Channeling the stark sound and fatalistic worldview of vintage Southern rap, the New Orleans duo takes grim pleasure in grappling with substance abuse and mental illness.

$uicideboy$: Long Term Effects of SUFFERING

Long Term Effects of Suffering

Of the many rappers who followed the aesthetic formula laid out by SpaceGhostPurrp and Raider Klan—lo-fi samples, hotboxed ’90s nostalgia, and an atmosphere that evokes witch house as much as horrorcore—few have built as stable a career as $uicideboy$, the New Orleans-born cousins Ruby da Cherry and $crim. With no radio hits and little in the way of mainstream American press, the duo has amassed a substantial following, to the tune of hundreds of millions of streams and collaborations with Travis Barker and Korn’s Munky. As their status has grown, so has their focus, and their once prolific release schedule has slowed. Their work hinges on a central question: When you’ve defined yourself by a professed desire to die, how do you sustain a thriving career based on your trauma? Long Term Effects of SUFFERING makes it clear that the anguish is no gimmick, but rather part of an almost Zen philosophy: For $uicideboy$, all of life is suffering, and it’s in that suffering that their work finds its meaning.
Ruby and $crim, who are both in their thirties, are older than most of their artistic peers. At the age that Lil Peep or XXXTentacion were dealing with sudden fame, Ruby and $crim were broke and trying to get their shit together, which might be why their music is so effectively cathartic: Though they often rap about celebrity, they have experienced what it’s like to be an adult without any kind of success, not just fighting the demons in your head but struggling, in a very real, material way, to survive.
Ruby spent his teen years playing in punk bands, and both cousins grew up under the influence of the local Cash Money, but they were drawn to different kinds of rap music as they grew older, a binary that’s fairly evident in their music: Ruby stuck to the classics, crediting more lyrically driven artists from Wu-Tang to Souls of Mischief as touchstones, while $crim fell in love with the head-banging hi-hats and gun sounds of Waka Flocka and Chief Keef. Their first mixtapes, adorned with memes like R. Buddy Dwyer’s on-air suicide or Bill Clinton playing the saxophone, feel almost more like the blunted blog rap of Big K.R.I.T. or Jackie Chain, just delivered in a slower drawl, with archetypal boasts about cocaine bumps, hit-and-runs, and hook-ups. Across subsequent releases, the flows sharpened, the production grew more composed, and the subject matter took on a more personal focus. $crim has been particularly vocal about his struggles with opioid addiction and substance abuse, and on Long Term Effects of SUFFERING, the group’s past tapestries of violence have given way to more genuinely felt songs like “Life Is but a Stream~,” which tearfully expresses how the side effects of addiction can drive away the people you love.
$uicideboy$ are more than capable of straight-up buck-wild tracks like “WE ENVY NOTHING IN THE WORLD.,” essentially a disconnected series of nihilistic images of extreme violence. But the duality in their work also allows space for positivity. Pain brings with it the possibility of healing, and on “The Number You Have Dialed Is Not in Service,” they offer wary words of encouragement to the desperate, despite the song’s punchline: When $crim, feeling suicidal, calls his therapist, the only answer is a dead-end intercept message. Suicidal thoughts are a constant presence on Long Term Effects of SUFFERING, and their bars are filled with images of psych wards and alienation. But despite their hardcore reputation and fatalistic lyrics, the pair effortlessly ease into lighter modes: “Smile at my casket/I’m at peace with my death,” croons $crim on “Forget It,” over a syrupy beat of almost Drain Gang-like trance pop.
$uicideboy$ are enthusiastic sample flippers who regularly return to the well of classic Memphis rap for sonic inspiration, but it’s no longer just imitation; they’ve grown confident and skilled enough to break out of the confines of their established sound. There are obvious Southern rap vocal samples across songs like “Degeneration in the Key of a Minor” and “Avalon,” but more left-field flips as well, like the subtle interpolation of the Counts’ “Love Sign” on “Lighting the Flames of My Own Personal Hell.” Over time, their beats have grown from simpler drum patterns stitched to Southern rap samples into more fully realized constructions, as likely to throw in a fluttering jazz sax or subtle xylophone as a trap hi-hat.
More than any of the usual names that get trotted out when discussing SoundCloud rap or emo rap, $uicideboy$ share the most with Lil Ugly Mane, who they’ve been known to sample. Both artists take vintage Southern rap as a kind of foundational pastiche but shape it into a found-sound collage of esoteric and experimental influences, finding a parallel between the violence of Southern rap and the often physically violent form that mental illness can take. When $uicideboy$ most deliberately ape the scary movie sounds of Memphis rap, like on “If Self-Destruction Was an Olympic Event, I’d Be Tanya Harding,” it’s mostly to create a sense of discomfort and unease. On “Materialism as a Means to an End,” the bass ricochets back and forth between the right and left speakers, making for a banger that feels like it’s mid-nervous breakdown.
As with Lil Ugly Mane, and any white artist who borrows so liberally and obviously from Black music, there’s a very real question of appropriation to chew on, especially considering the legal action Three 6 Mafia took against the duo over uncleared samples. But $uicideboy$ aren’t just pilfering rap history: The group has also come under fire for sampling deadmau5 without clearance and regularly flip contemporary artists like Denzel Curry, Lana Del Rey, and even themselves. They frequently sound less like a Southern rap tribute act than a dizzying pastiche of pastiches.
Though their music has often been described as “horrorcore,” they have flatly rejected that label. There are no concept songs from the point of view of Chucky here, no absurd gore, no John Carpenter flips. Three 6 Mafia used the imagery of slashers and demonic possession to express their condition as inhabitants of a society in which they had little to no power over their lives due to racial and economic oppression. $uicideboy$ are similarly unsparing in their reminder that, for many Americans, reality is shaped by violent and destructive forces beyond our control.
Substance abuse and its material causes are the ghosts in the rafters of modern rap, but $uicideboy$ invite them into the blunt rotation, directly confronting the pain that haunts so much of the genre. Detractors have claimed that artists like $uicideboy$, like so many rappers and rock stars before their time, as well as so many of their creative peers, glamorize mental illness and addiction. Every generation tends to believe that history will end, or at least peak, with its passing, but SoundCloud rap—or emo rap, or whatever you want to call it—and its audience belong to an era when our fate seems scientifically sealed. Faced with that grim prognosis, $uicideboy$ ask: What’s wrong with taking a little pleasure in your own demise when it’s all but set in stone?

