Self-released in 1978, this gorgeous set of ancient songs and instrumental abstractions predicted the shape of folk to come.

Waillee Waillee

Soon after she crossed into her sixties, and just six years before she died, in New Orleans, in 2003, Dorothy Carter became an unlikely star. Her life had been a whirlwind: Born in New York but raised in Boston, she was a childhood piano whiz who forsook professional life for a vagabond existence scattered among convents in Mexico, stints as a steamboat deckhand on the Mississippi, and communal living and music-making in Maine. But in the mid ’90s, while Carter was sleeping on floors in Berlin, what already sounds like a fable took a stranger-than-Chaucer twist. On a lark, she proposed an all-women ensemble playing the very old music of Europe in modern settings. The result, Mediæval Bæbes, was an unexpected sensation, their extravagant anachronism selling hundreds of thousands of records and becoming popular enough to become an easy potshot for rock critics. Still, no less an éminence grise than John Cale produced their third album, not long before Carter left a group that even now remains a winkingly witchy European novelty.
However unlikely the Mediæval Bæbes seemed, they were, for Carter, a logical outgrowth of the music she’d pursued for decades. After trading the piano for the harp, she immersed herself in Renaissance madrigals, French chanson, and European ballads and hymns that had made the trip across the Atlantic. When Carter encountered the struck-and-plucked psaltery in New York in the ’70s, her cross-century song stockpile finally clicked: “I felt something like a strange recognition,” Carter later wrote of the moment. “THIS was the instrument I wanted to play.”
Her enthusiasm for the psaltery and its zither kin, the dulcimer, would last a lifetime. The imaginative music she made with them has long been hidden away on 1978’s Waillee Waillee, a private-press gem coveted by crate diggers and Discogs hounds that has at long last been reissued, salvaged from nearly five decades of obscurity. It is the start of a loving and stepwise quest to get her prescient records—and her compelling story, in book form—into public view at last. A seamless hybrid of clarion folk arrangements and coruscant drones, Waillee Waillee functions as a signal flare for that effort, its strange permutations articulating the shapes that acoustic and new-age music would take together in the coming years. A beautiful, sad, and bemused record, Carter’s opus is a joy to behold, as alive and vital now as it was then.
Atavistic songs, some of which predated her by almost a millennium, anchored Carter’s work. The Frenchman Adam de la Halle had been dead for nearly 700 years when Carter recorded her jubilant instrumental take of his love song “Robin M’aime,” her sparkling strings radiating off big, hollow drums like glitter beneath a full moon. Her “Celtic Medley” on the psaltery weaves together traditional Irish and Scottish ballads and waltzes, leaving notes hanging so that the overtones fade like morning dew.
Wrestled from its racist minstrel history, opener “The Squirrel Is a Funny Thing” suggests a naturalist’s sketchbook, images of a possum, rabbit, and bushy tails radiant above her dulcimer’s bright notes. If you were told this was a demo for The Milk-Eyed Mender, and that Joanna Newsom had a mild cold when she recorded it, you would not balk. And for all her age-old inclinations, Carter’s “Waillee Waillee”—a Scottish number from the 18th century, covered as “The Water Is Wide” by Bob Dylan a few years before Carter cut this—could have been cast from the rim of Laurel Canyon. It feels like a folk-rock trance, gently tugging past toward present.
In fact, Carter was invested not just in history and conservation but also in the frontiers of sound around her. She was a mentor to a young Laraaji, and long before she made Waillee Waillee, she performed with the Central Maine Power Music Company of artist Robert Rutman, whose steel cellos made him something of a high-art forebear to industrial music. Rutman plays that droning beast and a few other of his sculptural contraptions on closer “Tree of Life,” where Carter intones a Jewish hymn in slow circles through his long tones. Its rapturous sweep recalls Bardo Pond and Growing, bands whose members were children, at most, at that point. And on her own “Summer Rhapsody,” Carter’s ecstatic hammered dulcimer lines sprint across the animalistic moans of Rutman’s bow chime. It suggests the sun rising high above yesterday’s snowstorm, the world becoming a blinding white, a wintry gamelan. The continuous piano music of Lubomyr Melnyk would eventually feel this way, as would the guitar majesty of James Blackshaw.
So often in the world of reissues, records are dubbed proto-something—proto-garage, proto-rap, proto-trance. But what is most striking about Waillee Waillee is the way it feels like the thing itself, not some wispy intimation of the freak-folk, New Weird America, or international underground oddities that would emerge over the next several decades. It is vivid and fully realized, finding the strands connecting simple songs about the woods and love to abstractions that aim for transcendence, then climbing them like a Jacob’s ladder toward wonder. It’s mostly surprising that it’s taken until 2023 for this sublime music to return to circulation, long after the days of Devendra Banhart’s Gnomonsong label, Espers’ communal haze, or Arthur Magazine’s reign of heady expertise, all of which began around the time of Carter’s death. Waillee Waillee got to many of the same elevated planes first, and it still moves just like a time machine.


Vivian Girls are no more, and lead vocalist Cassie Ramone's stepped out with her first solo album, which features lo-fi, shambolic musings on slackerdom and matters of the heart. Ariel Pink contributes bass to most tracks on the album.

The Time Has Come

Nonchalance can be brash. Across three albums in the late 2000s, Vivian Girls' mix of girl-group sweetness, punk brusqueness, and proto-grunge sludge won them an adoring cult, but it also left the Brooklyn-via-New Jersey band exposed to criticism from the not-so-silent majority this excluded. As her bandmates have gone on to other projects, Ramone (born Cassie Grzymkowski) has continued to evince a dedicated dispassion. Kickball Katy, the bass player, has stepped to the front over three increasingly confident albums with the melancholic, day-dreamy La Sera. Ali Koehler, the drummer, has also taken over the mic for the intrepid fuzz blasters of Upset. Founding Vivian Girls drummer Frankie Rose graduated into the richly colored synth-pop epitomized by 2012's outstanding Interstellar. Ramone, by contrast, avoided center stage, splitting lead vocal duties with Woods bassist Kevin Morby on a pair of casually scuffed LPs with the Babies.
The Time Has Come is Ramone's solo debut, thrusting her conversational voice and lyricism back to the spotlight, but in effect it's another intimate-yet-aloof sidestep. Rather than charge ahead with the gig-ready urgency of Vivian Girls or space out on details like Rose's Interstellar, she has turned in relatively stripped-down album of songs she recorded herself at apartments in New York and Los Angeles. What the time has come for, Ramone murmurs listlessly on the title track, brings to mind the eccentric emoting of Blur guitarist Graham Coxon's early solo output—that is, saying "I love you." Those aren't always words you want more than certain people to hear.
As with most of Ramone's work, there's an admirable lack of apparent affectation across the album, which should help make it welcome in all places predisposed to love—or even just like—her back. Reverb-soaked and shambolic, with the occasional tambourine or fluid guitar solo, the songs address dark days ("Song of Love"), troubled romance  ("Hangin On"), and enduring affection ("I Send My Love to You"). Despite the low-key recording setup, flourishes here or there break up the potential monotony, as when the nocturnal acoustic gallop of "I Don't Really Wanna Go" goes off into psyched-out lava-lamp burbles. Even when Ramone tends toward the tender-hearted melodies of great '90s indie-pop duo the Softies on "Sensitive Soul", she stays deadpan enough to allay the twee-allergic.
Lo-fi bedroom pop prophet Ariel Pink guests on bass for almost every song, but his presence is understated. T**he Time Has Come's press materials cite '60s Greenwich Village enigma Karen Dalton, and though the title has been used many times, one notable instance is English folkie Anne Briggs' breakout 1971 album. The grassroots movement where Ramone's effort would fit best is '90s indie culture, right down to the handwritten look of the cover text and the doodles on the record's inner label.
Part of that culture, of course, was the idea of the slacker. Ramone flirts most directly with that image on "I'm a Freak", where she flatly insists that she's "a fucking loser," "a bad egg just ready to crack, hey-hey." At times, particularly on the dirge-like "Joe's Song", she comes across instead like someone who likes her perfectly good eggs a bit undercooked. This is the paradox in which Ramone finds herself: her allure is partly her insular don't-give-a-fuckness, but that can only get her so far. It's hard to say whether she would benefit from the more generous approach to do-it-yourself recording seen on Karen O's "Rapt" or even Out Hud member Molly Shnick's self-titled Jean on Jean album several years back; she's not them. This much is clear: The Time Has Come is two songs shorter and about the same number of minutes longer than the Vivian Girls' 2008 debut album, and yet it's ultimately a bit slight. The songs are still nonchalant, still brash, but the time for Ramone's next nonchalantly brash big statement may be still to come.


Released just days after Philippe Zdar’s accidental death, the duo’s fifth album marks a joyous return to the emotive, immaculately produced house music of their early years.

