at the end of the sixth track on Yelawolf's major-label debut. It's "Throw It Up", one of the album's highlights. After the song ends, there's a skit where Yelawolf and his boss, Eminem, discuss the course of the album. Eminem tells Yelawolf that the album needs songs for women, love songs specifically. Yela, for his part, feigns protest. It's presented as a conversation that any label head might have with an artist, but including it on the album is a bizarre and remarkably cynical move. It's unclear whether it's presented as a warning, an apology, a cop-out, or all three, but it more importantly marks exactly where a potentially great album starts to go off the rails.
The idea of "crossing over" is something almost every rapper at a major label has to deal with. Making songs about, and for, women-- be it about love or dancing-- to gain popularity is a move about as old as the genre itself. For some rappers, it's a seamless transition. For others, it's not. It can be frustrating and dispiriting to watch the formula applied to a career that has yet to take shape, though it's a process everyone more or less knows is coming. It's also a route that can be rejected (a recent obvious example being Odd Future) or navigated deftly ("No Hands" didn't lose Waka Flocka any cred). Or, I guess, one can take the path Yelawolf chose, to lamely act as if you're a prisoner of a system that you chose to enter and make half-assed songs as if sentenced by law.
And with that rehearsed conversation with Eminem about making love songs for women, Yelawolf is trying to absolve himself from the responsibility of about one-third of Radioactive being decidedly half-assed. The middle of the album (featuring hooks from the likes of Priscilla Renea and Fefe Dobson) is far and away the worst music of Yelawolf's career, and he knows it. His rapping is passable, but the beats are leaden and uninspired and the hooks are about as canned as possible. It's hard to imagine what the market for those songs is, really-- I can't imagine that Yelawolf's female fans want to hear him rap about conventional romance, or want to hear a potentially good song about blue-collar American life drowned in a syrupy chorus.
The worst part isn't the songs themselves, but that the album didn't have to go this route. Outside the sagging middle section, the subject matter and production will be nothing new to those familiar with Yela's music; his voice and perspective remain sharp and unique, and he certainly hasn't lost any of his technical skill. The guests (Mystikal, Killer Mike, Three 6 Mafia secret weapon Gangsta Boo) are also otherwise the type of people that should be on a Yelawolf album, rappers from whom he pulls his vocal style or sharp wit, or to whom his fans likely also listen. (There is a frame of a great album here, and in the age of selective iTunes playlisting, maybe the regrettable portion of the album is merely just forgettable.) This isn't Yelawolf's first foray into trying to make pop songs or songs for women, but it's by far his worst. His previous albums-- last year's Trunk Muzik and its repackaged follow-up Trunk Muizk: 0-60-- showcased an ability and an affinity for pop songwriting that could've been fostered and encouraged here instead of being shelved for industry cast-offs.
And then there is "Let's Roll", the song with Kid Rock that unexpectedly shows exactly how the formula can go right. Whether it equals pop success remains to be seen, but it's a collaboration that plays to both artists' strengths. As country boys at heart with an interest in both rap and rock, Yela and Kid Rock are arguably closer kindred spirits than Yela and Eminem, despite the tongue-twisting rapping. "Let's Roll" asks Rock to sing a conventional rap hook over a conventional rap beat, but the crux is in the grittiness and twang that Rock brings to the track, which dovetails perfectly with Yela's imagery of life as a rebel in Alabama. It's an inspired pairing, one that amounts to one of the best songs of Yelawolf's career, and it holds a mirror up to the four or five insipid crossover attempts that come later.

DGC / Interscope / Shady / Ghet-O-Vision


Emeralds member steps out with a more accessible solo LP that traffics in memory and nostalgia to intriguing effect.

Living With Yourself

Alongside his pals in Emeralds, guitarist Mark McGuire makes unhinged music-- a swirling drone that oscillates wildly back and forth and seems to spin off in every direction at once. The focus of his latest solo effort is narrower. Without the synths and electronic elements that intensify Emeralds' swelling noise, Living With Yourself is primarily a guitar record, looser and more accessible than we're used to from McGuire. It also has a clear narrative and conceptual theme: This is an album about youth and memory, family and nostalgia-- it's a deeply personal, even autobiographical work.
McGuire makes this pretty clear right off the bat: the cover art collages photos from his childhood, song titles evoke memory ("Clear the Cobwebs"), and the album is bookended with actual recordings from his youth. Nostalgia is a concept indie music has explored a lot lately, but usually not with this kind of specificity. These are his memories, his family, so as listeners we get this rare voyeuristic peek into an artist's history. Opening cut "The Vast Structure of Recollection" is literally music-as-flashback: It moves between samples from his past and big rushes of ambient noise-- like a memory, it's vivid, then hazy, then gone.
Apart from these samples and a bit of drumming, Living With Yourself is all guitar, and McGuire manages great variety from this one instrument. He loops and multi-tracks his own playing, creating a rich tapestry of ambient swell and electric noise. Standout "Brain Storm (For Erin)" is a good example of his talent for layering: It starts of kind of pointillist with intricate finger plucks, then brings on heavy drones that work as a chorus. The song really moves. Even shorter interludes like "Moving Apart" feature this interwoven quality. Here, McGuire sets out a layer of proggy, almost percussive notes then lets darker mechanical noise bubble up from underneath.
There's no easy genre signifier for this music (the umbrella "experimental" might be best), but ultimately it reminds me of some of my favorite ambient records. Like Gas or Eno, it's very easy to lose yourself in the wash of sound of this album, but it's not drifty or toothless-- there's plenty of color and emotion here too. McGuire also does a good job of laying out a clear arc and holding his listeners' attention. For every epic number like "Recollection", there's a shorter passage that dials back the intensity and lets you catch your breath. Thematically it's as strong an instrumental record as I've heard in a while, this weird glimpse at a stranger's photo album that in the end is surprisingly quite touching.


After 2012's spiky, lonely, underrated Anxiety, Ladyhawke returns to '80s-inflected synth-pop on Wild Things.

Wild Things

Ladyhawke’s 2012 album, Anxiety was as much a “difficult sophomore album” as one’s likely to hear this decade: On it, New Zealand-born Philippa “Pip” Brown killed the ‘80s buzz of her debut with prickly pop-punk exploring some of the loneliest and least-fun emotions the human brain concocts. For that, it’s underrated. But it’s understandable that Brown would want to retreat from it, as much for its tepid reception as for her  reported state of mind while making it. “I’d never done a sober show in my life until last December,” Brown said; years of chasing social anxiety with alcohol gave way to detox and therapy and the pilgrimage to L.A. all early-to-mid-career musicians take eventually; from it emerged a happier person and, consequentially, a happier album. Who can fault that?
Wild Things announces its shinier, almost-perfectly-happy intentions immediately with “A Love Song,” another entry in the long and usually-pretty-great tradition of unabashed pop songs whose self-referential brightness conceals something dark and whose every line—“you’ve opened my eyes to the oldest tale of time,” “you pull me up and tell me how this could end”—works equally well as love or tragedy. Brown repeats the title to the point of insistence, or even defensiveness, like she’s distracting herself from something dark and unspoken.  The ambiguity is crucial; so is the exuberant pop rush.
In abandoning the spikier sound of Anxiety for more straightforward synth-pop, though, Ladyhawke returns to one of the most overcrowded genres going, where thousands vie for maybe a few months of syncs and a lifetime of anonymity. Too much of Wild Things is aimed little higher than that – most audibly on “Golden Girl,” on its polite throb to the Lumineers “hey!”s to the synths that suggest pre-ubiquity La Roux to the distressingly ukulele-like line you can almost smell the lemon Pledge on. It raises two questions: A) whether it’s already in an ad, or just sounds like it’s already in one, via Pavlovian association, and B) whether it’s mistagged and actually by Catey “Brooklyn Girls” Shaw.
“Wild Things” suffers the same; its graceful sweep and confessions so plainspoken (“when you’re almost always lonely, you forget to take it slowly”) mean little when they’re in the service of a Where the Wild Things Are allusion that was dead long before its corpse was fireside-tromped over in the past decade by Spike Jonze and Alessia Cara. It sounds well enough like 2016 and its trends, but it barely sounds like Ladyhawke. (Ladyhawke was ahead of these trends, too—synthpop most obviously, but also “Paris Is Burning,” which if it were released today would fit right into the crowd of disco licks and vaguely house-ish beats.) For every inspired touch—the backing-vocal frisson and ABBA-esque sweep to the melody of “Chills”—there’s an underwritten chorus, or a thin arrangement, or a lyrical complication avoided.
Unsurprisingly, Wild Things’ thorniness, however intermittent, is its best strength. “Let It Roll” has a clattery, deliberately crowded arrangement, guitar tremors off a LoneLady track and Brown’s best vocal mode: tensed-throat stress and tamped-down shyness so fully expressed that they come off as rock-star swagger. Likewise, the disco chorus and New Order synth latticework on “Dangerous” aren’t new, but they at least live up to their title, and to Brown’s older material. But there’s not nearly enough of it. There could have been; before Wild Things, Brown scrapped an entire album that, from press indications, probably sounded a lot like Anxiety; neither she nor the people she said heard it was happy with the results, but one wonders if it was really that bad, or just not commercial and crowd-pleasing enough. Wild Things collapses over the strain to be both.