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


The San Antonio-based musician brings newfound expression to her customary field recordings, folding richly harmonic elements into her typically cryptic palette of clatter and hum.

a softer focus

For claire rousay, ambient composition is not just a studio practice; it concerns real bodies in physical space. As a percussionist turned sound artist, the San Antonio-based musician has put out a whopping 19 releases since 2019, many featuring dizzying noise and free jazz that demonstrate her focus on live performance. Her work has increasingly incorporated a broad variety of sounds from unlikely sources; records like 2020’s a heavenly touch wrung haunting beauty from processed field recordings and tender piano arrangements, while both and it was always worth it used rich, textural electronics to induce ASMR-like effects at the lowest threshold of audible perception. On a softer focus, she captures a newfound intimacy, one that’s grounded and personal while still feeling otherworldly.
Like much of her work, the album is at its core a collection of field recordings, which she manipulates in ways that bring out latent emotions bound up within the audio. Its first track, “preston ave,” features sliding and clicking sounds from what appears to be a typewriter or cash register, with gentle brushes against the microphone that establish a soft, equanimous feeling. These non-tonal elements spill over onto “discrete (the market),” where rousay introduces organ chords, bowed harmonics, and threadbare piano phrases that feel carefully, expertly composed. Each line enters with a clarity of intention once foreign to rousay’s music, with a net effect that’s among the most striking moments of her career so far.
rousay often uses the voice as a compositional tool, and here, her processed vocals provide a stark point of contrast to the meditative elements of the album. A short, climactic pause in “peak chroma” gives way to warbling, pitch-shifted vocals as rousay sings about loss and the fallout of a relationship. The track invites immediate comparisons to the alien vocals of Daniel Lopatin, Andrew Weathers, and other ambient musicians using Auto-Tune, even as rousay seems to resist drawing attention to the lyrics themselves. On “stoned gesture,” the vocalist’s breathy singing rubs up against abstract clatter as the track sinks downward into a melancholy stupor. Warm, reflective, and dreamlike, the piece taps into an expressive dimension refreshingly at odds with stone-faced sound-art orthodoxy.
Few of the sounds on a softer focus are exactly new; rousay simply captures aspects of 21st-century auditory culture that others see as blemishes, foregrounding what might otherwise be discarded. On “diluted dreams,” powerful winds flicker over what sounds like an earbuds microphone to create a kind bristling, low-volume noise, one with immediate emotional valence for anyone who’s taken an outdoor phone call on a particularly brisk afternoon. Other sounds are more difficult to place, leaving space for speculation in the gaps between more clearly defined recordings. Around three minutes into “peak chroma,” a series of churning metallic tones coincides with a particularly cathartic synthesizer passage, and the entire track eases into meditative drift. Even the most chaotic moments lend structure and feeling in ways that suggest a true step forward within her catalog. Nothing is off limits, yet everything works within the context of the album, as rousay unearths modes of expression that make it hard to remember a time when ambient music sounded any differently. Through it all, rousay somehow makes this progression feel completely natural.

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


The Disco’s of Imhotep is dance-music outsider Jamal Moss's most approachable collection to date while not diluting his music’s signature oddity.

Hieroglyphic Being: The Disco’s of Imhotep

The Disco’s of Imhotep

One of the ironies about the recent “outsider house” wave—a faddish piece of dance music terminology to describe any club music that is self-consciously lo-fi or rhythmically off-kilter—is that its practitioners, being mostly straight white males, were rather more insider than those who built house music in the first place. You could not accuse Jamal Moss of this. The music Moss produces as Hieroglyphic Being—and under a variety of pseudonyms and collaborative ventures including the Sun God or Africans With Mainframes—shares an interest in degraded sonic textures and damaged rhythms. But Moss has genuine outsider credentials. Born in Chicago, he spent a period of the 1980s homeless, traded his TV for a pair of turntables touched by the hands of deep house godfather Ron Hardy, and played his first paying gigs as part of a sound therapy program, spinning records for the physically and mentally disabled. Moss is a direct link back to house mecca the Muzic Box—and through his interest in Afrofuturism, spirituality, and science fiction, his work offers a route forward, too.
By and large, Hieroglyphic Being’s music has been a little too roughshod and unusual to trouble the mainstream. But The Disco’s of Imhotep marks Moss’ long-playing debut for Ninja Tune (through their imprint Technicolour), his biggest label yet, and it finds him successfully squaring the circle. It’s his most approachable collection to date while not diluting his music’s signature oddity. Unlike last year’s collaborative LP We Are Not the First, which linked Moss with former Liturgy drummer Greg Fox and members of Sun Ra Arkestra for an improvised ensemble piece, The Disco’s of Imhotep is angled straight at the dancefloor. At its root, it’s four-to-the-floor club music, but of a fluid and organic nature, too wild to be corralled into a Pro Tools grid. Moss calls the style “synth expressionism” or “rhythmic cubism.”
On “Sepulchral Offerings,” melodies cascade from the skies, kickdrums morph and warp, and waves of hi-hat and cymbal swing into frame, veiled in distortion so they hiss like rattlesnakes. Moss’ productions often have the sense of being loosely tethered, their intricate layers barely clinging together. Here at least, though, the sense of slip and slide works beautifully; in jazz, they call this swing.
The other thing that Hieroglyphic Being has derived from jazz is his sense of mysticism, his music’s appeal to a sort of cosmic consciousness; the album’s title nods to an ancient Egyptian physician thought to have ascended to godhood. Moss discusses his songs not in the modern parlance of bangers and sick drops, but as “Frequencies and Vibrations...to Heal the Mind and Body and Enrich the Soul.” This is no puff. At its best, The Disco’s of Imhotep feels spiritually nourishing. Ringing chimes and the tones of an unearthly choir glitter within the fabric of “The Way of the Tree of Life,” while “Spiritual Alliances” winds together gauzy synth soundbaths, G-funk melodies, and slappy percussion; it bumps along at a frisky 130bpm or thereabouts, but its predominant feel is one of beatific stasis.
Elsewhere, Moss lets a little chaos creep in. A brief interlude named “Heru” imagines the electric zither meditations of Laraaji’s Day of Radiance invaded by the sort of industrial beats favored by Shapednoise or Regis. “Nubian Energy” is a wild jackin' house that apparently lets several tape loops run concurrently, leading to a cacophony of clapping hands, shrieks of ecstasy, and a voice that deliciously repeats the words “Getting hot up in this motherfucker!” Still, here even grotty noise is turned to blissful ends: that tape hiss that runs through “The Shrine of the Serpent Goddess” wafts around like fine mist blowing off a waterfall.
If there is anything about The Disco’s of Imhotep that jars, it’s in the editing. Often these tracks feel too much like mere excerpts from longer improvisatory jams, sometimes curtailed too early. The wriggly wormhole techno of “The Sound of KMT” could comfortably sprawl out to 10 minutes plus, but cuts out after just three brief minutes; it leads you to speculate how this record might sound if the material was teased out further.
All the same, there is something appealing about Moss’ dedication to recording live, on the fly. Listen to “Crocodile Skin” and you can visualize the track exploding from a tangle of equipment in real time. Recently, the idea that dance music could be something genuinely transcendent or mind-expanding feels diminished—deemed a little gauche, perhaps, in an era when techno 12-inches are marketed as “DJ tools,” and mixes can be Shazammed down to a list of track IDs. All this merely magnifies Moss’ achievement. Sweaty and ecstatic, elevated and pure, The Disco’s of Imhotep weaves quite the spell. This might be the most accessible Hieroglyphic Being album to date, but Jamal Moss remains out there on his own.