Dreems

In 1996, Philippe Zdar didn’t know what to do. Motorbass, his ascendant project with his friend and roommate Étienne de Crécy, had dissolved after Crécy packed his things and moved out of their apartment in the Montmartre district of Paris. That same year, they’d released their sole album, Pansoul, regarded today as one of the defining moments of the French house revolution. His downtime didn’t last long. Within months, Zdar linked back up with his old La Funk Mob partner Boom Bass, aka Hubert Blanc-Francard. Having bonded earlier in the decade through their shared love of hip-hop, Zdar and Boom Bass rebranded as Cassius and released their first album, 1999.
Motorbass paved the way, but ultimately it was Cassius who went the distance, bringing “French touch” to the masses alongside peers like Daft Punk. Twenty years (and one decade-long hiatus) after their debut, a new Cassius record has arrived with a heartbreaking asterisk: It will also be the duo’s final album of Zdar’s lifetime. Two days before it was to be released, the news broke that he had accidentally fallen through a window in Paris and died. He was 52 years old.
Thus Dreems is a bittersweet homecoming. With their sights locked back onto the dancefloor, Cassius sound reinvigorated. Arranging the record like a cinematic DJ mix, Zdar and Blanc-Francard pare back the kitchen-sink maximalism of their Balearic-tinged concept album Ibifornia. Instead, they adopt a more back-to-basics approach: kick, snare, hat, and bassline take priority.
“Summer” is a wistful opener, cut from the same emotional cloth as the Zdar-produced Phoenix masterpiece “Love Like a Sunset Pt. 1.” The downtempo cruiser “Vedra,” tailor-made for the late-night coastal drive, evaporates into a crispy vocal sample that sets the stage for the album’s first real banger, “Fame.” Throughout Dreems, Cassius make strides to remind us that they could always keep pace with the new breed of producers, many of whom were reared on their work.
“Calliope” is a bass-heavy belter that wouldn’t sound out of place during any peak-hour club set. Elsewhere, returning collaborator John Gourley (of Portugal. The Man) crops up on the ’80s pastiche “Nothing About You,” his otherwise bothersome timbre softened with immaculate double-tracking, while Beastie Boys’ Mike D lends manic energy to “Cause oui!” Cassius balance their guests with poise, manipulating their voices to feel as if they’ve been sampled off some long-forgotten record and rarely allowing the vocals to dominate the mix.
The notable exception is the title track, with its hypnotic dembow rhythm and heartfelt refrain. French singer Owlle is the most prominent guest vocalist on the album, with three separate features, and Cassius give her room for an impeccable performance. “Never before I had someone like you right by my side,” Owlle sighs on the chorus. She and Luke Jenner of the Rapture pair together in an unlikely complement on the hook, singing, “You make me want to dream,” their distinct voices made one within the blend.
The lyric feels like a fitting tribute to Zdar, a man who connected so many threads of dance, indie, and hip-hop to help realize masterpieces that changed countless lives. The day before the album’s release, that much was clear when the producer’s compatriots and admirers around the world openly mourned his death. Those who were close to him shared stories of not only his incredible studio wisdom, but also the love he held for his family and the empathy that he brought to his collaborators, all of whom could earnestly call him a friend. It is an immense tragedy that Zdar didn’t get to witness the release of this album with Boom Bass; the two had been steadfast creative partners ever since they were young studio rats trying to scrape together enough experience to make the music they heard in their heads. Cassius may come to a close, but in Dreems, they offer a worthy capstone for a well-lived life: a celebration of love, an uncynical outburst of the kind of joy that feels rarer to come by with each passing day.


On his latest venture, Church in These Streets, Jeezy is a preacher, the wise, older veteran of the Atlanta rap scene. The vibe of the music seems to suggest he wants to bring the dank and spacey stuff that Young Thug and Future work with into his playground, but grounded in his declarative, raspy voice.

Church in These Streets

Jeezy does not traffic in nuance. He dropped the ‘Young’ out of his name when he realized he wasn't young. The hooks to his biggest songs are so blunt they skirt deadpan humor—"my president is black, my Lambo is blue" works in a shockingly efficient manner, a mission statement that unpacked a hell of a lot at the right time in history in just two lines. He’s envisioned himself (on album covers at least) as a mafia don, Malcolm X, a patriot draped in the flag. His trademark grimacing snowman logo is as identifiable as a corporate brand.
Fresh off the release of last year’s Seen It All: The Autobiography, he's releasing Church in These Streets, and they are both as literal as their album titles. In his latest venture, Jeezy is a preacher, the wise, older veteran of an Atlanta rap scene that is currently worlds away from his grim motivational seminars. Church in These Streets doesn’t completely deliver on its compelling premise—a "reborn" Jeezy, half-conscious but still the self-proclaimed "God in these streets." There are some moments that strike this note, especially the spoken-word interludes that broadly touch on social issues like privatized prisons, police brutality, and even the toll of drug dealing on the lives of the hustlers and the buyers (especially striking on a record with a song called "Hustlaz Holiday"). But they do just feel like moments, a snapshot of a project Jeezy is unable to make.
After a few years of toiling in major-label purgatory, Jeezy’s new persona (and it is a "persona," not a guiding aesthetic principle) is good for a few effective, if perhaps obvious, metaphors and symbols. The song titles, just like the album title, give it all away: "Lost Souls", "Holy Water", "God", "Forgive Me". He deserves credit for turning a new album around in just a year that’s influenced by his feelings and thoughts on the current political climate, but it feels workmanlike and too deliberate to hold weight. It is conspicuously light on guests, probably by design, but Jeezy’s voice can wear during sustained listens, and when Janelle Monáe shows up on the light, totally un-Jeezy-like single "Sweet Life", she’s anonymous.
The vibe of the music seems to suggest that Jeezy wants to bring the dank and spacey stuff that Young Thug and Future work with into his playground, but grounded in his declarative, raspy voice. It's minimal, exciting stuff, the kind of creative pivot he executed so well just a few years ago overseeing CTE. "Gold Bottles" has a weak hook but features typically baroque production from London on da Track. "God" works that same apocalyptic tone of so many 808 Mafia productions: It’s a good song until you realize it’s essentially a redux of Future’s "Sh!t" from a few years ago.
"Just Win" is another highlight, riding a mournful horn sample that recalls socially aware blaxploitation movies and their rich scores, specifically Willie Hutch and the soundtrack for The Mack. It also samples Les Brown, a motivational speaker, and the song's dynamic nails the highs and the lows of this record—it clearly wants to be a meaningful, contemplative record, but it mostly reduces his action-hero slogans to blander political ones. The best Jeezy music often exploited how far he could go with memorable ad libs and punchlines, a triumphant kind of simplicity. Here that gets muted to muddied results.


The Pearl Jam leader’s first solo album in over a decade is an amiable, tuneful set with appearances from Stevie Wonder, Ringo Starr, and Elton John.

Earthling

To imagine the Eddie Vedder of 1993 one day sharing a mic with Elton John is like imagining the Billy Corgan of 1994 eventually writing for Marianne Faithfull: not an improbability, a reimagining. But there they are, Elton and his piano, on a rollicking little number on Vedder’s Earthling called “Picture,” his voice as crinkled as a damp leather wallet. Amiable, tuneful, and inessential, “Picture” exemplifies the spirit of the Pearl Jam frontperson’s first non-soundtrack solo album since 2011: a suite of crunchy rockers intermingling with chamber pop, recorded with the help of Stevie Wonder here and Ringo Starr there, a space for musicians who, as a pandemic raged, still wanted to bro down, virtually or otherwise. Imagine Live From Eddie’s House, not Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1.
Steeped in the mythos of bands as the last gangs in town, Vedder allows these superstar friends to garnish tracks instead of bullying them; this Neil Young and Pete Townshend devotee betrays not a hint of lèse-majesté. (Stevie and company come in at the end as if at a concert, he observed in a recent interview.) The backing band—Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, former Chili Pepper guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, and co-producer Andrew Watt on bass—don’t pestle the material. Listeners, presumably Vedder’s age and who keep their Pearl Jam CDs close, may find the petulant confidence of those guitars a reason to endure this dirty world; it’s as if the mutant disco jive “Dance of the Clairvoyants” from Pearl Jam’s last album, 2020’s Gigaton, were a bad dream after eating spoiled tuna salad. “Good and Evil” and “Rose of Jericho” will not repulse fans of bullshit-free churners like No Code’s “Lukin” or the eponymous 2006 album’s “Comatose.”
Earthling’s sturm und drang avoids potted gestures of dads-jamming-in-the-garage rebellion. A feminist in an aggro scene in which Courtney Love endured a lot of shit, Vedder has told women’s stories as early as “Alive.” The hard acoustic strummer “Fallout Today” gets into the mind of someone “drowned in her perceptions/reaching out in all directions/No escape.” It’s lovely to listen to “Invincible” open up to a multi-tracked Vedder wordlessly scraping at the ineffable like the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan taught him long ago; I don’t suggest Vedder is at his level, but the effort to escape the strictures of language redresses the image of the Soundscan-era scold. But despite the clawing after transcendence, songs are fictions, momentary in the mind. “Can’t escape the timeline,” he concedes on the pillowy, Tom Petty-indebted “Long Way” as Heartbreaker Benmont Tench adds organ washes. Brother, take a number.
As the morose soothsayer ceded ground to the ukulele strummer of the last decade, Vedder has accepted with dignity his position as one-fifth of what was once—briefly—the world’s biggest band. He’s lither; he sings with a spring in his step, trusting the deepened range of his indignant burr. After several Pearl Jam albums of material pounded into meat sauce, the airier delights of Earthling’s end run let Vedder stretch—cautiously. Ringo offers the usual super-steady drum work on “Mrs. Mills,” an ode to British pianist Gladys Mills and elegy to Vedder’s own musician father, his sampled trumpet shimmering like a memory of Swinging London. “Try” boasts Stevie Wonder’s harmonica, his skirls a pair of stirrups driving Vedder and Klinghoffer’s rhythm work. “Good men don’t have to pretend!” Vedder shouts. He may even have cracked a smile.
Buy: Rough Trade


On the first proper Underworld record in half a decade, the duo of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith continue to place matters of the heart at the center of their best songs.