On the first new album under her own name since 2012, the Canadian songwriter makes her voice the focus. Her songs feel instantly familiar, like smaller pieces of a timeless story.

I Thought of You

A few years ago, when asked to describe her music in one word, Julie Doiron responded, “Life-like.” It’s a perfect choice for a few reasons. Since her 1997 solo debut, the Canadian songwriter has favored sparse settings, minimal overdubs, and no effects on her voice—an atmosphere that conjures the image of a lone figure trudging through snow, cutting the quiet in a calm, dry voice. But Doiron said “life-like” and not just “life,” because her music has an element of surreality: The lyrics—pared-down stories full of I’s and you’s that read more like stage directions than scenes—resemble life in the way a sketch or an outline does, asking to be overlaid with our own imagination to see the full picture.
It’s been nearly a decade since Doiron last released a collection of new songs under her own name, but I Thought of You shows no signs of the long gap. The music is instantly familiar, easy to slot alongside career peaks like 1999’s Julie Doiron and the Wooden Stars. Like that album, which paired Doiron with the Ottawa indie rock band, I Thought of You is a collaboration, this time with the adventurous singer-songwriter Daniel Romano. Over the past few years, Romano has tried everything—a prog suite with a member of Tool, a creative reinterpretation of an underrated Bob Dylan record, a thrashy punk bloodletting—but these skeletal country songs return him to his roots. Between the two of them, not a moment feels out of place.
The shadowy nature of Doiron’s music feels particularly suited for collaborations. She leaves room for conversation, pauses for a response. Consider the standout track, “Thought of You”: The lyrics suggest that Doiron has contacted us after an intense period of self-reflection, presenting the findings of her personal inquiry in the form of an apology. “And honestly,” she sings, her voice cracking, “I felt ashamed.” The subject should be heartbreaking, but within Doiron’s narrative, Romano hears something more like a psychedelic Western: It’s not a dark moment of introspection, his lead guitar line suggests—it’s a showdown, all taking place in someone’s mind.
Throughout these songs, Doiron shines as a vocalist. She has remarkable control over her voice, folding simple sentences like origami to reveal surprising detail. She uses no words in “Good Reason” that would feel out of place in a casual text exchange: “home,” “gone,” “coming,” “back.” Yet the way her voice pulls and falters through a line about a lover returning after a long absence—“He had said he was/But he hadn’t said when”—fills in the more poetic details: the narrator’s mixed emotions; the strain the relationship has placed on her; the emotional distance that remains as the physical distance closes.
The thoughtfulness of Doiron’s delivery ties her to an older lineage than the ’90s indie rock scene where she first emerged as a member of the Sub Pop band Eric’s Trip. As she has evolved as a solo artist, Doiron has taken on the quality of a traditional vocalist: She can shift the meaning of a song with just her voice, whether serving as an empathetic foil on Mount Eerie’s Lost Wisdom albums, reinterpreting her own music in Spanish on her Canta en Español releases, or penning songs that feel increasingly like part of a longer, more timeless story.
“Back to the Water,” the closing track, is one such composition. It’s a country-folk song that Doiron plays solo on acoustic guitar, the kind of bold, idiomatic composition that could be sung by anyone, at any point in history. Like much of the album, the lyrics describe a kind of homecoming, although this one is left intentionally ambiguous. Instead of describing the place or her journey back, Doiron simply explains the way she feels when she’s there, how a setting can change her. “I know that there’s a lesson here for me to learn,” she tells us, but earlier in the song she finds a simpler way of expressing it: “It makes me feel like me.” Because if she’s not in motion, trudging ahead and landing somewhere new, then she’s not home yet.

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Kristin Hersh has been a great many things: the snakecharmer, the Queen Mum of indie rock, Vic Chesnutt's biggest ...

Sunny Border Blue

Kristin Hersh has been a great many things: the snakecharmer, the Queen Mum of indie rock, Vic Chesnutt's biggest supporter, and fan-friendly (to a fault). But I like to think of her as a veteran major league pitcher-- though she may slump and streak, she still keeps up the high baseline output that justifies contracts the size of Denmark's gross national product. You get what you pay for, and Hersh is always a bargain.
Sunny Border Blue-- god, is it really her fourth solo full-length already?-- lacks both the expansive, electronic band-backed arrangements of Sky Motel and the too-sparse skeletal sound of Strange Angels. Here, horns, organ, piano and ambient vinyl noise dress up Hersh's guitar-vox-barstool aesthetic nicely and efficiently. Little else is required. No electric rockers to bring down the house. Alas, poor Muses, we knew them well.
Like anyone who spends too much time in the studio over the years, Hersh has logged enough hours tinkering with other instruments to arrive at the point where she can proudly add that liner note to the effect that "all instruments [were] played by" you-know-who. Diminutive, but mom-tough, Hersh casually cusses her way through a baker's dozen songs that are as personal as ever, and far less cryptic than in the past. Her voice remains creaky and pregnant with emotion, matched against her signature bright-toned Collings guitars.
"White Suckers" is representative of this slight reinvention of solo Hersh. Moving from the plodding and fingerpicked verses, the song metamorphasizes with a trumpet player (Kristin?!) shifting into uptempo gear for a California-dreamin' chorus sporting fractured words like: "You come off like a distant moth, aimless and driven." The once-a-disc "'Gazebo Tree' moment" comes early in the album, this time with the sublime "Spain," a hissing crescendo of organ, melody and vowels. The innocuous opening slowly seethes into a classic Kristin barrage, belting out lines like: "Sucking down mother's milk/ Singing my throat away/ It's not an awful secret, you know/ It's just a secret."
A moving cover of Cat Stevens' "Trouble" is a welcome curveball, prompting a little more campfire-style swaying and head-bobbing in the audience than normal (i.e. none). "Ruby," the album's highlight, has an accessible pop elegance. Uplifting, oscillating ooh's lounge amid major key chordal melodies and equestrian drumming. Lyrics shine white-hot with a burning-magnesium bright light: "This baby's like a winter bird/ Raunchy and sweet/ With snowflakes melting in his hair/ The boys are supermen wondering..." Hersh's reputation and strength-- being off-kilter lyricwise and left-field musicwise-- almost feels like a nephew of a song rather than a child of her own. Ah, but there's a saving grace bridge that affords us a few moments of familiar University-ish unpredictability.
The few faults of Sunny Border Blue occur during the rare songs when Hersh goes on autopilot. Put the thumbscrews to me and I'd admit that "Summer Salt" sounds like so much filler. "Candyland" feels non-specific to the record and could have appeared innocuously on any of her solo efforts without seeming invasive. But in the long view, such sniping seems pretty lame when taken in the context of the disc's assets, which are nearly every song.
At this point in her Methuselan career, Hersh has no one left to surpass but herself. That can be challenging enough, given her tendency to meet and exceed expectations with alarming regularity. Anyone familiar with her entire corpus gets the sense that she'd have to work a hell of a lot harder to put out a bad album than a good one. The world is jealous.


The singer/producer’s debut album splits the difference between proudly rootless and profoundly lost.

Ancestor Boy

Lafawndah’s music is proudly rootless. The singer and producer’s works are labyrinths of genre and style that teem with trapdoors. Her voice, a lithe contralto dusted with a warm rasp, gives her songs a sensual quality, but she’s more trickster than romantic. “Jungle Exit,” from her debut EP, was written in Spanish, translated to English, then sung in Swahili. That cheeky elusiveness can make her music seem playful, but a wearying pall hangs over her debut album Ancestor Boy. Built from globally sourced strains of pop, ambient, and industrial, the record is rich in resources and poor in spirit.
Released on Lafawndah’s Concordia imprint, Ancestor Boy is intended as a blueprint for wayward artists. “The idea is to create a home for all the orphans of the world,” she has said. “All the artists that don’t sit properly, that are doing things that are challenging, that are not obeying enough of what’s expected of them.” That’s a worthwhile goal, but Lafawndah is no Professor X. Hell, she’s no Emma Frost, either. Lafawndah has no discernible vision or aesthetic: She shrouds songs in signifiers and lets entropy take the wheel.
“Uniform,” the album’s opening track, is a vague statement of iconoclasm. “I would never know, I would never know/Which color, which color/The one they wanna see me in.” She pens narratives within contexts that only she knows, making her storytelling cryptic at best, and gibberish at worst. The title track is so vague and ponderous it could be a church marquee. “Did he come from the water?/Did he come from the sky?/Did he come from the mountains?” she asks. She could be talking about Jesus or Columbus or Optimus Prime. It’s hard to care.
This abstraction wouldn’t be as frustrating if the mood weren’t so grave and self-serious. The production, a polished blend of quaking bass, militant percussion, and blaring drones, is made to shock and awe. It rarely does. Lafawndah’s voice is consistently prominent, leading the compositions along and tempering their volatility. On “Substancia” sirens and warped horns swell to a peak then drop away so Lafawndah can offer toothless threats. “Can’t you tell I got you encircled?” she asks. The synths on “Joseph” quiver with tension, but only pantomime danger. Lafawndah sings of some perilous journey, but the song itself feels about as harrowing as working from home.
The album’s one blip of color is “Tourist,” a lite-dancehall track that takes a jab at exoticism. Lafawndah convincingly embodies the latent colonialism that can underlie tourism. Speaking in first-person, her tourist makes casual observations that reek of unearned intimacy. “I like how you dress and how you braid your hair,” she coos with a treacly smugness. The song ultimately feels like a catfish though. Not only is the trop-house she's mocking low-hanging fruit, but throughout Ancestor Boy, it's never clear where precisely she's coming from, literally or artistically. Her perspective is blandly adrift, tethered to neither a point of origin nor a destination. “I am an island,” she declares on “Blueprint,” attempting to find pride in her singularity. Big mood, little substance.