Raekwon’s reflective new solo LP is his first to feature zero Wu-Tang Clan members. Amid its casual braggadocio and nimble wordplay, The Wild surveys the Chef’s experience and legacy.

The Wild

If there was any question as to where Raekwon stands with the Wu-Tang Clan in 2017, consider this: In the 23 years since he burst onto the scene with his brethren on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the Chef has released seven solo LPs. His latest, The Wild, is the first to feature zero Clan members.
His understandable frustration with the way the RZA has guided the Clan in the past has left him searching for a new voice, and the music industry’s rapid release cycle paradigm led him to make a few awkward attempts at reinvention. Rae has struggled to keep up with the expected output of a hip-hop artist in the mixtape era; his handful of recent mixtapes contained more forgettable moments than memorable ones. It’s been eight years since his stunning comeback sequel to Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, prodding the question: Does Raekwon have gas left in the tank?
The Wild’s answer is a definitive yes. Eschewing the bloated roster of features from his last LP (2015’s Fly International Luxurious Art) for just a few collaborators, The Wild is a 16-course meal representative of the Chef’s experience and legacy. Raekwon has always felt like the spiritual progeny of Slick Rick—an expert at vividly painted story raps—though his rhymes are perhaps laced with more vitriol. On one of the album’s strongest tracks, “Marvin,” Rae tells someone else’s story, crafting Marvin Gaye’s biography in three verses, from the Moonglows to Motown to his tragic murder at the hands of his father. Over a soulful Banks & Hampton sample, Cee-Lo’s croon soars over the hook, lending the track a somber gravitas.
Throughout The Wild, amid the casual braggadocio and nimble wordplay, Rae is often in a reflective mood, considering past mistakes and the crazy risks that young hoods take in the streets. “That used to be me, young, ruthless, and carefree/Until I seen the bigger picture, shifted, my way of thinking/That 25 to life is real, so is the casket once it close on you,” he raps on “Visiting Hour.” It’s a refreshing perspective from one of Mafioso Rap’s biggest stars, taking the tone of a wise uncle who’s been there, done that, and knows better.
The luxurious Rick Ross aesthetic Rae tried on for F.I.L.A. and his Unexpected Victory mixtape seemed to suit him poorly; if The Wild feels like a return to form, it’s because he’s embraced the way his growl adds grit to ’70s soul-sampling productions. The producer Xtreme freaks no less than three such samples on the record’s lead single, “This Is What It Comes Too,” laying some Al Green strings on top of some Melvin Bliss drums, working in a yelp from the Ohio Players’ “Ecstasy” that sounds almost instrumental in its new context. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but serves as the perfect platform for a middle-aged Raekwon—an expertly cooked boom-bap beat with enough energy to let him flex rhyme skills that rival any of the young bucks currently dominating the airwaves.
Raekwon’s recent surge of productivity proves he’s not one of those “stuck in the ’90s” cats—he seems to genuinely want to evolve. At 47, he’s still trying out new flows. His stutter-step delivery on “You Hear Me” loses impact with its mushy enunciation, but the fact that he would take the risk is commendable. A quick glance at a recent list of his favorite hip-hop records of all-time—rooted firmly in the golden and silver ages of hip-hop—reveals what inspires him most. When Raekwon leans into those sounds and themes, the rhymes that flow through him are evidence that this OG can still hang with the best of them.


The Richmond-based artist collides big riffs, sweet melodies, and thick fuzz into crisp, cathartic songs about life’s uncertainties.