Underworld: Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future

Let’s talk about love—with Underworld, you kind of have to. Though still best known for shouting "lager, lager, lager" in their epochal 1996 hit "Born Slippy.NUXX," the long-running dance duo, consisting of singer-lyricist-multi-instrumentalist Karl Hyde and producer Rick Smith, have quietly but persistently placed matters of the heart at the center of their best songs. Their breakthrough single "Cowgirl" pledged "I wanna give you everything," robotically chanting the final word like a mantra for emphasis. "Jumbo," the buoyant highlight of 1999’s Beaucoup Fish, took a (literally) sweeter approach, with singer Karl Hyde purring "I need sugar" when "I get thoughts about you." And despite the involvement of a series of guest producers whose work never quite gelled, UW’s last studio album Barking was held together by a chain of out-and-out love songs, from its singles "Scribble" to its tremulous closing ballad "Louisiana" ("When you touch me, planets in sweet collision"). Regardless of their reputation for turning late-night urban-hedonism anthems into festival-filling crowdpleasers, Underworld remain romantics at heart.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future—perhaps because Smith and Hyde’s own creative romance needed rekindling. Though their post-Barking period saw them collaborate with director Danny Boyle on both his stage adaptation of Frankenstein and the opening ceremony he helmed for London’s 2012 Olympics, recent years have seen them go largely their separate ways: Hyde recorded a solo album and two well-reviewed projects with Brian Eno, while Smith reteamed with Boyle to score the Trainspotting auteur’s Trance on his own. All told, Barbara is their first proper album in over half a decade.
Opening track and lead single "I Exhale," then, establishes the pair's reunion as a party-in-progress. The two-note synth-bass riff and stomping glitter-rock rhythm provide Hyde with a solid foundation for a madcap spoken-word romp whose introductory lines—"Life / It’s a touch / Everything is golden / Open"—set a tone as upbeat as the album’s utopian title. The second song, "If Rah," features Hyde's absurd proclamation that "the origin of numbers is a questionable hypothesis." Not many acts could recover from an opening gambit that ridiculous, but Smith (working here as throughout the record with co-producer High Contrast) constructs a groove relentless enough to contextualize that non sequitur as just another outburst from a fellow reveler, dimly heard over the din of the speakers.
The celebratory vibe takes a somber but sensual turn with "Low Burn." A pulsing throwback to the soundscapes of early albums dubnobasswithmyheadman and Second Toughest in the Infants, its lyrics are a cyclic incantation—"time / first time / blush / be bold / be beautiful / free"—that call to mind landmark moments of initial liberation, whether on the dancefloor or in the bedroom. The song makes a strong enough impression that the pair of comparatively slight downtempo tracks that follow it, the acoustic guitar interlude "Santiago Cuatro" and "Motorhome" (a gentle plea to "keep away from the dark side" marked by a "Baba O’Riley"esque synthesized highland reel in the background) can be forgiven as a necessary comedown.
They also provide a breather before closing tracks "Ova Nova" and "Nylon Strung," the strongest one-two punch in the band’s catalog since "Dirty Epic" faded into "Cowgirl" on dubnobasswithmyheadman 22 years ago. Strikingly, "Ova Nova" is the first time on Barbara that Hyde sings more than a single sentence at a time, and beautifully at that. Smith gives his high lilting tenor a digital shimmer, making the refrain of "change your mind" sound less about decision-making than actual transformation. But the emergence of bonafide back-up vocals—provided by Esme Smith and Tyler Hyde, the duo’s daughters—set "Ova" off not just from the blunt singing of the rest of the album, but from the band’s entire oeuvre.
Fittingly for an album that looks to the future in its very title, Barbara saves the best for last. The rhapsodic "Nylon Strung" starts with a hint of urban decay, with Hyde’s voice echoing "Sliding between the dust of a scorched earth." But the sadness doesn’t last in the face of what’s to come. The voices of Karl and Tyler Hyde and Esme Smith weave around the lines "Open me up / I want to hold you, laughing," over and over and over, with Smith’s classical soprano soaring high above. The repetition, long the most frequently employed tool in Underworld’s lyrical arsenal, is powerfully moving: Each iteration of the line brings you closer to the absolute vulnerability inherent in loving another person, whether a parent or a partner, a lover or a daughter or a son. The effect is stunning, the kind of music that makes you sob happysad tears in your car in the Sunday afternoon sunlight as you think about the people you wish were riding with you. Underworld’s never had trouble getting listeners to their feet. This gorgeously love-drunk finale makes Barbara a record that can bring them to their knees.


The Georgia rapper’s debut for Shady Records is a gritty showcase for his creativity and versatility, even if it only works in fits and starts.

I Died for This?!

Grip understands the strains of independent artistry. The Georgia-born rapper spent the back half of the 2010s using a ruthlessly technical and narrative-heavy style to bring his rugged Decatur upbringing to life. But, while breakout projects like 2017’s Porch and 2019’s Snubnose gained critical acclaim, he was working as a cab driver just to make ends meet. His misfortunes grew as steadily as his profile: his first chance at a nationwide tour in 2020 was thwarted by the pandemic and labels, who had begun steadily blowing up his line, were suddenly getting cold feet. In his eyes, Grip had given the game everything but his life and received very little in return.
This past year, the windfall of Grip’s success pushed him closer to stardom. He appeared on Eminem’s radar, who quickly signed him to Shady Records, and got to work crafting a proper studio debut. Even after signing with an artist whose videos he’d watched repeatedly as a child, the push-and-pull of the artist-consumer relationship he’d experienced during his early days was still on his mind. That relationship is the base of his label debut I Died For This!?—an attempt to parse through the pain and suffering that comes with performing pain and suffering. It’s a solid concept worth exploring, especially in the context of rap, and its best moments flesh out the Grip story while forcing the listener to confront their role in consuming it as #content. As a whole, though, the album’s stylistic shifts are too unwieldy to maintain the idea the whole way through.
Grip’s versatility has been his calling card from the start. Give him any type of beat—soulful, sample-driven, trunk-rattling—and he’ll catch a flow and bar out over it. His shorter projects, like his 2020 EP Proboscedia, tend to spotlight his ability to flex without a roadmap and rap for the pure sport of it. His longer, more conceptual projects lean further toward the more personal, their focus demanding a sterner sense of direction. I Died For This!? is easily Grip’s most ambitious undertaking, and when the vision comes together, the stakes feel lethally high.
On mid-album highlight “A Soldier’s Story?” Grip recounts his rise through the rap game through the eyes of an active-duty soldier. He sifts through producers Beat Butcha and Willy Will Yanez’s psychedelic guitars and drums to pen his journey from having nervous breakdowns while waiting to receive the Eminem phone call that would change his life. Memories like these and the ones powering tracks like “And the Eulogy Read!?” and “At What Cost?” feel prickly but accessible, like heirlooms locked in the closet that need to be opened carefully. Grip isn’t the first rapper whose passions have ate at his well-being, but the sense of anxiety rippling through I Died For This!? is palpable.
Executive producer and longtime collaborator Tu! helps Grip organize the intersecting lanes of his mind. The beats—whether they’re boom-bap (“Hands Up!”), trap (“Momma Told Me”), or something more sedate (“Patterns?”)—all pulse with darkness and uncertainty, coloring the hectic atmosphere of Grip’s raps. The piano stabs and organs in the middle of the cacophony of “Momma Told Me” repaint Dekalb County with a gothic texture. Conversely, the jazzy ambiance producer Latrell James brings to “At What Cost” amplifies Grip’s wrestling with his ambition to keep rapping.
Seams only begin to show when the album starts biting off more than it can chew. At 17 tracks, the album’s length does no favors for its sequencing. The tonal whiplash that comes with following a raucous song like “Glenwood Freestyle!” with the very intimate “Cost” is done for emphasis but also saps the emotional power from both songs. Most of the tracks with sung melodies, including the back half of “And The Eulogy Read!?” and the entirety of “JDDTTINT!?” are pretty but serve little utility within the album’s otherwise airtight framework. The album leaves its own atmosphere to come up for air too often, which ultimately distracts from the story at its center.
But when Grip and company lock in, I Died For This!? is urgent and thrilling. It’s bold to turn your major-label debut, an introduction to a whole new fanbase, into something akin to a meta rap version of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. But his versatility and hunger helps Grip fit right into the label that signed Griselda and Westside Boogie. His energy has clearly reinvigorated his label boss, who turns in his least cringey verse in years on “Walkthrough!” “I like to be motivated by the artists we sign and I want to feel pushed by their creativity as well,” Eminem recently told Complex. For now, Grip fits the bill.

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Co-produced by UK dance mainstay Switch, this comeback album largely ignores all the qualities that made the Queen of Funk a legend in the first place.

Hello Happiness

On August 31, 2018, a magenta-haired, fan-carrying Chaka Khan stepped onto the stage of Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple to honor her friend and mentor Aretha Franklin. I’ve watched the video of her performance a good 20 times, mainly because of how remarkable Chaka Khan’s transformation is, how powerful she grows. She begins with “Good evening” before correcting herself and saying, “Good afternoon”; the music comes in, and her voice—famously elastic and raw—slips out, warbly and tentative. She glances a few times at the back of her fan, where the lyrics to the hymn she is singing, “Going Up Yonder,” are conspicuously pasted. There’s a good 30 seconds, the first time you see the video, where you begin to silently pray to yourself, Please don’t let this be a disaster. Several bishops sit behind her, nodding respectfully.
Then the choir starts to sway and a smile breaks out on her face. She paces the stage, a bit dazed, but in full control. Around the 2:30 mark, you can tell that Chaka Khan’s got the hang of it—she just had to warm up. The choir swells like a tidal wave and the band is locked in. Going into the third chorus, it finally happens: The Chaka Khan cry is unleashed. Pained and piercing, she summons it from somewhere deep in her stomach. It’s the same cry that punctuated the last choruses of “Ain’t Nobody” and “Through the Fire.” The respectful bishops stand up instantly, the choir sings at the top of its lungs, and Chaka Khan has risen. The performance, complete with an encore, lasts over nine minutes. She smiles as she surrenders the mic at the end, as if to remind us: She might not remember all the words or hit all the notes, but, at 65 years old, she remains the undisputed Queen of Funk.
Hello Happiness, Chaka Khan’s first album of new music in 12 years, unfortunately frames her as a novelty past her prime. Released as the first project on Diary Records, the vanity imprint of Switch—better known as an original member of Major Lazer and the man half-responsible for “Bubble Butt”—it’s an album shockingly devoid of the expert musicianship that has defined Chaka Khan’s career. Instead of emphasizing the live instrumentation, hair-raising harmonies, and goosebump-inducing modulations of Funk This, the 2007 album anchored by longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis that maximized her talents, Hello Happiness is a messy, overproduced, anonymous set of hotel-lobby beats that makes woeful use of one of the greatest voices of all time.
For whatever reason, Switch and co-producer and label co-founder Sarah Ruba Taylor have coated Chaka Khan’s voice in a claustrophobic stew of reverb and chopped it to the point that she sounds like a sample, making songs like “Don’t Cha Know” resemble Fatboy Slim remixes from 1998. Putting effects on Chaka Khan’s pipes is like screwing training wheels on a Harley Davidson. Gone are her dizzying range, nimble jazz scats, and, really, any sense of emotion. When she does sing uninhibited and with the backing of some actual music, like on the sultry and groaning “Too Hot,” she sounds marvelous. But she’s rarely given the chance.
Single “Hello Happiness,” featuring deconstructed disco violins and a thumping bassline from Sam Wilkes, could conceivably make for a good time on the dancefloor. But Switch and Ruba Taylor’s mind-numbing, budget-Jamiroquai instrumental is shockingly bland; if anything, the production here, as on the rest of Hello Happiness, makes it feel like Switch and Ruba Taylor—in drastic comparison to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s careful work on Funk This—have never before listened to a single Chaka Khan song. Of course, Chaka Khan isn’t free from blame—she’s spoken of how inspired she was meeting Switch and Ruba Taylor in the studio, and she has co-writes or production credits on every song. But no matter who's at fault, having Chaka Khan and Switch together on wax feels like washing down a $40 ribeye with a Four Loko.
There’s a moment when Hello Happiness works. On the sensual and affirming closing track, “Ladylike,” Chaka Khan finally breaks free of vocal effects, and, accompanied by feel-good guitar by funk legend Ricky Rouse and backup vocals from her daughter Indira, the contours of her voice, worked like cracked leather, are allowed to emerge. But that’s about it.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Chaka Khan is clearly in a better place than she was a few years ago: The album has been touted as marking a new chapter in her life, following a dark moment when she returned to rehab in the aftermath of the death of her close friend and collaborator Prince. If Chaka Khan’s found the happiness she’s so doggedly searched for—and deserved—over the course of a life plagued with difficulty, then we should celebrate that, despite the album’s soul-starved production. As she sings on the title track, “Love is what I’m here for/So don’t give me no bad news.”
Still, that happiness doesn’t feel truly genuine across the album. In Chaka Khan’s life and music, happiness has always been accompanied by bad news. It’s what’s made her who she is. There’s a reason she chose to sing “Going Up Yonder” at Aretha’s funeral and sang it the way she did. “I can take the pain/The heartaches they bring,” the song goes. “The comfort in knowing/I’ll soon be gone.” Now that sounds like Chaka Khan. And when she sang those words on that church stage in Detroit, the smile she unleashed—one of relief, and knowing, and strength—said it all.