The experimental songwriter abandons the conceptual rigor of her recent albums, collaborating with a handful of jazz musicians on a loose, ambiguous EP where repetition induces a state of déjà vu.

The Long Sleep

If Jenny Hval’s 2016 album Blood Bitch was a closed fist, then her latest release, The Long Sleep, is an open palm. Unburdened by the rigorous editing an outstanding concept album like Blood Bitch requires, this new EP finds Hval enlisting a handful of jazz musicians to help her break free from the constraints she has previously imposed on her work. Saxophonist Espen Reinertsen gives the record a soft, melodic purr. Kyrre Laastad alternates gracefully between programmed drums and traditional percussion. Norwegian pianist Anja Lauvdal plays with such dignified restraint that the music emanating from her instrument could be the ghost of a more traditional piano performance. Surrounded by talented improvisers, Hval loosens her grip over The Long Sleep and lets the sounds she’s working with roam freely across the mix.
The EP opens, on “Spells,” with Lauvdal gingerly fluttering between notes on an out-of-tune piano. A swell of high-pitched trumpets gradually takes over, constructing a brassy wall of sound. A vibrating synth noise slithers through a crack in the edifice, making room for the sustained notes of a tenor saxophone to follow. “You are your own disco ball,” Hval sings, her glassy vocals buoyed by muted drum tones. “Hovering above you like a comforting reminder, that not even you belong to you.” Her words suggest that detachment from one’s self can bring a sense of peace. By multi-tracking her vocals in the chorus, Hval constructs an infinity mirror of sound, her harmony and melody surrounding the listener like light bouncing off of that disco ball.
Bits from “Spells” reappear unexpectedly throughout the record. “You are your own disco ball” and other familiar lyrics become circular thoughts, bleeding into the next track, “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream,” and beyond. Listening to The Long Sleep is like existing in a constant state of déjà vu.
Hval’s voice is as high and delicate throughout the EP as the sound a wine glass makes when you wind a wet finger around its rim, and those vocals perfectly complement Lauvdal’s light touch in the opening of “The Dreamer.” The lull is interrupted when the tempo picks up and repetitive incantations couple with incessant clapping as the song crashes into its second half. The arrangement evokes that terrifying moment when a good dream abruptly goes bad. Nightmares are apparently part of this long sleep, too.
At nearly 11 minutes long, the title track is The Long Sleep’s slow-wave stage. Its tonal palette occasionally recalls the whooshing, womb-like noises Matmos used a washing machine to produce on Ultimate Care II, but Hval’s rendering of this trance state is mostly unique.Drones that sound something like lightsabers in battle periodically cut across the track, while her voice reverberates in the background, uttering phrases of which only isolated words are discernible: “distances,” “vast,” “open,” “asleep.” The dream deepens. Sounds reminiscent of a bullfrog’s bassy croak and the twitter of an agitated cicada creep in.
This quasi-natural idyll gives way to speech on the short closing track, “I Want to Tell You Something.” Hval’s words descend upon the song like Sir David Attenborough’s narration in the sweeping opening scenes of a “Planet Earth” episode. “What am I doing here?” she whispers in a voice as soft and light as a moth’s wings. There’s that synthetic vibration from “Spells” again. Every question Hval raises throughout the album goes unanswered, but she offers assurances along the way and in the closing promise: “When I hold you, you will not be awake for long.”
Unclear messages and unspooled melodies break new ground for Hval, and she inhabits it with grace on The Long Sleep. It’s as penetrating a work as Blood Bitch and its predecessor, Apocalypse, girl, but more humble in concept and more suspicious of its own claims. The EP’s comforting antidote to confusion isn’t clarity; it’s ambiguity. More than any unifying theme, what ties the record together is just Hval herself—resting as she dreams up her next step.


The Philly rapper has evolved into an untouchable pop artist in sound and style. With deliriously good rapping and immaculate production, Uzi makes an event album live up to its name.

Eternal Atake

A typical Lil Uzi Vert song boils down to a few core topics: the millions in his bank account, the cars an average person wouldn’t know how to start, jewelry that wouldn’t shine on anyone else, clothing brands that most can’t pronounce, and girls who would never bat an eyelash at someone other than Uzi. But a typical Lil Uzi Vert song also sounds like it was ripped from a harddrive that fell out of the back of a spaceship, all delivered with a medley of influences from the generations that came before him. There’s the spirit of Meek Mill freestyling on Philadelphia street corners, the breakneck pace of G Herbo, the melodic designer-brand fever dream of a True Religion-wearing era Chief Keef, injected slightly with the pint-sized angst of punk-pop heroines like Hayley Williams of Paramore. There’s a reason why the Philly rapper’s leaks and snippets are traded like rare baseball cards in corners of the internet that stream more YouTube than Spotify. There’s nothing else like it.
But in the last two years, Lil Uzi Vert songs have become scarce. Shortly after the release of Luv Is Rage 2, the 2017 album that made Uzi a star, he entered label purgatory. Beginning in January 2018, Uzi began to vaguely hint that his Generation Now label bosses DJ Drama and Don Cannon were preventing him from releasing new music—he only dropped one solo song in 2018. In the meantime, while Uzi beefed with a suicide cult, squared up with Rich the Kid in a coffee shop, had a short-lived retirement, and became a semi-professional Triller dancer, his delayed third album, Eternal Atake, developed a mythical aura. It became known by fans as the Uzi opus forever locked away by greedy label heads, but, if it ever did find its way out into the world, it would be a landmark moment for an entire generation. The expectations were otherworldly.
And somehow, Uzi met those expectations. Eternal Atake is Uzi’s greatest album to date, a scope-defying hour-long epic that couldn’t be made by anyone else. It’s a seamless blend of drill-influenced rapping, melodic crooning, and beats that are aware of hip-hop’s trends, but stretch them to places unimaginable. A high-stakes feat, accomplished through a creative kinship with the Philly production collective Working On Dying and Uzi’s increased attention to detail—in the world of Eternal Atake, every spaced-out sample is just as important as any animated punchline.
Eternal Atake has a loose concept—something about abductions, aliens, and space, alluded to with a few skits and an album trailer—but none of that really matters. The album is 18 Lil Uzi songs about money, the luxury that money buys, the girls attracted to that luxury, and the heartache brought on by those girls, a feeling that has always inspired his music. Except, this time, his detail is richer. Uzi is not just compiling a list of brands; he paints colorful scenes down to the specificity of his Air Forces or a tag on his beanie.
Lil Uzi Vert has never rapped this well. He has always been capable, but much of his breakout mixtapes took a bright and singsongy approach to pair with his lovestruck personality. On “Silly Watch,” Uzi’s pace is relentless: It’s like sitting in the passenger seat while Uzi, head barely over the steering wheel, cruises into triple digits. “She look good, but she wear Fashion Nova/Took her shoppin’, put her right in some Vetements,” says Uzi, like every line is stepping on the one before it. “You Better Move” is similar, as Uzi fires off puns referencing forgotten pop culture tokens from his past—Blue Eyes White Dragon, Zoom, a Microsoft Zune—over a freakish Working On Dying beat, sampling sounds from “Space Cadet 3D Pinball,” which used to come pre-loaded with Windows. Uzi switches flows with ease, takes pauses that feel like a sudden pull of the emergency brake, and finishes every line with a high-pitch squeal that rivals Future on “King’s Dead.”
Uzi and Working On Dying really gel on “POP.” On a beat that sounds like it’s from the dystopian world of The Terminator, Uzi goes on the most intense Soho shopping spree: “I went to the store and got me some Vetements/Pradas and Balenci’, Balenci’, Balenci’,” he says like his voice is near-breaking. He goes on to name the brand “Balenci’” another 15 times, one of the countless unexpected moments that are not over-thought—the maximized version of the Uzi persona. Listening to Uzi rap this free is like watching an Olympic swimmer: He’s flying and I’m exhausted for him.
Eventually, Uzi takes his foot off the gas and weaves a melody in between his bars. “Celebration Station” is near-perfect, as Uzi sings and rolls his Rs: “And I can’t do my dance cause my pants, they from France,” he says, not joking. Then, there’s the delirious ballad “Chrome Heart Tags.” It’s bigger, but Uzi is still rapping about heartache and brands few can afford. The glorious mess of a beat is by Chief Keef, who wields drums that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Flockaveli-era Lux Luger beat paired with vocal samples that make it sound like a nightmare influenced by hallucinogens. Uzi and his producers aren’t reinventing the genre, but reimagining it, blending production and melodies of the last decade in hip-hop, while pushing it forward. At once, it feels like both the past and future.
On Eternal Atake you won’t find any pop songs—even a Backstreet Boys interpolation gets flipped on its head—or any attempts at being a rockstar—it’s a rap album. For a while, in the 2010s, many of Uzi’s SoundCloud peers were fed the nonsense that for a rapper to reach superstardom, they had to break down the genre’s barriers. But that was wrong: Hip-hop is limitless. Lil Uzi Vert made an event album, where the main attraction is flex raps and production that builds on its roots. Not even two years (an eternity in rap) was able to hold back Eternal Atake, an album that will be chased for years to come.