OUTOFBODY

“Am I Joey? Am I John?/Maybe Dee Dee? Maybe Tom?” James Goodson wonders on “Choose Yr Ramone,” smuggling in the thesis statement of his debut album as Dazy: We may never quite figure out who we are, but the music of our youth will keep us grounded. It’s not just a namecheck—the Virginia musician channels the New York punk pioneers in his own artistry, reducing rock’n’roll to its starkest, swaggering pleasures. An average Dazy song strings together anthemic choruses, anticipatory verses, and life-giving electric fuzz, making a show of its own crumbling stitchwork. But Goodson isn’t following a formula so much as he’s reverse-engineering our need for the equation. OUTOFBODY cracks open the big riff rulebook to understand why we use it, uniting the comfort of hook-happy songcraft with the everyday stressors that compel us to hit play again and again. The result is a record of arena-sized power pop built from the small, mounting anxieties you wouldn’t think to express out loud, but might be the reason you’re screaming along to Dookie on the morning commute.
A lot of that deeper resonance is built into the project’s own origin. Where other people keep a diary, Goodson, an indie publicist by day, has long funneled his quotidian soul-searching into a private catalog of pop euphoria. The idea for Dazy came from years of overthinking the proper way to invite listeners in. It took some stockpiled drum machines, the foolhardy confidence to record guitars straight into pre-amp, and one pandemic-born impulse—release singles as fast as the microphone in Goodson’s spare bedroom could capture them—to coalesce that trepidation into a quick and noisy one-man-band aesthetic. He assembled these tracks for the 2021 compilation MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD: The First 24 Songs, a dam-busting sugar rush that was an expression of his massive mental block. Instead of working through indecision, the content dump simply overpowered it.
Halfway through OUTOFBODY, Goodson puts words to that initial creative trepidation—one his debut triumphantly transcends: “I am always waiting on me/Consistently debating.” It’s noticeable what some judicious editing has done for Dazy’s music, even if it hasn’t actually changed much from last year. Aside from two tranquil cool-downs, the project’s default register remains a whirring buzzsaw attack. But whittling Goodson’s archives into 12 tracks affords each earworm crucial space to ensnare your mind without snagging their collective adrenaline. OUTOFBODY also finds ways to shift gears without slowing the tempo. Note how the Madchester-esque percussive outro to “Ladder” shuttles its energy directly into “AWTCMM?,” or the way that “Deadline” surges to life, pivoting off the dying synth fade-out that caps “Rollercoaster Ride.”
But what distinguishes Dazy’s debut isn’t just thoughtful pacing. From its first line—“Is that my voice leaving my own mouth?”—OUTOFBODY also offers a clear thematic frame: the rock album as therapeutic check-in. Throughout, Goodson sings about feeling “back and forth,” “up and down,” turned “inside out,” and shaken up. These feelings of dislocation aren’t physical, of course, but abstract, gesturing to the way adulthood scatters notions of identity. Perhaps that’s why OUTOFBODY is careful about giving away so little of Goodson. Befitting of all the distortion, these songs rarely present intelligible scenarios, simple emotions, or even other people, and instead work their uplifting hooks through inward-gazing lyricism. It’s a challenging, perhaps alienating twist on power pop—a rock form very nearly engineered from the need to construct a singalong chorus out of every possible human name.
But don’t accuse Goodson’s conceptual aims of obscuring his subgenre’s delights. If anything, they do the opposite. By offering its existential themes as fist-pumping fodder, OUTOFBODY makes an earnest plea for the cathartic utility of rock at its most shamelessly overt. By the time album closer “Gone” has warped its Oasis-style marching band psychedelia into a bittersweet lament for “nights that slip right past your eyes,” the import of Goodson’s approach is unmistakable. Music is all we have to hold onto—the only anchor we have against the “time relentless” he sings about on “Choose Yr Ramone.” Sometimes, the songs we love remain the same because you and I don’t.


On its warm and reflective new album, the Bay Area duo offers the most plainly pretty songs of its career. The stakes are high but the mood is anything but tense.

Grizzly Peak

The Dodos’ music moves in lean, agile sweeps, like a conversation between two friends who know each other well enough to develop their own shorthand. Whether on stage or on record, singer and guitarist Meric Long and drummer Logan Kroeber appear equally relaxed in their brisk exchanges, matching each other’s stoicism to the point that it’s easy to overlook the speed, stamina, and sharpness of their dialogue. There’s a lot of movement between them, little of it wasted, much of it flying under the radar. These qualities also apply to the path of the band itself. Over their 15 years together, and especially since the indie-folk duo’s beloved sophomore LP, Visiter, their consistency has been easy to take for granted.
This history comes into focus on Grizzly Peak, the band’s warm and vaguely elegiac eighth album, which could also be their last one. As Long recently revealed in an NPR story by Pitchfork contributor Grayson Haver Currin, he’s been afflicted by rheumatoid arthritis, perhaps exacerbated over the years by his athletic playing style. Though its lyrics don’t explicitly point to finality, Grizzly Peak sounds like a concerted burst of creative energy on approach to a resting point. The stakes are high, but the mood is anything but tense: Similar to the last album by the Walkmen, another remarkably consistent band with whom the Dodos once shared stages, there’s a hint of celebration within the big-hearted charge, manifested in some of the most plainly pretty songs the band has ever made.
Long kicks off the album on a reflective note: “Slowing down was not what I had planned/But here we are,” he sings over light touches of bouncing orchestral strings on “Annie,” as un-frantic a song as the Dodos have opened an album with since Visiter’s “Walking.” When Kroeber’s drums enter during the chorus, his hits are spacious and gigantic—basically the opposite of the intricate, scampering patterns that he and Long honed into the Dodos’ rhythmic fingerprint. Those trademarks appear on Grizzly Peak, too, but by the time that the hushed waltz “The Atlantic” comes in with a pattering, barely detectable beat under a solitary synth, there’s an inescapable sense that things are different this time: less hurried, as if slowing down to reassess the big picture. Long’s words, gently sung at near-lullaby volume, don’t exactly dispel that feeling: “I’m talking low but I’m thinking loud/Should I get away from this?”
Despite their consistent two-man core, it’s been a long time since the Dodos have sounded like only two people on an entire album, having developed a taste for selective overdubs on their Phil Ek-produced third LP, Time to Die. On Grizzly Peak, produced by Long, the song structures are simpler (with at least one notable exception in the crooked, vintage-Dodos skitter of “Quiet Voices”), but the additional frills remain: Strings, synths, and novel effects enter to usher songs around a corner. On “The Surface,” a satisfying harmony breaks out between two voicings of the same acoustic guitar: one with a crystal-clear fidelity and one that sounds so compressed it’s unrecognizable. This kind of production choice might come off as gratuitous to those who love the direct, in-the-room feeling of “Confidence” or “Undeclared,” but Long gives each additional piece a careful, prolonged spotlight that suggests they have meaning that not everyone will hear.
As poignant as it would have been to hear the Dodos revert to a live, strictly two-man setup, these lighter songs aren’t smothered by an occasional extra layer. Sometimes, they make the song: Halfway through “Sustainer,” Long spills a couple raspy electric guitar chords over the song’s ticking, delicate acoustic frame, creating a thin sheet of distortion offset by the elegance of a few bright piano chords in the final minute. “I know what you want, but I don’t know if I can give it back,” he sings, and it’s as close to pure sadness as the band allows themselves on Grizzly Peak; “Hopeless isn’t a place I can be,” he concludes seconds later, resolved and without hesitation.
Since veering away from his more sing-songy and diaristic early work, Long’s lyrics have hovered between specificity and abstraction. This evolution led to a new weapon for his songwriting: stepping fully onto the “specific” end for one isolated moment, emboldening a lyric through contrast. One of those moments punctuates “With a Guitar,” when Long acknowledges how ingrained his instrument has become in his identity: “I never had much to say, but I always said it with a guitar.” It might seem pedestrian, but when framed by Grizzly Peak’s constant allusions to rest, zooming out, and looking back, his words feel levels deep. Distilling the feeling of being intuitively drawn to a craft and shortchanging his own skills as a lyricist, it’s a line good enough to have sustained the song all on its own (although the preceding line, “I guess I’ll have to fight you with a guitar,” is pretty funny, too). If Grizzly Peak is indeed a resting point for the Dodos, it’s comforting to hear that they’re still smiling as they ease up.