On their new album Suck My Shirt, Atlanta punks the Coathangers manage to have it all. It's well-recorded, well-written, and teeming with both force and emotional depth.

Suck My Shirt

The Coathangers' debut album had a song called "Shut the Fuck Up", and the elements were few: a tom-heavy thwack, brief guitar stabs, and a basic keyboard melody. The lyrics, like so many others by the Atlanta punks, are aggressive: "You said I broke your heart and you’ll never love again/ Let’s tell the truth you only like the way I give head." Then, the full band screams along the chorus: "Well grow up, and then shut the fuck up!" Seven years later, on Suck My Shirt, they've got a song on the album called, simply, "Shut Up". The message here is more grown up—the narrator is fed up after years of being lied to, whined at, and blamed. And this time around, the band are firing on all cylinders—the drums sound more full, the guitars more complex, and the vocals are sung rather than growled or screamed. "Shut up," they sing repeatedly at the chorus, more out of frustration than vindictiveness.
No longer peddling the candy-coated vigor of "Stop Stomp Stompin'" or the intense, Nina Hagen-esque vocal delivery of "Johnny", Suck My Shirt shows a band continuing to grow and refine their sound. Have they become more tame as they've become a tighter band? Hell no. Their instruments still bite and their vocals still growl. But this time, the subject matter feels weightier. Several songs have the band addressing the harsh realities of love and relationships ("I know it's hard to love me," bellows Stephanie Luke on "Love Em and Leave Em"), all while delivering some of the best performances in their discography.
Four tracks that recently appeared on Suicide Squeeze singles, reworked for the album, are all performed with urgency and power. "Smother" is a persistent burner with an infectious chorus about needing space. "Adderall", one of the best-constructed songs of the album with its subtle harmonies and calm-before-the-storm chorus, is about deception. You can detect a hint of sorrow in Luke's vocals on "Derek's Song", a requiem for their fallen friend Derek Shepherd, but it's offset by the track's opening power chords. Then there's "Merry Go Round", one of the album's undeniable highlights, and describing the "he tricks her, she tricks him" plot isn't nearly as interesting as the earworm chorus: "I'll have some fun on the merry go round,/ I'll get real high on the merry go round...".
The only snag along the way has to do with the length of their songs. Album opener "Follow Me" has a melody that's immediate and lyrics that're both aggressive and playful, but it's a song that goes for a largely unvarying four minutes. Before they even find the second minute, they're repeating the lengthy-on-its-own first verse again. Why? It's a punk song with momentum, but it's stretched too thin. Other songs start slow—"Love Em and Leave Em", for example, which opens with a trudge. But that track is also an example of one of the Coathangers' greatest strengths: They've become adept proprietors of "the drop." Right as the chorus hits, there's a pause, and then they launch into a breakneck chorus. It's even more satisfying one track later, on "Zombie", because it's completely unexpected. The track comes to a full stop. Then a wall of frenzied guitars, fingers shoved to the bottom of the fretboard, an atmosphere that's sudden and dire.
There's plenty of ire on Suck My Shirt, but the album's real stunner is "Drive", which isn't angry at all. Their warm, gentle power pop guitars close the album, and the narrator sings with a sense of longing. She's waiting for someone special to come home; it's been too long. "But you," she sings, pausing—maybe the pause is there so the verse can fit in the confines of the song's structure, but it's just as likely that the truth at hand is too painful for the full sentence to come out at once. "You drive away from me." She says she'll stop waiting around for him, but as the chorus hits and she sings "so long, my love," it feels bittersweet. It's a relatable sentiment in a beautiful song. Somehow, on an album called Suck My Shirt, the Coathangers manage to have it all. It's well-recorded, well-written, and teeming with both force and emotional depth.


The debut release from queer multimedia artist Bully Fae, on Matmos' Vague Terrain label, mixes rapping, stand-up comedy, spoken-word, and more into a hilarious and fascinating whole.

Defy a Thing to Be

It’s been a few years since Matmos’ label Vague Terrain released a piece of new music, and for the most part Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt have called the organization a “vanity label” to release their own work and play around. In 2002, they even used Vague Terrain as a pseudonym to record the soundtrack for a fetish-heavy pornographic film. “Every so often we hear something completely gobsmacking and feel that we MUST share it with the world,” the pair wrote on their website to suddenly announce the revival of their label.
The project that so shocked them is the debut album of Bully Fae, a queer Los-Angeles based multimedia artist. Defy a Thing to Be is the artist’s first formal release, but they (Fae prefers not to be gendered) have been sharing performance pieces and fragments of the album, which mixes rapping, stand-up comedy, abstracted spoken word, and goofy (but highly effective) dancing into a hilarious and fascinating whole.
Fae’s work has been described as the middle of a “Bermuda Triangle” that includes three artistic forebears: Nicki Minaj, the video artist Ryan Trecartin, and the poet Ariana Reines. Meaning, the work they make is colorful, fueled by amphetamines and raunchy, but highly theoretical, and very interested in the body and identity. Defy a Thing to Be is a short, acerbic, and often very funny album that only spans 22 minutes over 9 tracks. It lives in this intersection of experimental dance music and hip hop, one that recalls the work of artists like Yves Tumor, Nguzunguzu (and the Night Slugs/Fade to Mind crew at large), Lotic, and queer rappers like Le1f. Although, unlike any of these artists, Fae’s work is much more invested—often to its own detriment—in heady and restricted kinds of experimentation.
The lyrics attempt to explore a broad and almost overwhelming number of subjects. The writing can be very serious and probing: “Hack up the program hosting us/Addicted to systems.../You could say I’m addicted/But how do we define addiction,” but also grotesquely humorous: “Bossy but a bottom at best I wish.” On the level of Fae’s writing alone, there is a sly and investigative quality that can’t be imitated. Yet, their voice will definitely be polarizing for many listeners. It can be piercing or cartoonish, and it is often garbled by digital effects, but there is no avoiding the fact that a needling voice can be a bad messenger for such dense thinking. Even if unintended, Fae’s sometimes erratic flow can make the expression of their ideas clunky and forced.
Often, the album’s saving grace is clever, subtle, and fluid production across the nine tracks. Fae’s beats are often vaporous, foreboding, and almost dystopian, cloaking their voice with a razor’s edge that makes up for any vocal shortcomings. Take for example songs like “Elevator Pitch (lasséz-fairy forecast),” where Fae attempts to critically frame this corporate experience with a queer sensibility. Lines like, “Picture us online/All accounts entwined” or “Like a verb man can I heard your a word man” don’t sound disjointed or so random, because Fae is able to create a sonic space that is dimly lit and uncomfortable and unpredictable. In the music video for the song, it becomes profoundly weird, which depicts Fae cavorting around an empty office in a shabby suit.
Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of Defy a Thing to Be is that it just seems better suited for the stage or for visual consumption. Part of Fae’s theory of performance is based upon a kind of focused randomness that can be lost with the album form. Watching videos of Fae perform show that their ideas simultaneously focus and loosen in the context of actual performance. The critical aspect of Fae’s work seems to go missing when experienced only in your headphones.
Similar to the artist working in the NON collective, Fae works to implicate an audience, but it requires a dance floor and willing group to generate this ideal experience. Fae almost proves Peggy Phelan's idea that performance can only exist in the present, and that documentation and records of it are profoundly different. As an act of artistic subversion, Defy a Thing to Be hits the mark with its level of thinking, but misses a key element of physicality that would make it something special.


The enigmatic Swedish rapper strips back his hypnotic music until it’s nothing but AutoTuned crooning and chanted slogans.