The Toronto jangle-pop duo doesn’t attempt to upset the winning formula established on its 2021 debut; it just executes the same bittersweet moves with even more militaristic precision.

Harm’s Way

For half a century, jangly guitar pop has been a reliable delivery vehicle for both irrepressible joy and aching melancholy; it’s the musical vantage point from which a sunrise and sunset both look the same. But the songs of Toronto‘s Ducks Ltd. don’t so much deal in simple happy-sound/sad-lyric dichotomies as explore the symbiotic relationship between ennui and urgency. Since debuting in 2019, the duo of Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis has been building a modest but sturdy catalog of songs that communicate the frustration of being stuck—in stagnant relationships, soul-crushing cities, a doomed world—with fleet-footed, blurrily strummed joie de vivre. If McGreevy often sings from the perspective of someone in desperate need of motivation, Ducks Ltd.’s excitable rave-ups function as the musical equivalent of a fitness app prodding him to close his rings for the day.
On their second album, Harm’s Way, McGreevy and fellow guitarist Lewis don’t do much to upset their winning formula; they just execute it with more militaristic precision. On the sprightly “The Main Thing,” McGreevy sings, “I've been sort of staying in my lane/Moving like the eyes in a painting”—a line highly reflective of a band firmly ensconced in its comfort zone, yet open to incremental yet impactful evolutions. For the first time, the musicians decamped from their makeshift basement studio in Toronto and recorded in Chicago, plugging into a local network of collaborators that includes producer Dave Vettraino (Deeper, Melkbelly), Dehd’s Jason Balla, and Ratboys’ Julia Steiner and Marcus Nuccio, among others. Ducks Ltd. remain hitched to a lineage that spans Antipodean ’80s indie greats like the Clean and the Go-Betweens and modern-day torchbearers like Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever; with its twangly guitar lines, picture-postcard scenery, and yearning romanticism, you’d swear “Cathedral City” was some bygone Grant McLennan gem. But the expanded cast helps Ducks Ltd. shake off the hermetic, home-recorded feel of 2021’s Get Bleak EP and its full-length follow-up, Modern Fiction, giving the songs more room to breathe and blossom.
You can measure Ducks Ltd.’s relationship to—and growing distance from—their influences in their choice of railway metaphors: Where the Go-Betweens once wistfully compared unrequited desire to a “Head Full of Steam,” McGreevy renders a doomed partnership as a crash-bound “Train Full of Gasoline,” a song that aptly barrels forward like a runaway locomotive. Pretty much everything else on Harm’s Way is firing at an equally heightened level. The pacing is jacked up, the guitars sparkle brighter, and the harmony-rich choruses soar higher than before, even as the words sting more intensely: “Hollowed Out” is a song about emotional emptiness that will nonetheless fill your heart, while “A Girl, Running” frames its crestfallen portrait of relationship dysfunction and codependency (“She falls apart before me/And then I fall apart right back”) with shimmering guitar fanfare that conjures the giddy Breeders chestnut “Divine Hammer.”
Packing nine songs into 28 fat-free minutes, Ducks Ltd. approach Harm’s Way like a merciless personal trainer: After one mad dash ends, they permit nary a second of rest before initiating another. But they do provide a comedown breather with the closing “Heavy Bag,” where McGreevy and Lewis settle into the acoustic idyll of a rainy-day Belle and Sebastian ballad, before a swell of strings and encroaching cloud of distortion summon the rhythm section for a casual cruise to the finish line. It’s a classic encore move, the sort of gradually ascendant tune where you can imagine McGreevy and Lewis waving goodbye to the crowd as their backing musicians play them off. But coming at the end of a record overflowing with existential malaise and anxious energy, the stress-relieving “Heavy Bag” feels less like a calculated curtain-closer than a necessary act of self-care.


A confusing affair, the latest mixtape from the Clipse star features Rick Ross, Kanye West, 50 Cent, and very little effort from anyone.

Fear of God

"Roll With the Winners" was a classic track from Clipse's We Got It 4 Cheap, Vol. 2 mixtape, but Pusha T, that duo's more visible half, is a whole lot easier to root for when he's losing. From 2004 to 2006, Clipse were down and out, forgotten by their label even though they'd made a hit album, written off by an industry that preferred its crack-sales talk bigger and dumber. And the group responded by making their best music ever, exceeding even their great debut, Lord Willin', with the two Got It 4 Cheap mixtapes and Hell Hath No Fury. On these records, Pusha and older brother Malice projected raw, unbridled animosity rendered in dense, twisty language that showed them to be two of the best writers of their rap generation. But after those displays of hunger, ferocity, and intelligence, they went on autopilot, cranking out a few mixtapes and another album that sounded utterly tapped-out and devoid of inspiration.
A year ago, the group's critical and commercial future looked dim, and Malice embarked on an unexpected religious journey that led him to write a Bible-informed memoir. And all of a sudden, Pusha seems to be closer to stardom than he ever came in the Clipse. Kanye West snapped him up as a solo artist and made him the linchpin of Kanye's G.O.O.D. Music roster. Pusha got to step onstage at the VMAs in a "Miami Vice"-looking dinner jacket and deliver a shattering closing verse on "Runaway", and Kanye made room for Pusha verses in a ton of his G.O.O.D. Friday mp3s. Now Pusha has a label boss who appears to have full faith in him, and that label boss happens to be the most visionary producer in rap today. If ever there was a time for Pusha to make good on all his underdog promise, this is it. Instead, he's given us a mixtape so flat and lazy that I almost don't know why it exists at all.
Fear of God is less than 40 minutes long, and too much of that running time is given over to pointless freestyles over well-circulated tracks, or to tracks so flimsy that they barely exist. This is when Pusha should be establishing himself as a major artist, not freestyling over Soulja Boy's "Speakers Going Hammer". On opening song "My God", Pusha snarls, "Bear witness as I unveil this instant classic," but nothing about the tape suggests that he's interested in making any sort of classic. Pusha has some serious gifts in his favor: a great snarling delivery, a vivid eye for detail, a writer's gift for getting well-trod ideas across in ways nobody could've expected. But too often on Fear of God, he's just filling space with flat, workmanlike rhyme patterns and out-of-gas punchlines: "Money on my mind like my pillow is a vault." "Touch It", in which Pusha and Kanye beg for head, is the weakest Kanye West track in years, complete with a beat that must've been sitting around Kanye's hard drive forever. And on "Open Your Eyes", producer Nottz turns "Bohemian Rhapsody" into pitched-up chipmunk soul, which nobody ever needed to hear. On too much of Fear of God, nobody even seems to be trying.
But when the mixtape does crackle to life, we see a whole other side of the solo rapper Pusha could be. "Raid" has an absolutely vicious piano-driven Neptunes beat and an on-fire cameo from 50 Cent, and Pusha raises his game accordingly, giving his most energetic performance of the mixtape. And on "I Still Wanna", he shares a churning, operatic Rick Ross-type beat with Ross himself, and everyone comes out sounding bloodthirsty. If Pusha had made a whole mixtape of songs like these, it would've been incredible.
Otherwise, though, it's just a confusing affair. On his G.O.O.D. Friday tracks and his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy verses, Pusha sounded like Kanye had lit a fire up under him; that fire seems nothing but a barely-glowing ember through most of Fear of God. And considering the amount of faith Kanye seems to have in Pusha, I can't understand why he'd do so little to prove Kanye right. At the beginning of his freestyle over Jay-Z's "Can I Live", Pusha says that he's recording at the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi. If that's true-- and it might be-- it makes no sense. Pusha shouldn't have to leave his basement to record a "Can I Live" freestyle. And unless that freestyle turns out to be as sharp as what he was doing on We Got It 4 Cheap, Vol. 2, he shouldn't even be letting us hear it. Right now, I'm just hoping Pusha makes an album strong enough that we can all pretend Fear of God never happened.


The first album in four years (five if you account for the one-year gap it took to cross the Atlantic) from the French dance band draws significantly from the funk, electro, post-punk, synth-pop, and techno movements that stretched across the span of the 1980s.