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


The Canadian country singer trades his solitary fare for a new set of stories, and a backing band that cuts in and out like a dance partner.

Colter Wall: Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs

Canadian singer-songwriter Colter Wall hasn’t needed much more than his singular voice—a charred, whiskey-soaked baritone that belies his years—to tell colorful tales of the western frontier and the folk heroes who populate it. Across 2017’s self-titled debut and 2018’s follow-up Songs of the Plains, he kept the arrangements sparse, letting his voice pull focus. There was no pressing need for a full backing band when his primary instrument filled a space so completely.
With his new album Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, Wall trades that solitary fare for a new set of stories—and a new way to tell them. Recorded with a full band, Western Swing moves away from Wall’s unvarnished veneration of the Wild West and swings wide the barn doors. This here’s a party.
While Dave Cobb produced Songs of the Plains, here Wall takes the reins. Cobb honed Wall’s instincts, stripping his songs down so that they felt like campfire tales traded after a long and lonesome ride. But Wall doesn’t press in quite so tight. His penchant for “atmospheric feel” sounds different: He leaves ample space, layering and texturing each track so the band never overshadows his voice—instead, they cut in and out like dance partners. Odd squeaks bleed through at times, as on “Talkin’ Prairie Boy,” when it sounds as though someone inadvertently opens the studio door. Wall leaves that sound in, as well as his resolute chuckle at the end. Those choices bring Western Swing & Waltzes closer to a live album, further reflecting the hoedown charm the backing band adds.
On Song of the Plains, Wall focused his songwriting on wide Canadian vistas and the time—and solitude—it takes to traverse them. But Western Swing & Waltzes gets closer to embodying that capacious sensation. The title track unfurls like a map, an ode to Wall’s native Saskatchewan. “East of beautiful Alberta/North of old Montan’,” he sings about the province, situating it not just physically but spiritually—as a descendent of traditional folk and country’s storied lineage.
Wall has regularly sung of the rugged prairie landscape that reared him, but on “Western Swings & Waltzes,” he seems more satisfied to nod to it rather than keep it in sight. It’s a framing song, setting the milieu of the following tracks and their resplendent “punch”: “It’s Western swing and waltzes in Saskatchewan tonight,” he sings, while the band line dances around his voice with fiddle, pedal steel, DeFord Bailey-esque harmonica, and piano. The scuffs and scratches lacing their imaginary dancefloor feel palpable.
Western Swing & Waltzes includes only a handful of original songs from Wall, who covers Marty Robbins’s “Big Iron,” Stan Jones’s “Cowpoke,” and Lewis Martin Pederson’s “High & Mighty,” as well as two traditional songs, “I Ride an Old Paint” and “Diamond Joe.” Wall keeps the locomotive pace of “Big Iron,” but eschews the original’s polish and backing harmonies, giving his voice new land to roam. Under his thumb, Jones’s “Cowpoke” sheds its upbeat tempo and technicolor flare. Wall’s voice works in tandem with the song’s harmonica and pedal steel to elevate the high lonesome yodel of the original into something scorched and reverent. Having showcased his distinctive voice in ways sparse and spare, he now fills out the room.

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


Ipecac indie hip-hop group return with another set of verbal bluntness and sonic brutality, helping to color the fringes of rap with musical and political gusto.

Gutter Tactics

In 2008, few things pushed the buttons of American insecurities more effectively than the sermons of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Forget that most of the speeches the media and political opponents of Barack Obama got hysterical over were made years ago, in 2008 Wright was your bogeyman, and news coverage ensured his "God damn America!" refrain will echo down through the ages. Wright caused millions of knees to jerk with those words when they were dug up and aired, but I've thought all along that he got a bum deal in a media that wants to smack you with a sensation and would prefer it if you didn't bother to think deeply. That's not to say that I think America should go straight to hell of course, but I at least think his comments come from somewhere intellectually and emotionally honest, and taken in their context-- whether you believe Wright is a raging, aging relic, a traitor, or a righteous prophet-- are a powerful exercise of the First Amendment.
The duo behind Dälek apparently agrees, as Dälek (the MC the band is named for) steps back and gives the opening verse on Gutter Tactics to the Reverend, playing a long excerpt of a sermon in which he enumerates a series of American atrocities against Native Americans, blacks, and others, riding a slow crescendo in which he reminds his parishioners that many of the people who die under our bombs are just ordinary folks trying to live their lives and put food on the table. Listening, I think it's not so much the content of his message that makes us shift in our seats so much as the bluntness and lack of a leavening agent, the part where he says, "Well, America has its faults, but when you get right down to it it's a pretty great place." He never provides the counterargument, and in that respect, he could probably join Dälek full-time, because verbal bluntness and sonic brutality are basically their stock in trade.
To Dälek and the band's producer half, Oktopus, dystopia isn't some abstract future; it's what we're living in right now, and though I'm sure that on at least some level they were happy to see a member of a minority elected President, they aren't letting on here. They say as much on "No Question", Dälek rapping, "A black president don't ensure the sunshine/ A rich president represent his own kind/ As it stands now, the blind lead the blind." Even if you don't share their cynicism, the conviction of the delivery sells it anyway-- Dälek are as methodically effective as ever, their signature blend of simple beats, carefully sculpted noise, and straightforward flow still highly unique after more than a decade. The vocals and lyrics, as always, play a much more secondary role than in basically any other rap group, with the little bits that stand out coherently above the mix providing about all the parts of the picture you need to construct the whole.
"Los Macheteros/Spear of a Nation", for instance, calmly chronicles the injustices delivered upon Nelson Mandela by the Apartheid government of South Africa amid a hellstorm of processed drums and cascading sheets of feedback, with bits of muffled dialogue and South African choral music crying out from the depths. On the other side of things, "A Collection of Miserable Thoughts Laced With Wit" is actually quite pretty, dappling an echoing beat with smears of backward keyboard and piano. The vocal is buried and processed, used more as a rhythmic tool than a lead or focal point. While the intensity of their earlier records is still mostly intact, Dälek have hit on a more spacious, open method for arranging their sounds, so that even a pounding dirge like "Who Medgar Evers Was..." feels more inviting than assaultive. There's no "Black Smoke Rises" endurance test here.
Of course, it wouldn't be a Dälek record without at least one track decrying the state of hip-hop, and "We Lost Sight" provides that. Still, I've never bought the idea that Dälek was rap for people who hate rap. Some people who aren't normally crazy for hip-hop will undoubtedly enjoy this album, but I think it's primarily for people who believe that hip-hop is a broad canvas that demands people who color in the fringes, and Dälek do that, musically and politically. The opening Wright sample is a hard look back at a year most people would already rather forget, but it's a perfect intro for Gutter Tactics, an album that draws much of its strength from the same well of outrage and disaffection.