Exeter

Though his Auto-Tuned vocals have remained a constant, each Bladee project tends to sound like a new era. The enigmatic Swedish rapper and Drain Gang leader has moved through the airy lo-fi sound of his first mixtape, 2014’s Gluee, to the the icy industrial of his 2016 debut album, Eversince, and the futuristic pop of Drain Gang’s most recent group project, 2019’s Trash Island. Along the way, his music has become sunnier and more melodic, while his songwriting, which has veered at times into the deeply depressive, has grown increasingly pared down and positive.
EXETER is Bladee’s third studio album and the first time he’s worked significantly with Gud, the Sad Boys producer and close Yung Lean collaborator. Bladee has always had range—even on his first album, aggressive songs like “Rip” lived alongside ballads like “Skin”—but, here, he pushes even further towards blissful pop and strips down his lyrics to their most minimal extreme.
The album’s intro, “MIRROR (HYMN),” serves as a blueprint for his approach. Over twinkling ascending notes, he repeats three phrases—“Mirror in the way,” “Follow all the way,” and “Window in the way”—in a circular pattern before adding something more concrete: “Ego in the way/I go all the way/I’m not in the way.” On “MERRY-GO-ROUND,” he examines the cycles of life, striking a satisfying balance between simple writing and catchy melody. But his less-is-more approach starts to feel hollow on “EVERY MOMENT SPECIAL,” a song with even simpler lyrics that consist of just two repeated phrases (“Every moment’s special, you make every moment special” and “Only one wish, baby, it has to be perfect”).
Where the 18-minute project starts to feel shapeless, guest spots on “WONDERLAND” and “LOVESTORY” from Ecco2K, Bladee’s sweet-voiced Drain Gang compatriot, help anchor it. But it’s Gud’s production that glues the album together. Listening to the crinkly distortion effects on “RAIN3OW STAR (LOVE IS ALL)” with headphones on sounds like dialing out of the Matrix. More than ever before, Bladee uses his voice like another instrument and pays attention to blank space, allowing Gud’s sparkling melodies and muffled percussion to breathe. They meet perfectly on “DNA RAIN,” a glitchy, angelic song that’s a reminder of Bladee’s influence on the clipped vocal stylings of current internet darlings 100 gecs and the legion of artists that have already sprung up in their wake.
Bladee’s music has always been about building alternate universes, and the one he creates with Gud on EXETER sounds like a warped version of Mario’s journey to save Princess Peach—but without a neat and predictable conclusion. Instead, he seems to be removing himself as much as possible and inviting listeners to grapple with their own interpretations. “I’m not special,” he emphasizes over and over on “OPEN SYMBOLS (PLAY) BE IN YOUR MIND.” For those that haven’t yet bought into Bladee, EXETER probably won’t be the turning point and, even among die-hard fans, it’s minimalism has already proven to be controversial. But it’s the sort of album that rewards you the closer you lean into it.


Mixing speech and singing, the New York-based sound poet and experimental musician meditates on meaning, context, and impermanence.

Interior Monologues

In his 1978 essay Sound Poetry: A Survey, poet Steve McCaffery traces three distinct eras of the field. He notes the first “paleotechnic” period as defined by chant structures—think nursery and jump-rope rhymes. Later came the Dadaists and Futurists, whose desire to split words from semantic meaning allowed for a focus on their acoustic properties. Then the tape recorder arrived, allowing practitioners to work beyond the human body’s limitations. Sound poetry, he asserts, is about feeling the insufficiency of language and, as a result, finding new possibilities of expression. A concluding declaration is at the heart of his text: “[Sound poetry] is, above all, a practice of freedom.”
Asha Sheshadri’s music displays a rigorous consideration for the way that technological practices can rupture language to create something original. She’s strikingly different from many of her sound-art peers, the kind who’ve spent the past decade using spoken text in diaristic modes or as a way to approximate ASMR videos (a phenomenon that has often ignored its sonic precedents in sound poetry, radio plays, and acousmatic music). On her 2020 epic “Patty Live June,” she uses field recordings, shapeshifting electronics, and text recitations to explore the psychology of Stockholm syndrome. Across Misfired Empathy, her collaboration with brainy prankster Jack Callahan, any speech we hear is regularly mangled to create conflicting emotions. She pushes her practice further with Interior Monologues, a solo album that features her most compelling use of singing as a phonological, textual, and conceptual launchpad.
In previous works, any singing Sheshadri employed had a largely textural impact. Under the Isolde Touch moniker, reverberating vocals recall artists like Julianna Barwick. In Open Corner, her duo with Christian Mirande, fleeting melodic moments are just one element in a robust sound collage. Throughout Interior Monologues’ 29 minutes, she sings Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me” with a tender casualness—the sort of vocalizing that only barely breaches the talking/singing threshold, and has the semblance of someone puttering around at home. Her edited, overlapping, and non-chronological mishmash of verses creates a technology-produced simultaneous poem, and the effect is evocative. It’s easy to identify the loping melodies of Mitchell’s lines “Oh, didn’t it feel good?” and “When I get that crazy feelin’” as deeply lovestruck. But as Sheshadri repeats Mitchell’s words, a palpable sense of anxiety comes to the surface; found sounds and stuttering samples reinforce the impression that this is an illusory moment frozen in time. One spoken line sums up the mood: “Three hours of total disbelief.”
This focus on the temporary is highlighted by the album cover’s lightly edited images of Charles Ray’s Two horses (2019). The piece exemplifies what the sculptor once said about the medium: “A sculpture physically ages as it slips into time. Authorship, context, and content fade away long before sculptural stone turns into sand.” It’s no coincidence that the Court and Spark highlight is the song Sheshadri wields here: Its lyrics reference “I’m a Rambler, I’m a Gambler,” a traditional American folk song that has been interpreted by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. When the second half of Interior Monologues tightens the focus on this pairing of recited text and song (and even includes moments when the former turns into singing), Sheshadri embraces the inevitability of contextual dissolution. Musings on Two horses and the impermanence of one’s cultural footprint are revisited with slight variances, and they have the effect of gradually repurposing what Mitchell’s words mean. The refrain of “Help Me” (“We love our lovin’/But not like we love our freedom”) is initially a sobering reality check about a doomed romance, but near Interior Monologues’ end, the “freedom” Sheshadri sings of feels related to something else entirely: the impossibility of fully understanding art in their original contexts. Find joy, she seems to suggest, in how unavoidable ignorance always births something new.
Sheshadri’s music is clearly indebted to sound poetry forebears like Henri Chopin, Marran Gosov, Larry Wendt, and text-sound composer Åke Hodell. But her music has a propulsive energy that embodies the entirety of sound poetry’s progressive spirit and complex history, one that McCaffery found challenging to discuss because of its competing but related concerns—“attempts to recover lost traditions” and “attempts to effect a radical break with all continuities.” The most striking result is that Interior Monologues then points to the beauty of all art as a prismatic culmination of exchanges across different generations and cultures. In theory and practice, Sheshadri’s music reminds us that everyone can and does participate in this never-ending dialogue.


The Sun Kil Moon/Red House Painters singer-songwriter ends the year with yet another quality release-- this time, a record of lovely instrumentals and covers of tracks from tribute and benefit albums.

The Finally LP

As the exec and main signee of Caldo Verde Records, Mark Kozelek can release pretty much whatever he wants. This year alone has seen a full-length by his band Sun Kil Moon, which was packaged with a bonus disc of alternate takes; an LP of live and alternate takes that accompanied the U.S. publication of his book of lyrics; a live EP that came free with purchase at his online store; and finally a covers album. Rather than flood the market or dilute the quality of his output, these releases suggest Kozelek tinkers with his own and others' compositions continuously. In this regard, he's certainly no stranger to the covers album: His first solo release was 2000's Rock 'N' Roll Singer, which included songs by AC/DC and John Denver, and he has since released full-lengths fully devoted to AC/DC and Modest Mouse. But The Finally LP is something a bit different even for him: a record of lovely instrumentals and covers of tracks from tribute and benefit albums.
Finally may be LP length but it lacks an album's cohesiveness. There's no big statement here, at least not like there was with April, his second album with Sun Kil Moon. However, the looseness of the tracklist allows him to indulge some punishing metal riffs and howling emo madman vocals. Yeah, right. Kozelek is the king of somber and of course gives these covers his signature reading: slow, melancholy, full of stoic vocals and steady, shimmery guitar. This solemn take doesn't work against the LP, but in its favor. The Finally LP is Kozelek's own tribute of sorts, a nod to his array of idols and influences.
The title comes from a song by folk singer Kath Bloom, who has experienced a resurgence of sorts in the past two years. Kozelek covered the song for Loving Takes Its Course: A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom, out next year on her Australian label, Chapter Music. He gives it a tension that wasn't present in the original: Bloom's version was as much a valedictory as the title suggests, but for Kozelek, there are no promises in catharsis and no conclusion in the song. Such dourness, while not unexpected, has always threatened to become Kozelek's default mode, but here his curiously pessimistic interpretation sounds raw and wounded, as if he hasn't yet shaken off the darkness of whatever is finally coming to and end. His ruminative reading of "New Partner", from the 2006 comp I Am a Cold Rock, I Am Dull Grass: A Tribute to Will Oldham, develops that theme and storyline, creating an intriguing diptych about loss and renewal.
This is an album of transitions. The segue from "Finally" into "New Partner" gives both songs more impact than they might have otherwise, as does "Bedtime Lullaby" into "Celebrated Summer". "Lullaby" was recorded for an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba!, and this song, along with dancing Nathaniel and a beatboxing lesson from Biz Markie, would argue that it might just be the greatest show ever. If some listeners claim that Kozelek puts them to sleep, he has responded with a song specifically designed to put listeners to sleep. Written by the show's Jarond Gibbs, it makes for a sweet lullaby and leads in nicely to Kozelek's cover of Hüsker Dü's "Celebrated Summer", which he slows down to great effect, playing up wistful memories of youth like an adult's lullaby.
He's less successful with his cover of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns", off the charity comp Musicians for Minneapolis: 57 Songs for the I-35 Bridge Disaster Relief Fund. Kozelek grafts an effective descending acoustic riff onto the chorus and adds a slight lilt to the melody, but it's still "Send in the Clowns". Low's "Lazy" fares better, as Kozelek's voice cracks just enough to convey a strong sense of yearning. His delivery lends added gravity to "My Friend Bob", by Dom Leone (not Pitchfork's Dominique Leone, but the late songwriter for Ed's Redeeming Qualities), although his cover of AC/DC's "If You Want Blood", recorded for Lisbon radio, isn't appreciably different from the version that appeared on What's Next to the Moon. There's a hodgepodge quality to The Finally LP, but like his recent EPs, bonus discs, and live collections, it proves another essential non-essential.