15 Again

A little personal nostalgia can be a good way for musicians to reconnect with their artistic inspiration-- just listen to Daft Punk's Discovery, a record largely spurred by the feelings the duo got from hearing pop music as children, or the Who coming to terms with their mod youth on Quadrophenia. It so often happens that these trips down memory lane somehow wind up being remarkably in tune with whatever retro-pop movements might be happening at the time, so it might not be too obvious that this kind of motivation is what drives 15 Again, the first album in four years from dance music vets Cassius (five if you account for the one-year gap it took to cross the Atlantic). After all, it's a French house-pop album that draws significantly from the funk, electro, post-punk, synthpop and techno movements that stretched across the span of the 80s-- that's only something you don't hear every day if you avoid anything remotely resembling current dance music.
But here's where 15 Again gets tricky: I couldn't find any specific details as to how old Philippe "Zdar" Cerboneschi or Hubert "Boom Bass" Blanc-Francard actually are. This means that figuring out the exact period of the album's impressionable mid-teen years is a bit elusive, and that's where we get back to that whole span-of-the-80s thing; any record that starts with a goodbye-seventies Italo-disco/new wave jam ("Toop Toop") and crests at the end with a four-song block of Phuture/Derrick May/Orbital-style rave fodder is, if maybe unintentionally, just as effective as a roadmap of dance music's decade-long mutation as it is a "man music was amazing when we were young" look in the rearview.
Maybe more so, since a purer form of nostalgia would do a lot less to disguise or modernize the catalysts that pushed the members of Cassius towards becoming pop musicians. It's easy enough to half-hear the first couple bars of a track on this album and notice the echoes of Paisley Park and the Hacienda, but it's just as easy to streamline this into the present. The acid-house-tinged title track isn't too far off from the kind of rave'n'B that's growing to define the late zero years, only with the breathy, subdued intensity of Gladys Gambie in place of Rihanna. Gambie also sings lead on "Rock Number One", where its Princely electro-soul lushness helps push her voice into an understated version of Chaka Khan, but the production is so spotlessly modern-digital that it sounds as much like 3121 as 1999. And while "This Song" might split a snarling, bass-heavy, handclap-riddled difference between Blondie's "Call Me" and Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus", it also elicits pangs of a somewhat more baffled and recent nostalgia-- hey, remember schaffel?
Interestingly, the further it gets towards the end of the 80s and the core of techno, the less it tries to connect with contemporary pop; "15 Again" aside, the acid house and Detroit techno homages ("Jack Rock"; "Cactus"; "Shame Shame Cherie") are pretty straightforward-- enough to sound like they came from an album without Pharrell Williams on it. (In this case, that'd be a better album-- Pharrell's awkward environmental-apocalypse crooning on "Eye Water" is a low point, and as a remake of 2002's Au Rêve opening cut "Hi Water", a redundant one at that.) But some peoples’ mid-teens are more confusing and more burdened with identity crises than others, and that could be enough to forgive this album’s thematic inconsistency: Cassius aren’t just capturing their own youth, they’re reveling in the youthful days of an entire sound-- on a record that a 15-year-old could enjoy.


On the embattled rapper’s latest EP, Iggy Azalea knows what a good rap song sounds like in the abstract but is simply incapable of making one.

Survive the Summer EP

“First things first: I’m the realest,” Iggy Azalea rapped to open her chart-conquering, Grammy-nominated single “Fancy,” through a well-rehearsed “blaccent” over a knockoff DJ Mustard beat. Authenticity was never really her thing, but since a scathing investigation into the careful creation of her pop-rap image by Jezebel’s Clover Hope, in a piece called “The Making and Unmaking of Iggy Azalea,” she’s been unmasked as a poseur infatuated with “super hood shit,” an outsider drawn to rap “caricatures” looking to fulfill her facile American dream.
She got her wish but not without consequence. Becoming rap’s latest Great White Hope left her neck-deep in fierce, ongoing conversations about appropriation, erasure, and realness. (Conversations Miley Cyrus had already been stoking for months before Azalea became the lightning rod.) “Its funny to see people Like Igloo Australia silent when these things happen,” Azealia Banks tweeted when Iggy was silent on Ferguson. “Black Culture is cool, but black issues sure aren’t huh?” She was in a meme war with Snoop Dogg, schooled on rap by Q-Tip, the butt of a “South Park” joke, threatened by Anonymous. And that was all at the height of her popularity.
Iggy Azalea’s debut album, 2014’s The New Classic, wrote checks she couldn’t cash on the front cover, and inside she smushed her Southern-aping flows into EDM beats. It’s taken her four years to release a new project because of how quickly the last one expired. Once touted as a clear heir apparent to Nicki Minaj, her sophomore album, Digital Distortion, is somewhere in label purgatory with Detox. After several false starts, she parted with Def Jam and signed with Island Records. Survive the Summer is the EP of someone too deep in the hole to stop digging. It’s like she’s rapping in a vacuum where none of this has happened. The same boilerplate language used in her songs four years ago is repurposed here, only now she’s even less believable. In these songs, she makes soporific guests Tyga and Wiz Khalifa look like aesthetes and tastemakers.
Azalea is, if nothing else, competent, owed primarily to a keen eye for forgery and a well-practiced routine. She knows what a good rap song should sound like in the abstract, but she is incapable of making one. Her writing is unimaginative yet cocksure, so convinced of its own epicness despite evidence to the contrary, framing her as the same unlikeable blowhard from her most controversial tweets. Few rappers seem to have to work as hard in their raps as she does, and even fewer make stunting feel so completely unglamourous.
Most of Iggy’s raps, dating back to and including “Fancy,” are about how she’s better off than those around her, how lucky someone (anyone, everyone) is to be in her presence, yet she is uninteresting and she comes across as dissatisfied. It’s hard to provoke envy when you’re projecting displeasure and resentment at every turn. When she raps, “I be looking at the stars while my pussy in his face/How the fuck could I fall off? I get 250 just to play,” on “OMG,” she doesn’t even sound like she’s enjoying herself, much less believes her own claim. Her request, on “Hey Iggy,” to “play this in the club” is performed with such animus it’s like she already knows the answer. Given all her haters, and how good she is at pretending, you’d think she could summon some showmanship. But the only thing flimsier on Survive the Summer is her songcraft.
These songs are so derivative that it’s hard not to home in and nitpick every instance where she says or does something absurd. “The Whisper Song”-referencing “Tokyo Snow Trip” is made entirely of tumbling hooks, and each is monotonous: “Rose from the cracks, with the rats and the roaches/Bust a duffle bag open/Hush money in the sofa/Bitch, you know what I’m totin’,” she hisses over and over, as if repeating the words will make them truer. On “Kawasaki,” she raps, “The block is hot, bitch go inside/Barry Sanders tryna juke the truth, we know you lyin’,” and it’s hard to imagine any rapper has been less self-aware. Realness is an elusive concept for Iggy Azalea, who still has no idea who she is in her songs and can’t even feign sincerity. Inside the 16-minutes of raps on Survive the Summer, her caricature feels less real than ever.


RZA and Interpol's Paul Banks come together for an overwrought pop-rap record either for die-hard fans or for those who think Chris Martin might just the best part of Graduation.

Anything But Words

If you squint hard enough, a collaboration between RZA and Interpol’s Paul Banks makes a certain kind of sense. There’s a complementary starkness between Interpol’s icicled post-punk and the hip-hop RZA perfected with Wu-Tang Clan. It’s even possible to imagine Banks’ aura of gloom re-sparking some of the wilder, more macabre impulses of RZA’s Gravediggaz days. At their respective peaks, these two might have created a gnarly, gothic spectacle of a rap record together.
That’s not the record they made because they aren’t those artists anymore. Rather than carry on as the same shadowy figure of those first two Interpol records, Banks has revealed himself to be a pretty normal guy who likes normal guy things: hip-hop, clubs, and the good life in general. He’s covered J Dilla and released a rap mixtape titled Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be. RZA, meanwhile, has spent much of the last decade softening his image and broadening his horizons beyond rap. He's starring in a biopic about a porn star Venessa Del Rio and did a track with James Blake. Both artists have proven themselves to be richer, more complex figures than they introduced themselves as—and yet, paradoxically, less interesting figures. Each fought to escape the very box in which they did their best work.
Maybe that restlessness is what drew them together. There’s no great story behind their partnership, no unlikely shared acquaintance or serendipitous meet-cute at the backstage of a festival. RZA’s manager suggested the two get together, so they did, and after bonding over noodles and chess they set about recording this extremely workmanlike album as Banks & Steelz (Julian Plenti & Bobby Digital didn’t have the same ring to it, apparently). Banks had been a longtime Wu-Tang fan, of course, while RZA only began to explore Banks’ work after their initial meeting. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he cited not Turn on the Bright Lights or Antics, but rather 2007’s Our Love To Admire as the Interpol album he connected with the most. That’s hardly the consensus pick, but it checks out because it’s the album that mostly closely mirrors the transitional one Wu-Tang put out that year, 8 Diagrams. Both works expanded the group’s templates in ways that, in general, their architects found a lot more rewarding than their fans did.