Jeezy's first album in three years is intermittently enjoyable, even if it completely cuts against the presumed goal of presenting Jeezy as an elder statesman of the South along the lines of Bun B or Scarface. However, Jeezy's recent legal troubles add a strange weight to what Seen It All could have been: had it been autobiographical, it may have been even more inherently sad than it already is.

Seen It All: The Autobiography

With few exceptions, the release of a major-label record from a hip-hop veteran tends to be inherently sad, a merciful end to its struggle for existence. It carries constant reminders of the indifference it faced in numerous record label offices: catchphrases and namedrops that would’ve been timely had the record dropped a year or so ago, big-name producers appearing as courteous gestures and for quick paychecks, a tracklist riddled with guest verses and collaborations that somehow seem reverent and disrespectful at the same time. As with Jeezy’s previous LP, 2011's Thug Motivation 103: Hustlerz Ambition, all of these things are present on Seen It All: The Autobiography. Similarly, the fact that it’s any good at all might be a greater testament to Jeezy’s skills than his albums that are actually great on their own terms.
You might’ve noticed that Jeezy's dropped the “Young”, but that’s the only time the transitional nature of Seen It All is entirely his doing. The guy is in a spot that makes executive decisions more difficult: he’s still bankable, but not an A-lister. He calls out Def Jam's endless meddling by name in “Me OK”, all while threatening to drop his album on Atlantic. But since it’s the hottest track here, the bosses ostensibly let it slide. Moreover, Jeezy struck up a valuable alliance with DJ Mustard and even if you don't remember a single track from TM103, it still sold 233,000 copies in its first week.
He’s given tracks from Mike WiLL Made-It and Drumma Boy, which barely sound that different from what Shawty Redd provided Jeezy on Thug Motivation 101: Let’s Get It. But their beats lack that record’s assured sound. Jeezy’s more respected than influential right now—the sound of Atlanta rap bears more in common with the vocal and lyrical unorthodoxy of his former rival Gucci Mane or current collaborator Future—making Jeezy a classic rock riffer in a post-punk world, which means he’s lasted long enough to possibly appeal to the purists who dismissed him back in 2004.
It’s not necessarily an insult to call Jeezy a punchline rapper at this point. That’s what he’s always been, really—his bars were all slogans, ad-libs, and smart/dumb similes that were delivered so confidently, you could only briefly eye-roll before ad-libbing right along with him. He made light of this on The Recession’s “Word Play”, which silenced the “lyrical” heads with half a bar—“I’m way too intelligent/ To play with my intelligence.”  And here, Jeezy delivers a host of howlers with the aplomb and lack of quality control you’d expect from a stand-up working out new material. He’s got birds like Chick-fil-A; however, he’s on the block on Sundays, unlike Chick-fil-A. He boasts about having a cooking show on Netflix called “The Best Bricks”, which, come on—at least call it “House of Birds” or "Orange is the New Crack". He also rhymes “Plaxico” with “Texaco” like Gucci Mane, and “Atlantic” with “Atlantic” like Rick Ross, so you're left reminiscing about a time when all three rappers were all actually still beefing and making great music.
This makes Seen It All intermittently enjoyable, even if it completely cuts against the presumed goal of presenting Jeezy as an elder statesman of the South along the lines of Bun B or Scarface. It’s a transformation that’s occurred by circumstance rather than growth; the dude doesn’t tell stories and, while pithy, he doesn’t spit wisdom. Jeezy’s music is post-triumph and visceral, channeling the power of what it feels like to be Trapper of the Year four years in a row even if you're doing concentration curls or a heavy load of laundry, or you're just enduring a long commute back from your office job.
And that’s still the case, as Seen It All: The Autobiography doesn’t deliver on either one of its titular promises. Here’s what we can tell about Jeezy’s life: he experienced much success as a drug dealer prior to rapping, he has a lot of guns and has fallen out with friends over money, and he really thinks you should try Tequila Avion because it's fucking awesome. Given the number of times it's mentioned, Seen It All could pass for a longform Avion commercial; you'd think the first 35 years of Jeezy's life were mere prelude to being named a "Multicultural Advisor" for the brand.
Which results in Jeezy being shown up by every rapper who’s willing to offer something close to full disclosure. If not remorse, Lil Boosie shows the real consequences of his jail sentence on “Beez Like”, bemoaning how he missed the first time his daughter had her period. And though he has nothing to gain by doing so, even Jay Z is willing to name names and get specific about his days herbin' 'em in the home of the Terrapins.
Otherwise, you've heard it all on Seen It All*:* there’s something called “Been Getting Money” and you could probably come up with 85% of it in your head before your first listen. (I’ll spot you “ft. Akon” as a hint.) Conversely, a Jeezy track named "Black Eskimo" could never live up to what you think it might sound like. There’s a six minute song with Rick Ross and the Game, which is no fun now that they’re all getting along with each other. The deluxe edition contains “Fuck the World”, which features R&B seat filler August Alsina and is only notable for being a Jeezy love song that isn’t as embarrassing as “Tear It Up”.
But none of this really seems to matter right now, because a 38-year-old man was shot and killed at a Wiz Khalifa concert and Jeezy was recently held in custody with five of his associates on $1 million bail. It will inevitably be used as a “teachable moment” about Jeezy and hip-hop as a whole and make Seen It All a footnote, but those are the least of the problems presented here—a man is dead and Jeezy may have had something to do with it, and even shittier is that you’re reminded of Jeezy’s other, very disturbing 2014 run-in with the law. So maybe the vagueness of Seen It All actually works in its favor: had it been autobiographical, it may have been even more inherently sad than it already is.