The South African gqom trio explores the joy and disorder of sensory overload on its vibrant second album.

Ama Gogela

Phelimuncasi want to jolt their audience into a mad, uninhibited state of dance. The South African trio of Makan Nana, Khera, and Malathon makes harsh and propulsive gqom, a vigorous strain of house music that sprung from Durban townships in the early 2010s. On their restless and vibrant second album, Ama Gogela—named after a menacing South African bee—Phelimuncasi enlist a glossary of local producers to shape their scorching, urgent club cuts. Uninterested in subtlety or the slow burn of build-ups, they prefer sensory overload: clattering, repetitive polyrhythms and snarled call-and-response vocals.
Gqom is inherently democratic. Its exact origin point is unknown, and the genre has generated a kind of DIY lore: Some guy futzing with production software in his bedroom birthed a more rugged and intense variant of kwaito—the cleaner, mainstream style of South African house. It is more likely that a handful of nascent producers conducted this experiment simultaneously, tapping into the collective unconscious of Durban and its surrounding communities. Produced largely on FruityLoops, early gqom tracks were unmixed and unmastered, passed around in massive WhatsApp group chats and offered as free downloads on websites dedicated to the genre. Though the songs were often too low quality for radio airplay, local taxis would blast the latest hits from their consoles to attract people pouring out of nightclubs.
Conservatives targeted the genre, who condemned its artists for encouraging delinquent behavior and drug use. Certain tracks were banned from South African radio, while local venues endured a rash of police raids. Phelimuncasi allude to this brand of artistic oppression frequently on Ama Gogela. On the creeping, drone-spurred “Maka Nana,” featuring South African rapper Bhejane, the MCs cite an approaching police van and subsequent arrests. “We just having fun,” they sing, volleying lines back and forth in isiZulu over DJ Scoturn’s crispy hi-hats. “This is dark entertainment.” Rather than buff out blemishes with gleaming pop melodies, Phelimuncasi embrace the grit with a barrage of guttural bass and hissing percussion.
Phelimuncasi’s work is often self-referential, documenting the club scene in their local Mlaszi township—the drinks and dance moves but also the disorder. In this way they shape their own narrative, one of defiance and camaraderie. Like so many schools of censored art—punk, Dada, drill—Phelimuncasi’s work points to an entire community pushing back. They are strengthened by the collective; their music, with its snapping, incessant beats, provokes a physical response, designed to be heard in public. On “Kdala Ngiwa Ngivuka,” Malathon admits to being “hardened” by history but strives to rejoice in spite of adversity. “Please stop hating,” he sings in his low, round register as robotic chirps echo in the background. “Just listen to my good music and dance like you don’t have a future.”
Phelimuncasi have described their music as “irresistible” and “painful,” and their best songs incite a ceaseless, fanatical response on par with The Red Shoes. Maximalist opener “I Don’t Feel My Legs” perfects this frenzy; rubbery bass notes propel the track as Makan Nana and Khera’s voices tangle like crossed telephone lines. Sirens caterwaul in the distance and a simmering beat buzzes like the mechanized stab of a tattoo needle. Its density and insistent rhythm feels all-encompassing, with the momentum of a densely-packed, chanting crowd. The Net Gala-produced “Ngiphupha Izinto” is another offbeat banger, bursting with plasticky drum trills and a springy synth pattern that sounds like wingdings transposed into musical notation. The song perpetuates the group’s self-made mythology, as they envision crowds around the globe flailing to their music. Listening to Ama Gogela, far from the heaving dancefloor, you can almost see it for yourself.


Now reissued in expanded editions, the first official Sub Pop release—and its full-length follow-up—deserve more than historical footnote status.

Dry As a Bone/Rehab Doll

Green River are known best for having broken up. Any retelling of the history of the Seattle music boom in the 1990s worth its wack slacks will explain how the 1988 demise of Green River begat Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone, which begat Pearl Jam, which ultimately begat platinum records and global pandemonium and the upending of underground culture. But before all that begatting, there were some records; after 30-plus years of exhaustive hindsight and recontextualization, Green River’s songs have aged better than many of their better-known contemporaries. Taken as a whole, they remind us that history is not always as neat as the way we remember it.
The band’s second EP, 1986’s Dry As a Bone, is the faster, scrappier, punkier, and more lo-fi one. While Green River’s 1988 full-length debut and swan song, Rehab Doll, isn’t exactly polished, it has the distinctly late-1980s big-drums feel of something someone tried to polish before the band imploded—at least in part over disagreements about how much it should be polished. Still, the two records bear more similarities than differences, an implicit point of Sub Pop’s expanded reissues of both. Four songs (“One More Stitch,” “Hangin’ Tree,” “Together We’ll Never,” “10000 Things”) appear on both editions in multiple forms and in varying degrees of shagginess. This isn’t a novel concept—Sub Pop reissued the records as a single title in 1990. Together, Dry As a Bone and Rehab Doll deserve a richer legacy than that of a walking prologue.
At all of five songs in its original incarnation (and bulked up to 16 here), Dry As a Bone will mainly be immortalized for being the first proper release on Sub Pop, albeit about a year after the EP was finished. Recorded by producer Jack Endino, whose imprimatur became nearly as integral to the scene’s mythology as flannel itself, it’s a mischievous, unassuming dogearring of the Stooges playbook—the embodiment of what the word “grunge” might sound like before it lost all meaning. These songs remain a natural showcase for Mark Arm’s inimitable yawp. Far from filler or mere fan service, the added tracks show a band clawing at its restraints as it learns how to play together in real time, particularly on “Hangin’ Tree,” “Bleeding Sheep,” and the six-and-a-half-minute “Bazaar.”
Rehab Doll was intended to be the great leap forward, but the band was finished before the album even came out. “Mark wanted to keep the band more down to earth, and the other guys wanted it to become something bigger,” drummer Alex Vincent told author Mark Yarm (no relation) for the definitive Seattle rock oral history, Everybody Loves Our Town. The reissue stands, then, as a fascinating document of an impassable crossroads. After initially recording with Endino, the band instead hired producer Bruce Calder to smooth the edges. Most of the songs are included in both forms here, and toggling between the two amounts to a clinic in what gets lost—and more crucially, what doesn’t. Though not intentional, the original album feels cast as the villain, an outmoded example of slickness or careerism versus the Important Authenticity of the Endino recordings.
But to believe that is to buy into the idea that ’80s metal in all its grandeur and thwomp was inherently bad (it was not) or that Duff McKagan wasn’t in the Fastbacks (he was). This David-versus-Goliath conflict has always been at the core of the Seattle story, but Rehab Doll reminds us that the truth was messy; before these bands were saddled with carrying the torch for authenticity, they made big, dumb, fun rock. The things that work best about the songs work in either iteration—a hook is a hook. The riffs that guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament helped write later may be more famous, but few do their job better than the ones driving “Hangin’ Tree” or Dry As a Bone’s frantic opener, “This Town.”
The combination of humor and gloom helped set the scene’s mood as much as any Big Muffed guitar sound. There is an earworm catchiness to even the most nihilistic romps, like “Smilin’ and Dyin’” (“Misery loves company, baby/That’s why I love you”) and, most indelibly, Arm’s defiant refrain during Rehab Doll’s “Swallow My Pride.” “This ain’t the summer of love!” he wails, lifting several lines from Blue Öyster Cult to presage the wagon-circling to come as bands and labels and media outlets would very soon saturate the city, thinking it some sort of countercultural utopia.
Little else ages the songs. The distinct whelp of Arm’s vocals sounds just like it does on the Mudhoney album that came out last year. Untethered from their historical baggage and period-specific sheen, these Green River songs just feel like good, loud, heavy, snotty rock tunes, the way grunge intended.


Your humble reviewer is not hugely invested in the state or the fate of hip-hop. A lot of folks are ...