And so with Anything But Words, both jump on the opportunity to branch out. These sort of rocker/rapper collaborations tend to be lopsided, with one party, usually the rocker, carrying the work load while the other phones it in (anybody interested in seeing this dynamic in action should watch the strangely fascinating making-of documentary for Linkin Park’s Collision Course, which features more footage of the band in the studio waiting for Jay Z to arrive than it does of Jay Z actually in the studio). To their credit, though, Banks and RZA are each so engaged that their project always feels like a true partnership. Banks’ guitars and synths amicably share space with RZA’s tidy beats, and every track judiciously reserves equal space for both voices.
Run The Jewels, the tag-team duo fueled in equal parts by righteousness and friendship, initially feels like the aspirational model here. On opener “Giant” RZA even channels some of Killer Mike’s bulldozer conviction (“Fuck CNN, this is ghetto editorial!” he fumes.) His rhymes still have a disjointed quality that becomes tedious in large exposures—he rarely carries a thought for more than a few bars—but it’s been years since he’s sounded this fired up. For anybody raised on those first few Wu-Tang records, his unmistakable lispy bark will always elicit a Pavlovian endorphin rush.
Banks, however, couldn't sound more out of place. Instead of singing in the focused baritone on Interpol’s first records, he leans on his higher registers, so much so that he even approaches howling, Adam Levine, “Just like animals, animals, like animals oh” territory. It’s as if he set out to make a rap album for people whose favorite part of Graduation was Chris Martin. And since nearly every song rigidly sticks to the same RZA verse/Banks chorus dynamic, all that mewling grows old fast.
Anything But Words’ best moments are the ones offer some relief from that endless back and forth. Kool Keith lends his weird energy to “Sword in the Stone,” a satisfying enough bit of fan service for hip-hop heads who have been waiting for a RZA/Keith team-up, while Florence and the Machine’s Florence Welch capably channels the spirit of contemporary R&B during her guest turn on “Wild Season.”
There are also decent verses from Ghostface Killah, Method Man and Masta Killa, but those outside voices aren’t enough to break up the often cloying monotony of an hour-long record that tries to repackage two cult artists as a mass-appeal pop act. Banks and RZA spent three years on this record, adding layers upon layers to the tracks and polishing them to an arduous sheen, then releasing it with the full backing of a major label. In interviews, they give off the sense that they’re hoping Banks & Steelz becomes something more permanent than just a one-off dalliance. But at some point during that all that tinkering, and all their efforts to mimic the chorus-centric template of Top 40’s tackiest crossover rap, the record lost whatever scrappy charm it might have held. Anything But Words is the rare side project that might have been better off if both parties had cared a little less.


The group is back from a three-year hiatus with its 13th studio album, Man Plans God Laughs*,* a timely release that repackages classic Public Enemy motifs for a renewed struggle.

Man Plans God Laughs

Earlier this year, Public Enemy's classic 1990 album, Fear of a Black Planet, celebrated its 25th anniversary. Almost 25 years to the day after Chuck D's piercing shouts bookended Radio Raheem getting choked out by the police in front of onlookers in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Eric Garner suffered the same fate. Since then, the police have killed Michael Brown, John Crawford III, Ezell Ford, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and many, many more unarmed black men and women. Public Enemy's message is more relevant now than ever.
Almost on cue, the group is back from a three-year hiatus with its 13th studio album, Man Plans God Laughs, a timely release that repackages classic Public Enemy motifs for a renewed struggle. The group seems revitalized by the current movement and, as a longstanding, outspoken voice for civil rights, anxiously seeks to lend its support in the ongoing fight for black lives—there's even a passing mention of the #BlackLivesMatter campaign. Chuck D is refocused and often sharp, using his strained, but still booming chants to rally allies. When he shouts, "So, it's cool to be black until it's time to be black," on "Mine Again", a song about African pride, it's as much a call-to-action for African-Americans as it is reprimand of cultural appropriators. The two major points of emphasis remain mobilizing the black base and challenging anti-black tyranny. The message is delivered heavy-handedly, but that's always been the group's method; the main difference between Man Plans God Laughs and Public Enemy at its critical best is that the former isn't bracing or forceful in any impactful way. It lacks bite. There's no punch.
Public Enemy's tone has always been angry, confrontational, and conspiratorial, and there's no group in history better equipped to weaponize black nationalism against white supremacy, but here the battle waged is at least partially against a spiritual adversary. The title originates from an old Yiddish proverb—a weird bit of irony for a group that has frequently been accused of anti-Semitism—and the record is lined with similarly out-of-place religious subtext (on "Those Who Know Know Who", Chuck fires subliminal barbs at the devil; there's no sympathy for the same foe in the intro). Scriptural buzzwords like "evil" and "wicked" pop up unexpectedly as descriptors. There's no piety, merely a fixation with "the great Satan", who plays a puppet master figure in the periphery, and this only splits focus and limits the commentary's potency.
Chuck told Rolling Stone that this would be "the most intense Public Enemy record of the century," but 2007's How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul??? was much fiercer and more substantial. Man Plans God Laughs isn't intense; it's concise, and though it can't quite muster up the heavy strikes of other PE projects, it benefits from brevity. Many of the tracks barely clock-in at two minutes, which suits Chuck's fragmenting rap style, Flav's fading wail, and DJ Lord's compact scratching. Things click on all cylinders with the skipping "Lost in Space Music", where Chuck and Flav play up the emcee-hype man dynamic. When given space, like on "Corplantationopoly", the veteran can still be exhilaratingly bullish, rumbling through with weighty appraisals of race politics. But Chuck's voice isn't the same weapon it once was, Flav's ad-libs aren't as timely and his appearances are less waggish, and the shifting rap tide hasn't done the group's traditionalist sensibilities any favors. You can feel the difference.
Man Plans God Laughs is entirely produced by longtime Bomb Squad member G-Wiz—who also produced the majority of How You Sell Soul—and some of his beats slap, particularly "Praise the Loud", which is augmented by DJ Lord scratches. But many others blatantly pander to rap radio, and some are just busy for no reason ("Give Peace a Damn"). Where previous PE releases this century have often sounded dated, this one often sounds forcibly modern, the sonic equivalent of your tech-challenged granddad trying to use Spotify. At one point, Chuck utters the words 'Turnt up brand." "Earthizen" attempts to reimagine the tired alphabet rap concept, but sputters, adding a cringeworthy hook: "The earth without art is just, 'eh'." Even for all its faults, though, this record doesn't lack the distinct, aggressively pro-Black energy that originally made Public Enemy a voice for the oppressed masses. That's what has always been the most important thing at the music's core. The message is still there, the delivery is just less effective now.


From its humble roots in the Bay Area punk scene to its massive hooks, Dookie has become one of the greatest teenage wasteland albums of any generation.