On his full-length debut, the 24-year-old singer’s chameleonic tenor pierces through the Dirty Hit template and finds a natural fit in pouty pop-rock and gauzy trip-hop.

It’s All Smiles

It was Matty Healy’s sticky earworm of a hook that introduced us to No Rome in 2018. On “Narcissist,” No Rome lays the groundwork, spinning rhymes and stringing together brief reflections on taking acid and alienating himself. Healy’s back-up coos and earnest cry—“I’ve been seeing somebody”—formed a compelling endorsement of this soft-spoken, R&B-influenced Gen Z newcomer. The track, off No Rome’s RIP Indo Hisashi EP, ushered him into the 1975 universe with subtle, polished swagger.
No Rome, born Guendoline Rome Viray Gomez, had been releasing lo-fi tracks on SoundCloud from his hometown of Manila in the Philippines when Healy emailed and invited him to the UK. He signed to Healy’s Dirty Hit label almost immediately; Healy told Zane Lowe that Rome became “a bit of a muse” and that the two shared “parallel” ideas. In 2019, Rome, Healy, and the 1975’s George Daniel drew on that overlapping vision for No Rome’s second EP, the sparkly and brooding Crying in the Pretty Places. This past year, Charli XCX joined the now London-based artist for a one-off single. With his debut LP, It’s All Smiles, No Rome sets out to prove himself as not just a muse or collaborator but a key player in this realm of glossy and emotional left-of-center pop.
Dirty Hit began as a home for the 1975 when no other label wanted them, and it’s grown into a mini pop powerhouse in recent years, signing beabadoobee, Wolf Alice, the Japanese House, and Rina Sawayama. Most of its artists are young, with a shared affinity for slick production, dreamy synths, and the 1990s—a bedroom haze of alt-rock. Excellent albums have come out of the Dirty Hit braintrust, along with some derivative and underwhelming ones. Healy and co. are smart to bet on No Rome and It’s All Smiles gives him a lot to work with: He can croon, sing-rap over a skipping beat, or stretch across an ambient drone. In line with Dirty Hit’s underdog vibe, the album presents an outline for a fresh alternative sound, one that’s undeniably current without relying on major labels or TikTok trends. It’s solid pop with an experimental slant.
A hopeless romantic, No Rome spends much of the album delivering melancholy-tinged love songs and spottily recounting scenes from a party as if he’s just coming to. He remembers doing lines on the table and playing Prince to get someone’s attention; he fixates on her words and believes the sun doesn’t shine without her. The lyrics are simple, immediate snapshots of longing, but the production choices make them glow. Just when a song threatens to glide into easy listening, a skittering drumbeat shakes you awake.
Opener “Space-Cowboy” is busy with pitched-up vocals and glitchy modulations that could’ve been plucked from A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. There are echoes of Healy’s vocal cadence on “How Are You Feeling?” and shades of co-producer BJ Burton’s signal-distorting past work with Kanye West and Bon Iver in the moody guitars and fuzzy bass of “ITS *N0T* LOV33 (Winter in London).” At times these familiar notes can make the album sound a bit generic. But its range—not quite genre-spanning, but wide enough within the critically acclaimed pop quadrant—is gratifying. No Rome has described his style as “shoegaze R&B,” a vibe best realized in Frank Oceanic croons and widescreen synth-scapes on “Issues (After Dark)” and “Remember November / Bitcrush*Yr*Life.” Sunny reverb and shout-along refrains on more traditional pop numbers like “When She Comes Around” are big and rousing enough to fill a medium-sized room.
No Rome could probably command a bigger one: His chameleonic tenor pierces through the Dirty Hit template, a natural fit for pouty pop-rock or gauzy trip-hop. But eventually It’s All Smiles starts to run out of steam. Its songs are ambitious compared to radio pop, but too safe to really stand out; it’s a cinematic album in search of a climax. And while No Rome’s vocals scale up to the bolder flourishes, his lyrics come out undercooked, especially on sparser tracks like “I Want U.” The lack of balance doesn’t entirely register on a cursory listen. But as valuable as the 1975’s mentorship has been, No Rome will need more purposeful songwriting and less expected reference points to truly stand alone.

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


Kool Keith’s second act was inspiring, and it came from a relentless willingness to redefine himself. His newly-reissued collaboration with Dan the Automator was a rap album of unprecedented oddity.