Labor Days

Your humble reviewer is not hugely invested in the state or the fate of hip-hop. A lot of folks are, though, sometimes to an unfortunate extent-- hip-hop spends almost as much time drawing lines and fighting over its own image as the punk and hardcore zines do, albeit more entertainingly. One of the results of this is that a whole lot of hip-hop records are basically about hip-hop: the mainstream stuff (aka "real" hip-hop) offers up further meta-explorations of a few MC-persona archetypes, while the undie stuff (aka "real" hip-hop) dedicates itself to the Ancient Skillz of crate-digging, battle rhyming, and either picking on the mainstream or spitting abstract jumbles of wordplay. The former is how we get stuff like P. Diddy saying, "I don't write rhymes, I write checks"; the latter is how we get stuff like the Anti-Pop Consortium, who sound godlike in ten second snippets but prove mind-numbingly tedious by fifteen.
Aesop Rock is one of those MCs who have stumbled upon a blindingly intelligent solution to this state of affairs: he's ignored all of that baggage and made a record that's mostly about something. That something is work. Labor-- effort in its broadest sense-- is a topic he treats sometimes pedantically but often more thought-provokingly than not only the bulk of hip-hop, but the bulk of any genre. It helps that Labor Days is as terrific a record as anyone could ask for, really, and you should buy it, and here's why.
First: Aesop Rock is a terrific MC. His flow is rapid but clear; his interjections, double-time verses and sing-song bits are arranged with near-symphonic skill. He's also calm and confident, avoiding both the egomaniacal swagger of a lot of mainstream and the egomaniacal jerkiness of a lot of underground, while nicking their finer points as well. Better than that: Aesop Rock's flow is brilliant, a combination of mindbending wordplay ("Who am I?" he asks, then answers: "Jabberwocky Superfly!"), in-rhymed poetics ("You won't be laughing when the buzzards drag your brother's flags to rags"), and surgically sharp, eye-rolling dismissals of anyone he disapproves of: "If you had one more eye you'd be a cyclops," runs one, "which may explain your missing the premise." Aesop Rock says more astoundingly intelligent things per minute than the entire combined rosters of a lot of other labels.
Second: Blockhead, who produces much of this record, does an equally terrific job. Labor Days is bound for constant comparisons to Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein, the other Def Jux Edgy Intelligent NYC MCs with Stark Progressive Beats record to crop up on 2001's year-end lists. And while the comparisons are valid ones, lyrically and often sonically, Labor Days differs by trading in The Cold Vein's minimalist grind for an equally minimal but remarkably lush, cinematic spread of subtly weaving beats and sinuous, somber, minor-key instrumental arrangements that sound as if someone has been doing his crate-digging in the klezmer, bouzouki, and koto piles of the "World Classical" section.
"Daylight," the record's initial standout, works from a long, plush melodic loop with a wood flute sighing over it (there are a lot of woody flutes on this record-- enough to make you wonder if Blockhead wouldn't have done a better job than RZA on the Ghost Dog soundtrack). Meanwhile, "Save Yourself," the record's real standout, consists of a slow-motion lope constructed from staccato bass blips, an east-Mediterranean guitar pluck, and wispy female cooing. "Battery" stretches the limits of hip-hop pastoralism with a bass-and-cello figure and more of those fluttering coos with Ace intoning, "Brother sun, sister moon, mother beautiful," and, "I painted a sunny day on the insides of my eyelids."
If most hip-hop chases a futuristic, brightly lit city vitality, Labor Days is laid out peacefully on a rainy plain somewhere. And if The Cold Vein sounds like the grind of inscrutable machinery, Labor Days waits a couple hundred years for those machines to be covered with moss and vines. When it all comes together, on "9-5ers Anthem"-- a track which pairs a sprightly bassline with handbells (handbells!) with Ace in top form, spitting out brilliant parallel metaphors for quotidian employment-- it seems so all-consumingly right: hip-hop bouncing confidently along, actually saying something about something, and saying it well and smartly.
Aesop Rock does have a message here, which you'd expect to be a bad thing but isn't, really, insofar as the message is a pretty reasonable one. Ace's message is that life can be hard but that's all the more reason to shut your mouth and work on something that makes you happy. Essentially. Labor Days gets cartoonish only once, on "No Regrets," which is still a decent and sensitive track but which we won't really get into here because on the other hand, it's the inherent pragmatism of Ace's theme that allows for his wonderfully apologetic complaints about 9-5 employment. Not to mention all those glorious eye-rolling disses: "Keep me posted," he says, "as to when you grasp something mature to sit and soak about, Mister, and I'll consider picking up your record."
That last line's from "Save Yourself," which collects Ace's comments on the How We Do Hip-Hop question-- he's undie, of course, here with his sonically progressive Def Jux release, so clearly he's going to drop some invective on this Important Issue. His take, though? Forget it: "Maybe you ought to try saving something other than hip-hop," insightful advice no matter what genre you insert at the end. "Pistons pump perfect," he says, then, "what you're holding ain't really broken." And for the duration of Labor Days, it's pretty clear that in the hands of someone with something to use it for, it's not, not at all.


It's no real surprise that Alice in Chains are still around-- there's always money in the reunion rounds-- but it is a surprise that the band's latest album actually sounds like they're trying to move forward. The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is more inventive than it needs to be, and less self-congratulatory than past efforts.

Alice in Chains: The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here

The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here

Alice in Chains were one of the most successful grunge acts of the 1990s, but they were also one of the most derided. They started life as a glam-derived metal band, for which they were dismissed by the same people who embraced Seattle’s other big glam-derived metal band, Mother Love Bone. Layne Staley’s drug metaphors and horror-show vocals made hits out of “Man in the Box” and “Would?” but he could often sound self-satisfied regarding his addictions, which ultimately made it difficult for them to tour. If Alice in Chains staked its popularity on the still-vital Dirt in 1992, they maintained it with an MTV Unplugged album. As a band, they never possessed the metal chops of Soundgarden, or the arena-punk populism of Pearl Jam, or the self-torturing sound of Nirvana. As an influence on subsequent bands, they are arguably responsible for mook-metal acts like Puddle of Mudd, codifying self-absorption as a viable rock'n'roll stance.
Even after Staley’s OD in 2002, it’s no real surprise that Alice in Chains are still around-- there’s always cash in nostalgia-- but it is a surprise that the band's latest album actually sounds like they're trying to move forward rather than rest on their dubious laurels. Despite its very 1990s red jewel case and its trollable title, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is actually a solid mainstream rock album: more inventive than it needs to be, and less self-congratulatory in its intense introspection. That’s due to new vocalist William DuVall, who approximates Staley's blared sneer but actually has more expressive range. And mostly it’s due to Jerry Cantrell, the guitar player, chief songwriter, and arguably the brains behind the band for 20 years now.
In 2009, this new line-up made the tortured-but-determined Black Gives Way to Blue, which lacked the desperation of a typical comeback record. In retrospect, that album sounds like a warm-up for Dinosaurs, which sounds more confident and concentrated than its predecessor. The hooks sounds more insistent, the guitars grind harder, and the songwriting sounds almost extroverted at times. The title track is one of Alice in Chains’ most politicized songs to date, a God’s-eye-view of religious extremism in America and a quick glimpse back at the spiritual doubts that infected “Man in the Box”. “The devil put dinosaurs here,” DuVall sings as the guitars quake and rumble, as though the bottom were falling out of the song. “No problem with faith, just fear.”
That song is six-and-a-half minutes long. It doesn’t need to be. Chop it in half and you could double its impact. But the same could be said of just about any track on Dinosaurs, which typically lumber past the five-minute mark. The result is an album that feels much longer than its bloated 70 minutes, that often buries its best moments, that exhausts its most intriguing ideas either by stretching them out or simply repeating them. On the other hand, Dinosaurs actually does have some intriguing ideas to exhaust, mostly about how you play mainstream rock in 2013. Rather than foreground crunching guitars, “Pretty Done” and “Voices” build their riffs piecemeal out of bent and tortured notes that fit together in jigsaw fashion. The technique approximates melody but conveys mood precisely. That’s what makes first single “Stone” so effective: You’re a full minute or so in before you realize just how smart and menacing its central guitar riff is, or how it slyly establishes an atmosphere of subtle aggression.
In other words, Alice in Chains would rather sneak up on you than attack you with blunt force. That serves a fairly boilerplate anthem like “Scalpel” especially well as it builds quickly from an acoustic intro to an extroverted chorus that in concert likely prompts a few raised lighters. On the other hand, Dinosaurs loses some of its stomp toward the end, with the by-the-numbers “Phantom Limb” and the plodding “Hung on a Hook” sounding more like what you’d expect from Alice in Chains 20 years after their heyday. So it’s as insistent as Dirt, but it’s also not as superfluous as, for example, Soundgarden’s recent reunion record. Instead, Dinosaurs is a testament to how 90s alt-rock angst can translate meaningfully to middle age.


The riffs come hard, fuzzy, and fast on the Bristol punks’ deeply passionate second album—and the platitudes follow close behind.

Joy as an Act of Resistance

IDLES’ new album concerns the tragedies of illness and loss, the addict’s vacillation between sobriety and vice, and the discomfort of rational people at the current state of the world. Joe Talbot, the band’s sardonic, growling singer, lost his disabled mother, cleaned up his substance abuse, and watched the xenophobic Brexit go down—all while his Bristol-based post-punk quintet blew up in his home country. While they mined grief and addiction on their heralded 2017 debut, Brutalism, its follow-up seeks to further focus their notorious, explosive, tongue-in-cheek energy. Now the name of the game is to see past the pain: Joy as an Act of Resistance.
The music on this record is unrefined in the same way that sugarcane is unrefined—any further processing would strip it of its vitality. In the few short months IDLES have spent touring stateside, they’ve gone from cult New York bar act to headlining midsize venues from Brooklyn to Peoria. Without a doubt, they’re playing the hits people who can muster the energy for a circle pit want to hear: Grief is OK, masculinity is toxic, racism sucks. (An actual cover makes its way into the mix, of Solomon Burke’s 1961 soul standard “Cry to Me.”) The riffs come hard, fuzzy, and fast. And the platitudes follow close behind.
Talbot delivers lyrics like “I am my father’s son/His shadow weighs a ton” with the passion of a desperate man, borrowing wisdom from very well-worn aphorisms. The lines come from opener “Colossus,” which twists the solitary act of Catholic confession into something collective: After the narrator atones for his personal sins, the song closes with a gang-shout chant, and the entire room is absolved. But what’s so revolutionary about bringing the mosh pit to the pulpit? In the face of the explicitly earthly problems IDLES are so eager to address, it feels like a cop-out.
And it isn’t the only moment on the album when Talbot retreats from more difficult conversations. The singularly heartbreaking experience of having a stillborn child permeates Joy. “There are so many people out there who probably think they are weird or different because they have lost their child,” he told NME. “Because there is a point of loneliness where you think you are the only person in the world grieving at that point.” It’s the kind of insight that, if harnessed in Talbot’s songs, could have made grieving listeners feel less alone. Yet IDLES never quite get there. Instead, they paraphrase a six-word story famously, but probably apocryphally, attributed to Hemingway: “Baby shoes for sale: never worn,” Talbot repeats on the turgid singalong “June.”
Across Joy as an Act of Resistance, IDLES struggle to balance the weight of human history with the absurdity of making music at what feels like the twilight of humanity. On “I’m Scum,” one of several overt political polemics. The line “I put homophobes in coffins” (with Talbot’s hint of a Bristol accent) is laughable enough to pass, while “This snowflake is an avalanche” belongs scrawled on the protest sign of a recently radicalized 13-year-old. When the songs—and the political convictions behind them—are inextricably tied to personal experiences, it’s a shame to paper over that vulnerability with something so broad.
When an artist reaches their wit’s end, the struggle to return from that point can fuel some of their most resonant work. IDLES share a certain strain of desperation with Modern Life Is War, the crossover hardcore act whose 2005 album Witness was a masterpiece of bottoming out. But what made that record so compelling as a portrait of a broken man was specificity that approached poetry, with the band finding solace by wallowing in the caverns of misfortune and describing every stalagmite that blocked their path. While IDLES don’t sound dishonest on Joy as an Act of Resistance, both the urgency and the vagueness of this record create the impression that a declaration of “joy” might be a little premature.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we examine the young South Carolina rapper’s profoundly influential moment in the spotlight.