Dookie

When he was 10 years old, long before he sang about masturbation losing its fun, Billie Joe Armstrong lost himself in music. His father had just died of cancer, and in Rodeo, California, a smallish East Bay suburb next to an oil refinery, Armstrong retreated into MTV, the Beatles, Van Halen, and a Stratocaster knock-off he nicknamed Blue. He grew close to schoolmate Michael Pritchard, who had his own family grief and who introduced Armstrong to British heavy metal giants like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Pritchard later earned the sobriquet Mike Dirnt, for his constant dirnting on bass guitar.
In high school, Armstrong and Dirnt smoked pot and played in a band called Sweet Children, finding their tribe in a tiny clique of DIY punks. By 1988, Sweet Children had their first gig at 924 Gilman Street, the Berkeley punk mecca opened the previous year by Maximumrocknroll zine founder Tim Yohannan, and Armstrong told his waitress mother he wouldn’t be graduating. Sweet Children signed to Lookout Records!, changed their name to Green Day, and put out a pair of rough but promising EPs. They brought in Frank “Tré Cool” Wright, a drummer known equally for his musicianship and his mischievousness, and with their sharply improved LP Kerplunk!, Green Day arrived.
As Kerplunk! landed on shelves in December 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind zoomed to the top of the album charts. A band with Green Day’s momentum and punk pedigree was obvious bait for the major labels. Still, it was Armstrong’s voice, sneering and congested, that initially put one A&R exec off of Green Day’s demo. Luckily, he passed it to his producing partner, Rob Cavallo, whose father had been Prince’s manager circa Purple Rain and who, despite signing respected L.A. pop-punks the Muffs, was sorely in need of a hit.
He found one. Co-produced by Cavallo and the band themselves, Green Day’s Dookie was released on February 1, 1994. To date, the band’s Warner/Reprise debut has sold more than 16 million copies worldwide. Most of those album buyers probably know nothing about its makers’ humble origins. But that story helps to explain the unique series of balances, between showmanship and disaffection, dogmatic punk ideals and romantic stadium dreams, sweetness and scatology, partying and pain, that have turned Dookie into one of the greatest teenage wasteland albums of any generation. Armstrong’s Dookie guitar? His childhood’s trusty old Blue.
What set Dookie apart from the grunge rock bellowers of its day was Armstrong’s voice, foggy and vaguely unplaceable. “I’m an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent,” he teased at the time. Though Armstrong’s tone was bratty, his phrasing had that lackadaisical quality that left room for listeners to fill in their own interpretations. On Dookie, Armstrong channeled a lifetime of songcraft obsession into buzzing, hook-crammed tracks that acted like they didn’t give a shit—fashionably then, but also appealingly for the 12-year-old spirit within us all. Maybe they worked so well because, on a compositional and emotional level, they were actually gravely serious. Sometimes singing about the serious stuff in your life—desire, anxiety, identity—feels a lot more weightless done against the backdrop of a dogshit-bombarded illustration of your hometown by East Bay punk fixture Richie Bucher.
“Longview,” Dookie’s outstanding first single, smacks of the most extreme disengagement: a title taken from Longview, Washington, where it happened to be played live for the first time; a loping bass line supposedly concocted while Dirnt was tripping on acid; and a theme of shrugging boredom that placed it in the ne’er-do-well pantheon next to “Slack Motherfucker” to “Loser.” Adolescent interest may always be piqued by lyrical references to drugs and jerking off, the way a 5-year-old mainly laughs at the Calvin and Hobbes panels where Calvin is naked or calling Hobbes an “idiot.” But as beer-raising alt-rock goes, this is also exceptionally bleak, with the narrator’s couch-locked wank session transforming into a self-imposed prison where Armstrong semi-decipherably sings, per the liner notes, “You’re fucking breaking.” No motivation? For a high-school dropout hoping to succeed in music, that mental hell sounds like plenty of motivation.
The other singles mix Armstrong’s burgeoning songwriting chops with deceptively lighthearted takes on deeper topics. The opening line, “Do you have the time/To listen to me whine?” is endlessly quotable, but the self-mocking stoner paranoia of the irresistible “Basket Case” was inspired by Armstrong’s anxiety attacks. As late as 1992, Armstrong still had no fixed address, and “Welcome to Paradise” reaches back to those nights crashing at dodgy West Oakland warehouse spaces. It also brashly embodies punk’s trash-is-treasure aesthetic at its most American. But the closest Armstrong came to a pop standard, one that any guitarist who knows four power chords can play at a home and a more established star could likely have made an even bigger hit, was the midtempo “When I Come Around”—a smoldering devotion to the then-estranged lover who would become the mother of Armstrong’s two children. They’re still married.
Elsewhere, the bouncy, brief “Coming Clean” is from the perspective of a confused 17-year-old, uncovering secrets about manhood that his parents can’t fathom; Armstrong has forthrightly related the song to his own youthful questions about bisexuality. “Seventeen and coming clean for the first time/I finally figured out myself for the time,” he declares, in one particularly sublime bit of wordcraft. Teenage angst pays off well: Now he was bored and almost 22. Likewise, the rest of the album tracks often further showed what an accomplished songwriter Armstrong had become. “I declare I don’t care no more,” from breakneck slacker anthem “Burnout,” would be a classic first opener on any album, even though by now we know it contains an element of false bravado. The contrasts that made up the band’s identity also helped elevate Dookie above its shitty name, couching anti-social childishness in whip-smart melodic and lyrical turns. When, on the last proper track, the nuke-invoking “F.O.D.” (short for “fuck off and die”), Armstrong vents, “It’s real and it’s been fun/But was it all real fun,” it’s his Dookie-era way of saying he hopes you had the time of your life.
Critics have been kind to Dookie, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s tempting to wonder how many of these lyrics could’ve been influenced by Robert Christgau’s two-word, two-star Village Voice review of Kerplunk!: “Beats masturbation.” Still, he gave Dookie an A-, and the album made it onto the Voice’s 1994 Pazz & Jop year-end critics’ poll at No. 12. But the backlash against Green Day in the pages of Maximumrocknroll was real and visceral. The June 1994 cover showed a man holding a gun in his mouth with the words, “Major labels: some of your friends are already this fucked,” with Yohannan sniffing inside, “I thought it was oh so touching that MTV decided to interrupt playing Green Day videos to overwhelm us with Nirvana videos on the day of Kobain’s [sic] death.” At Gilman, where major label acts were banned, graffiti on the wall proclaimed, “Billie Joe must die.” So it’s an album many people adore, but like loving the Beatles, proclaiming your adoration for it doesn’t necessarily win you any special recognition. Oh, you were in seventh grade and learned every word of a Green Day album? Duh.
Time has worked on Dookie in strange ways. Most blatantly, the post-grunge alt boom allowed an album like this to exist in the first place. Green Day were masters at pulling stoner humor out of malaise, and that is what the so-called alternative nation needed. One of Dookie’s great light-hearted touches, the image of Ernie from “Sesame Street” on the back cover, has been airbrushed away from later physical editions, ostensibly due to legal concerns. Among the many things streaming has ruined was the old ’90s trick of including hidden tracks on the album buried without notice at the end of the CD, so all digital releases treat Tré Cool’s novelty goof “All By Myself” as its own proper track. The unfortunate “Having a Blast,” about wanting to lash out with a suicide bombing, is understandably absent from most recent Green Day setlists.
Then again, so many of the fights that Dookie started have happily become moot. In 2015, Green Day played their first show at Gilman in 22 years. Whichever Maximumrocknroll readers were mad at Green Day for trying to make it out of their working-class suburban beginnings probably have more adult worries today (the zine, however, hasn’t forgotten). Though Green Day never quite embraced the term pop-punk and certainly didn’t invent it, they were pegged as its popularizers; you could hear their echoes several years ago in records like Wavves’ King of the Beach, but younger pop-punk torchbearers like Joyce Manor, Modern Baseball, or You Blew It! have been more likely to name-check the more tightly genre-fitting Blink-182. In interviews, Armstrong still claims the “punk” mantle, but over the years Green Day emerged as a classic arena-rock band, noted for their pyrotechnics.
These days, Armstrong knows how to fire up crowds by promising them they’ll have a good time. Fans are brought up on stage every night to take their instruments and play a song. A T-shirt cannon is somehow involved. Green Day have matured in all the ways the biggest bands usually mature, and that’s their right. Immature but crafty, punk but pop, American pretending to be English pretending to be, well, whatever, Dookie-era Green Day were, for a time, in a class alone. Call them pathetic, call them what you will. They were all by themselves, and everyone was looking.


No, it's not Illmatic, but here Nasir Jones is again telling stories, attacking the mic, and displaying his virtuosity.

Hip Hop Is Dead

For all the youngsters and dabblers out there, hip-hop is not dead, so calm down. If anything, hip-hop is deaf. Rappers, bloggers, and fans have become so averse to criticism that the mere title of this album flung them into defensive hysterics. So, Nas' plan worked. People are at least trying to come up with reasons why hip-hop is indeed alive instead of just stealing an album per week and dropping weird science on the internet. He wants us to care again, to think when we listen instead of simply consuming, because his career and the survival of the culture depend on it. Nas couldn't be a pop guy, even with Puff's help. He couldn't write a club song if his life was at stake, which, after "Oochie Wally" it probably should have been. And he certainly isn't going to make any money off his crew (see also: "Oochie Wally"). Nas is a writer, and he needs our attention. He needs us to read lines, between the lines, put it all together. He needs us to give a fuck about the art, the history, and the craft or we won't get what he's saying. Hip-hop isn't dying because Nas hates it; it's dying because not enough people love it. If that sounds corny or offensive, well, there's the rub, and Hip Hop Is Dead is made for you. If you lecture on rap forums all day, post daily pics on your blog of Lil' Wayne kissing people, wonder why we write about hip-hop on this site, or just want to know what the best rapper alive really sounds like, listen to this album.
For everyone else, the standard Nas disclaimer: Hip Hop Is Dead is not Illmatic. Nothing ever will be. Nas and I are roughly the same age, so when his debut came out in 1994, it was a humbling experience for me. I was struggling through term papers while this slightly older dude from Queensbridge was writing the great literature of our generation and collaborating with producers I considered legendary. Pete Rock, Gang Starr's DJ Premier, Tribe's Q-Tip, and Large Professor of Main Source had produced a dozen or more of my favorite albums by the time they worked on Illmatic, and each dropped a gem on Nas, a rookie. (The Black Album was not the dawn of Dream Team production.) AZ, the only guest, got one verse on "Life's a Bitch", a verse so perfect it still haunts him in the same way Illmatic's every verse haunts Nas. It's a flawless album, my personal favorite, and I can listen to it today and not be bored for a second. Unfortunately, every album subsequent to Illmatic contained increasingly longer stretches of boredom, mine and Nas'. Even his recent "comeback" albums (aren't they all?), including the infamous "Ether"-ing of Jay-Z on Stillmatic, were better in theory than in practice-- the go-to criticism of Nas, his poor taste in beats, holding true for every failure. But, he was also getting lazier, less-focused, saying things without thinking and probably smoking way too many blunts. It was largely a lost decade for Nasir Jones.
When Nas signed with Jay-Z's Def Jam, I didn't guffaw. I didn't care. I was happy that Nas was making money, but I didn't believe rumors of a Nas/Premier reunion or the Return of Nasty Nas. It was what it was: a business deal. Whatever that deal promised Nas, though, pays off on Hip Hop Is Dead. He is, in fact, extremely nasty on almost every track, as committed and consistent as he's been in a long time. Beginning with the L.E.S. & Wyldfyer-produced royal rumbler, "Money Over Bullshit", Nas leans into the mic and doesn't fall back until he's said his last word on the a capella "Hope". The two tracks with Kanye West are exceptional for both artists, confirming the chemistry of Late Registration's "We Major" and bracketing the meditative middle of the album. On either side of that soulful stretch are "Black Republican", the fantasy duet with Jay, and "Hustlers", or, Make-a-Wish for the Game. Jay and Nas are so ridiculous on a track together, it's almost depressing that it took this long to happen, and the Godfather II sample is inspired. The Game, in what should be his template, sounds great rapping on a song with the rapper whose name he is dropping, especially when it's Nas, whom the Game most closely resembles. The closeness of their voices actually makes the Game more tolerable by osmosis.
A few of the beats are mediocre, which, again, is Nas' Achilles Heel. But if I'm going to talk negatives, it's really only necessary to mention one song. Will.i.am produced three on the album, and all of them, at least his contribution to them, are decent to good. However, "Who Killed It?", Will's odd nursery-noir beat, is the worst concept song in the history of hip-hop music. Normally, I'm with Nas any time he wants to inhabit a persona or inanimate object, but here he assumes the voice of-- I shit you not-- character actor Edward G. Robinson (kids: think Chief Wiggum). The first time I heard it, I was genuinely shocked. The content is irrelevant. Truly, deeply embarrassing, but that's what the delete key is for, people. Let's hope it was the Black Eyed Pea's idea.
At least Nas is trying again, though. He's pushing himself, and that's what his appeal has always been. He's a virtuoso MC, but it has never been about style over substance or dazzling technique. Don't get me wrong, there are verses on Hip Hop in which he rattles off minute-long torrents with more internal rhymes than Rick Ross had rhymes in toto on his album. But Nas is telling stories again and attacking the mic, and that is what is important. While his successors might impress with intricate wordplay, too often they're just saying what's on their minds instead of getting something off their chests. Maybe that's what Nas means by Hip Hop Is Dead, that the art of rhyme is lost, but he also must accept some of the blame that he liberally places on others. It was his lack of effort, after all, that created a vacuum for others to fill with emptiness.
In the end, Hip Hop Is Dead is the album I'll give to people in 20 years when they ask who Nas was. More than Illmatic, it represents the real Nas-- not the ideal-- the MC with all the skill, all the rhymes, and all the insight who sabotaged himself with bad decisions. There aren't too many here, which is why I'll recommend it. Whether he will revive hip-hop or not is for history to decide; I'm not sure it needs reviving. The need for Nas to play a vital role in whatever happens, though, is something I am sure of, so I'm glad he's back with the living.


The fifth album from the Kentucky singer-songwriter is her most intimate record yet, bracing and dense, featuring subtle production touches from Jeff Tweedy.

Joan Shelley

When self-titled albums fall later in an artist’s catalogue, they’re usually perceived as statements of intent. Joan Shelley’s comes five solo records into her career at a fairly big moment for the Louisville traditionalist. Following 2014’s Electric Ursa and 2015’s Over and Even, she’s become a songwriter of some renown, yoking country’s lilt and primitive picking to her wise, elegant vocal delivery. Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy enthusiastically accepted her invitation to produce Joan Shelley, her first time working outside of her usual cohort of guitarist and Lomax archivist Nathan Salsburg, and English guitarist James Elkington. They’re both present here, joined by Tweedy’s son, Spencer, on drums. Yet despite banner names all over, Shelley has explained her self-titling as “trying to get away with less… an exercise in understatement.”
Above all, Joan Shelley is intimate. Jeff Tweedy’s production barely makes itself heard—it’s all in the close-mic’d recording, unfussed takes, and dusky atmosphere. Elkington’s arrangements are similarly minimal. Each of these 11 songs starts from acoustic fingerpicking and Shelley’s clear, mature voice, and builds from there, layers of guitar stacked for depth, not impact. The feathery tangle of “We’d Be Home” and the chiming “Even Though” are Joan Shelley at its purest, songs that might breeze by unnoticed if not for her striking vocals and nimble melodies. Across the record, she seems to reckon with a non-committal lover, and the simple backing forces her insistence on her own strength to stand alone. “Yes, I can bear you,” she repeats, “Yes, I can bear it all.” She could just as easily be saying “bury it all,” in a sly allusion to her suppressing her own emotional needs.
The more intriguing parts of Joan Shelley are more keyed into the album’s bittersweet mood, evocative of Fairport Convention and Linda Thompson’s somber turns. The light dims on “If the Storms Never Came,” and Shelley sings at a flinty remove as she appraises someone who’s drawn from domesticity to the darkness. “How could you stand it, how could you stand it,” she asks, pushing into the question as if testing the gait of an old rocking chair. “How could you stand it if the storms never came?” The uneasy tone persists as she reproaches herself for pinning her colors to this person’s unstable mast. The rueful “I Didn’t Know” reaches a pique where it could start kicking up dust, but stays steady and restrained. “Didn’t know I needed him/To twirl me and to watch me spin/I didn’t know/I didn’t know,” she sings, sounding like the much-missed Nina Nastasia.
Shelley repeatedly comes back to these rhetorical flourishes—an approach that clearly feels safer than firm statements, as she clarifies when she asks, “Don’t make me say what this is/Where have we to go once we’ve described it?” on “The Push and Pull.” Yet her questions never obscure her intentions. “I Got What I Wanted” has a skittish outlaw darkness, and a muted electric guitar line that tugs like a clenched jaw. “I got what I wanted/Didn’t I?” she asks again and again, almost trilling the harsh consonants. “I got a good mother/Didn’t I?/And I got a real good father/Didn’t I?” Although she pleads with her lover to recognize her needs, the effect is devastating—as if questioning how she could dare ask for more given what she already has, or deriding her own naivety.
Despite the subtle betrayal at the heart of Joan Shelley, its sweeter moments might hit harder than the obvious darkness. “Isn’t That Enough” is a close duet between Shelley and Salsburg’s guitar that demonstrates the affection of their neighborly porch sessions, and the only song on the record that approaches concrete detail, contrasting images of carefree innocence (“I’ve watched the foal/Roll in clover and steam in cold”) with endless futility: “Oh, when all the red/Could be the wine/We never win the wars/Just see the fights.” But the only moment where Shelley indicts the other party is on “Wild Indifference,” a strange, swooping song that groans and bows like sheet metal in the wind, a low, forlorn accompaniment to her unyielding bemusement. This time-waster isn’t a romantic wanderer, but a self-absorbed myopic. “Ain’t it lonely?” she asks repeatedly, and her curiosity turns to pity.
She presses further: “Can you even see me? Am I coming through?” As far as Joan Shelley goes, the answer is definitively yes. While it’s a quieter record than its predecessors, and her ceaseless questions and lacerating self-doubt would seem like the opposite of asserting an artistic identity, Shelley’s absence of imposition only emphasizes her enviable patience and burgeoning tenderness.


On his debut album under his own name, the artist formerly known as Deadboy captures a cross-section of recent UK dance-music history, spanning 2-step, breaks, sunrise anthems, and dub techno.

Witness

First arriving on the UK scene in 2009, Al Wootton notched up a number of underground hits under his Deadboy alias on labels including Numbers and Well Rounded. His floor-focused verve and deft application of cute, catchy R&B samples sounded fresh in the face of dubstep’s increasingly murky (and often moodily masculine) trajectory. Tracks like “If U Want Me” and “U Cheated” borrowed from the blossoming UK funky scene and would be lumped in alongside everything from the ill-fated future-garage revival to the so-called tropical sound. Ultimately, though, they formed part of a shift that helped open up audiences to the experimental approach of dubstep-adjacent artists like Peverelist, 2562, and Martyn, who had taken to dialling up the dub elements in dub techno. It’s this hinterland that Wootton, having retired the Deadboy moniker, explores on his debut LP under his own name, Witness.
Arriving via Trule—Wootton’s own label, which, in its two short years, has established itself as a buy-on-sight imprint—the album is the product of a couple of particularly fertile weeks in his newly established home studio out on England’s East Coast.  Moving from digi-dub to burbling garage, breaks, ravey chords, four-to-the-floor sunrise anthems, and, finally, an impeccable dub-techno workout on closer “Cephas,” Witness offers its own chronology of UK club music. The reality isn’t quite that neat a journey, of course, but the ground Wootton manages to cover in just shy of 40 minutes is impressive; that he does so without the music ever feeling forced is more so.
Sometimes, he squeezes this broad sweep into a single track: “Over,” with its melange of plump kicks, incidental synths, and occasional flourish of breakbeats, feels like a microcosm of the album as a whole. Tracks like “Sema” and “Witness” are more singularly focused—the former a gloopy drum’n’bass stepper, the latter swung 2-step—but connect with the rest of the album via Wootton’s signature airy pads that drift from track to track throughout. The lasting impression is of Wootton’s deep attachment to the UK’s ever-evolving electronic underground. With shared club spaces in peril like never before, the record provides an opportune cross-section of the island nation’s rich dance-music history.
It’s ironic that Wootton should produce this ode to UK dance music having decamped from the friction and buzz of the capital to the relatively sleepy environs of Ramsgate—a coastal town on the country’s Eastern shore, probably most famous today for its depressing cameo in the latest season of Top Boy. While for the most part this physical distance is immaterial, Witness does lack one of clubbing’s “What the fuck is this?” moments—the sort of ear-popping tune that makes you screw up your face mid-drinks order and cast a desperate glance at the DJ booth in the vain hope of discovering just what it is you’re hearing. For seasoned dance-music fans, there’s nothing here that won’t already sound in some way familiar. Given the relentless pace of UK dance music’s evolution, this might be taken as a criticism, but it needn’t be: Sometimes it’s fine to have a little more of a good thing. And in that sense, Witness manages the sometimes tricky tussle between healthy microdoses of nostalgia and the rush of the new with magnetic, full-hearted aplomb.