Speaker Knockerz: Married to the Money II #MTTM2

Married to the Money II #MTTM2

Derek McAllister Jr. was 16 and broke, living in Columbia, South Carolina, and, like any teenager, needed money in his pocket. He wanted a job at the fast-food chicken joint Zaxbys but when they didn’t call him back, he turned to his computer. Using a beat making program called FruityLoops, which he had been fooling around on since he was 13 after he watched a clip of the self-promotion wiz and teenage dance-rap icon Soulja Boy doing the same, he put beats for sale on a website called SoundClick and marketed them aggressively on social media.
Around 2010 or 2011, McAllister sold his first beat to a Miami rapper for $50, which he used to purchase his trusty pair of affordable speakers. He scored early major placements on Meek Mill’s Dreamchasers, for “Tony Montana,” and French Montana’s Coke Boys 3, for “Dope Got Me Rich.” Through his production, you could hear the heavy influence of Atlanta’s rap scene: his piano melodies, soft enough for a jack-in-the-box, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Travis Porter deep cut; his doomsday-ready 808s and ticking hi-hats were indebted to Lex Luger. His beats sounded like the ones on Future’s Pluto if they came from a cracked version of FruityLoops on a personal computer in a 16-year-old’s South Carolina bedroom.
Over the next year, McAllister uploaded 250 beats on his SoundClick page and sold them all. With this newfound spending money, he bought what would instantly become his prized possession: A brand new black-on-black Camaro. Later on, the car would be referenced in his songs again and again, and featured in his music videos with dramatic slow-motion shots that made it seem like the Batmobile.
Rapping came along almost as a promotional tactic. “The whole purpose of me rapping is that I knew I could make a good song,” he said in a grainy interview from 2013 that looks and sounds like it was shot on a flip phone. “I knew how to promote myself, so that would bring more people to buy beats from me.” In spring 2012, he began to upload melodic singles on YouTube under the name Speaker Knockerz. “All I Know,” the best of his early tracks, laid a robotic, lifeless melody—with a generous amount of Auto-Tune—over a bright piano line. This clash defined his music, especially the two essential mixtapes released in 2013.
Married to the Money and Finesse Father sound like much of popular rap throughout the South and Midwest in the early 2010s, because they’re not trying to be anything more. The twinkling production, the catchy coos delivered with a deadpan demeanor, and the attention to detail elevated the pair of mixtapes to melodramatic mini sagas. Sometimes the songs were just shit to throw ass to in the club (see: “Freak Hoe”). But usually, they were bitter anti-love pop ballads and street fiction. But his heartbreak, loneliness, and paranoia came at a strange remove, like the fantasies of a teenager who’d learned about these emotions from the music videos he religiously watched on the internet.
He studied the music around him like he was going to be tested on it. (There’s a clip on his YouTube where he’s dancing along to Future’s “Same Damn Time,” and stops to make a comment. “Why do rappers brag about selling mid?” he asks. “That’s the dumbest shit ever. I would brag about selling loud.”) Particularly the cold style of Chicago’s emerging drill rap scene: Whether it was the stoic melody Durk began to experiment with, or how Keef could warble about numbing his trauma with drugs and alcohol, and it was still sung along to by fans as if it was a joyous Top 40 radio record. Similarly, Speaker Knockerz could rattle off villainous, neurotic sentiments on “How Could You,” or pen the hopeless three-part crime epic “Rico Story” trilogy, and overlap the grim mood with sun-splashed production that felt like it was made for teenagers wearing skinny jeans to dance to, which is exactly what happened.
Instead of breaking out in the South, Speaker Knockerz’s music came alive further north, in Chicago. Spiritually, his blend of Future-style Auto-Tune on steroids and drill’s brutal frame of mind aligned his tracks with the fast-emerging Chicago bop scene which, around this same time, spawned local hits like Breezy Montana’s “Ball Out,” Shawty Doo’s Speaker Knockerz-produced “Its Foreign,” and anything made by Sicko Mobb. In 2013, Chicago’s Kemo, an essential local tastemaker known as the King of Bop, uploaded a video of himself dancing fluidly to Married to the Money’s “Annoying.” Kemo’s endorsement helped Speaker Knockerz become a staple of the scene. Eventually, Toni Romiti—then a popular personality on the short-form video platform Vine—heard the singles around Chicago and used them to backdrop her six-second clips. Speaker Knockerz went modestly viral.
At the end of 2013, Speaker Knockerz put out his definitive single, “Lonely.” It’s his style perfected, crooning with the cold-blooded stoicism of the Terminator, “Started out with nothing, I was hungry/Now I got a couple niggas bitches on me/Fuck nigga, I don’t wanna be your homie/I had to make a couple bands by my lonely,” over rapid-fire hi-hats and a bleeding-heart piano. This time, the track went so viral on Vine that Drake sang along to it. Speaker Knockerz followed up “Lonely” with the similarly dynamic “Erica Kane,” which, along with the “Rico Story” trilogy, represents the pinnacle of his writing. “Erica Kane” would be the last song he released while he was alive. In March 2014, at 19 years old, Speaker Knockerz was found by police and his father in his garage holding his chest, dead from an apparent heart attack. At his side was his black-on-black Camaro.
Speaker Knockerz may have made pop-inflected rap music, but when he was alive he was no pop star. He only did a handful of interviews, there was little written about him, and despite interest from Atlantic and Universal Republic, he never signed to a label. His recognition veered more regionally specific, in cities like Chicago, New York, and Milwaukee. He also came along at a time when rap blogs were beginning to fade; media coverage tended to favor the mix of typically label-backed stars who would grace XXL’s Freshman covers. Even after his death, his family was relatively tight-lipped aside from a single profile on the music website Wondering Sound. While it’s unclear how Married to the Money II, a posthumous album released almost six months after he passed and headlined by both “Lonely” and “Erica Kane,” was completed, it’s fair to assume that it included heavy involvement from his family, most specifically his father, Derek McAllister Sr.
Initially, the younger McAllister was raised in the Bronx by his mother and father, who was a music producer himself. When McAllister Jr. was 5, his father was sent to prison on drug-related charges; in that time, his mother moved him and his younger brother to South Carolina. At 13, when Speaker Knockerz first began to mess around on FruityLoops, he played his amateur instrumentals over the phone for his father and asked for advice and criticism. After McAllister Sr.’s release, he worked closely with his son, bringing him to a studio and assisting with the more routine aspects of his burgeoning career.
Despite the likely involvement of close relatives, Married to the Money II is flawed like most posthumous rap albums. Its construction is comparable to Pop Smoke’s 2020 album Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon, by how it aimed to take a regional star who was on the verge of mainstream fame before a sudden loss and build on their legacy while also remaining an introduction point for possible new fans. It ends up sounding confused, focused on too many lofty goals at once.
Unlike those two foundational mixtapes, II is not as tightly edited and runs too long. Speaker Knockerz’s decisions usually felt fun and chaotic, as if made on a whim, but here the choices come out of necessity, especially the heavy emphasis on collaborations, which were sparse on earlier projects. It’s easy to tell that quite a few of these songs were unfinished: Kevin Flum sounds like the most cliché fast-spitting white rapper on “U Mad Bro”; childhood friend Capo Cheeze’s use of Auto-Tune on “Smoke It” and “Double Count” might make you think JAY-Z was right that one time; the “Scared Money” hook by Toni Romiti, the Vine star who helped to boost Speaker Knockerz’s early popularity, is unfathomably bad.
Despite the glaring issues, II is the launchpad into Speaker Knockerz’s catalog it was intended to be. Particularly notable is his production, which continued to maximize the popular rap music trends of the era: automated-sounding hand claps and finger-snaps, booming drums, and electronic keyboard melodies, hallmarks of the unconventional ATL era between ringtone rap and the arrival of pivotal mixtapes like Rich Gang’s Tha Tour Pt. 1 and Migos’ Rich Nigga Timeline. Of course, “Lonely” and “Erica Kane” are the peaks, but “Tattoos,” where he laid heart-pounding drums over pop synthesizers, and “Don’t Know,” which is the perfect canvas for his AutoTune-heavy wails, belong in that conversation as well. With production this bubbly and harmonic, it’s likely that if Speaker Knockerz got the chance to finish his verses and hooks himself—rather than rely on cheap mercenaries—II would have been his opus.
In tune with the lyrical structure of his previous mixtapes, the writing—whether jolly or somber—is as straightforward as a nursery rhyme. “The phone, the phone is ringing/I’m ’bout to talk dis dumb nigga out all of his ching-ching/All dis finnessin’ now I got all of this bling-bling/Nigga… I’m fuckin an’ smokin’ and drinking,” he sings on “We Know.” The basic words are uplifted by vocals that blend disorienting Auto-Tuned croons with the uncanny energy of an A.I. that has just learned how to feel for the first time. Likewise, if you can overlook the lackluster guest verse on “On Me,” you’ll find one of the most vibrant and melodic verses of Speaker Knockerz’s brief career: “She wanna ride in my black car, because I’ma star,” he lilts, as if the offer of a ride in his Camaro was the equivalent of getting down on one knee.
As time goes on, Speaker Knockerz’s story only becomes harder to tell. The regional scenes where he thrived are no longer the same and the social media platform where his music boomed is now a distant memory. It’s getting harder to find the original Vines and clips that made him an early viral star; if we were to wake up one day and his YouTube page were taken down, much of what we know about him would be gone. It’s a reminder of how temporary anything that lives almost solely on the internet is, of the fragility of a legacy that exists entirely on platforms Big Tech could snuff out tomorrow.
Regardless, like so much memorable pop music, Married to the Money II feels like a time capsule (next to a Speaker Knockerz CD there would probably be snapbacks, True Religion jeans, graphic tees from his favorite store Urban Outfitters, and clothing with unnecessary zippers). But similar to his kindred spirits Future and Chief Keef, the moment while important is also a backdrop to the ageless stories that just happened to take place during this time. More traditional pop-rap records are forever stuck in the early 2010s moment (see: “Rack City” or “Black and Yellow”); a single like “Lonely” has emotional weight that feels timeless. Speaker Knockerz sounds like an entity of his own, no matter how heavily inspired he was by everything popular to a teenager, in the early 2010s, stuck in their bedroom on the internet.

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