Dr. Octagonecologyst

Around 1995, Kool Keith’s path was unclear. After the demise of his legendary New York crew Ultramagnetic MCs, he spent many of his early solo years out in California. Rap had never paid him or his crew the recognition they deserved, and Keith’s place within it seemed unstable. Collaborator Kutmasta Kurt had been working with him on an album for Capitol called Sex Style—a porno-chic concept record that the label continually back-burnered. Keith needed something else to get his voice out there in the meantime.
Inspired by his West Coast relocation, Keith cut another track and sent the tape to hip-hop radio tastemakers like Stretch & Bobbito and Sway & King Tech. His name wasn’t on it; still, his voice was recognizable enough that people knew it was him. But the lyrics—with a space-doctor, scato-gyno-urological theme, and co-penned with an NYC cohort named Sir Menelik (as “Chewbacca Uncircumcised”)—were completely preposterous. “Wax in your inner ear, doodoo in your outer ear/Two cows a zebra will jump through your atmosphere,” goes the project’s titular cut. The DJs assumed it was more fitting to bill the track to the only name listed on the cassette: Dr. Octagon.
The positive reception for “Dr. Octagon” caught the attention of Dan Nakamura, aka Dan the Automator. A young producer who had been learning on the job, he mastered early Solesides Records by the likes of DJ Shadow and Latyrx in his studio The Glue Factory (or as his parents knew it, their basement). Keith and Automator wound up doing a couple albums’ worth of collaborations in ’95 and 1996—a host of their bicoastal boom-bap joints can be heard on the after-the-fact collection A (Much) Better Tomorrow—but it’s Dr. Octagonecologyst that really shook people up. Hip-hop could be weird, but how weird could it get? The level of oddity within Dr. Octagonecologyst had yet to be explored. And we wouldn’t be getting this nice deluxe reissue of the album if that weirdness hadn’t aged well.
At a time when 1980s vets were accustomed to fall-offs, Kool Keith’s second act was inspiring, and it came from a relentless willingness to redefine himself—even if it meant being someone else. On the album, he’s credited as Dr. Octagon throughout, even if his dissociative, Thelonious Monk-timing bars are consistent with his other guises. Few MCs have been as comfortable in their absurdity, their convention-trashing, or their absolute fearlessness in trying new things on the mic. Dr. Octagonecologyst is where Funkadelic at their most “Icka Prick”-pornographic is rerouted into intergalactic g-funk, a place too cold for drop-top Impalas. Cronenberg body horror dominates throat-clenching medical-procedure narratives, like “Waiting List” and “Blue Flowers.” Residual Sex Style fantasies drive “Girl Let Me Touch You,” and “I’m Destructive” pushes threats of cruelty to the point of total goofiness. But when Keith is on the mic, he never lets up for a breather. Even at their most meter-defying and non sequitur-prone, his lyrics are memorably pungent in pretty much every line.
As Automator produced with a singular defiance, all that strangeness found its ideal pairing. No slight to Ced Gee and the Ultramagnetics, but this is where one of the great unconventional MCs found his most adventurous co-experimentalist. Nakamura was a keen-eared cratedigger and a trained violinist—that’s him splitting the difference between reverie and nausea on the “Blue Flowers” loop. He paired obscure yet on-point samples with more recognizable classic drum loops (including a nod to Ultramagnetics-popularized “Synthetic Substitution” on “Wild and Crazy”) and raw, ugly keyboards. It gave Dr. Octagonecologyst the feeling of a traditional hip-hop record sent through a bath of acid—lysergic or corrosive, take your pick.
On the more accessible cuts, he takes familiar, contemporaneous concepts and scuzzes them up. “Earth People” pairs Whodini 808s and fizzing analog synth sounds, resulting in a horror-psych mutation of classic Dre. It also features DJ Q-Bert’s then-new idea of running his turntables through a wah-wah pedal for a mind-warping scratch outro. The album’s less conventional moments show how Automator could have a hard time thinking of this as a hip-hop album at all, despite it showcasing an all-time rapper’s-rapper. Coyote howls dropped like Bomb Squad Maceo horns during “On Production.” Headnod beats bumped skulls into musique concrete Moogs on “Biology 101,” ratcheting up the uncanny elements of Keith’s presence. But Keith and Automator linked up their sensibilities so well that even their jokey, free-associative skits became indelible. Say it with me now: “Oh shit, there’s a horse in the hospital!”
The additions to this reissue of Dr. Octagonecologyst don’t dilute that feeling, either. The three previously unreleased tracks are in keeping with the album’s space-perv aesthetic: “Astro Embalming Fluid” sews together headknock beats, silver-plated synth burbles, and manic mid-freakout astronaut lyrics. “Redeye” finds common ground with Roger Troutman and Master P before going into zoological player mode. And “I’ll Be There For You” posits the Doctor as some sort of extraterrestrial savoir in a track that would’ve made for a strangely uplifting respite. Apart from that, the two Automator remixes—a somewhat more “professional” sounding guitar on “I’m Destructive” and a lesser version of “Wild and Crazy” with a subtler synth bassline—hint at directions that Dan might’ve taken these tracks with a few more years of experience. In these cases, the happy accidents of amateurism win out over the older-and-wiser versions.
Dr. Octagonecologyst’s afterlife is nearly as weird as its conception and its essence. Seemingly destined for cult status, it instead spread like wildfire, becoming an indie-rap essential—even as both parties were en route to newer things. By 1997, when Dr. Octagonecologyst’s major-label push made it the single weirdest thing to ever have the DreamWorks name attached, both its MC and its producer were on to the next thing. Their respective careers would lead Automator to a string of alter-egos—Handsome Boy Modeling School with Prince Paul, Deltron 3030 with Del the Funky Homosapien, and most notably Gorillaz with Damon Albarn. Meanwhile, Keith would kill off Dr. Octagon for Dr. Dooom, only to resurrect him again for an inside-out, meta-alter-ego: Mr. Nogatco. Whether they’re inspired by its precedent or pushing back against it, both artists wound up permanently routed towards definitive careers by Dr. Octagon. And even considering its 1990s origins, Dr. Octagonecologyst still feels as much out of its time as it does out of its mind.


The Chilean band Föllakzoid specialize in the pillowy sort of rock music designed to shield you from the world for a while. At its best, their music gains allure by gradually stacking up moments of powerful suggestion.

III

The Chilean band Föllakzoid specialize in the pillowy sort of rock music designed to shield you from the world for a while. Huge, looping riffs stretch across deeply repetitive percussion, creating an atmosphere somewhere between trance and stupor. The word "psychedelic" is never far away when reading descriptions of the band, but three albums into their career, they’ve explored many colors on that particular spectrum. Beginning with outward-facing, Josh Homme-indebted rock on their eponymous debut in 2009, they switched to something closer to krautrock on 2013’s II. Here, they tighten their sound, cutting out the meandering themes and occasionally sloppy riffing. There are only four songs, but extra details emerge slowly on repeat listening.
German producer Uwe Schmidt, better known as Atom™, has been brought in as a collaborator, bringing the discipline of his immersively repetitive electronic music with him. He’s also credited with playing a Korg synth that belonged to Kraftwerk during the 1980s. Föllakzoid can’t let go of their roots entirely—at best, they’re channeling the LSD-laced guitar patterns of Loop and Spacemen 3; at worst, vocalist Juan Pablo Rodrigues leans too hard on foggy vocal effects that recall Brooklyn psych also-rans (and labelmates) Psychic Ills. They’re most effective when working somewhere between their rock instincts and Schmidt’s concise approach. Opener "Electric" recalls a more-guitar heavy version of LCD Soundsystem’s "Get Innocuous!", where a patient build combines with a subtle layering of elements to deliver the album’s most transcendent moment.
Föllakzoid barely shift course over the 45-minute III. The riff that dominates the closing "Feuerzeug" is only a breath away from the one that towers over "Electric". "Piure" is the best example of that here, mixing up backward-masked electronics, menacing ambient noise, and a guitar churn that sounds like it was played by Can’s Michael Karoli. In general, the album treats its journey as circular, a path of tiny incremental steps that eventually leads us back to where we began.
In 2014 Föllakzoid played a set at Primavera Sound, leaving behind this video memento to mark the occasion. The beginning is marked by the reading of a poem by the Chilean writer Vicente Huidobro, which is heavy on birthing and religious imagery, where each line is so dense in implication it’s easy to just disappear into it for a while. It’s a handy comparison for the type of feeling Föllakzoid try to convey in their music, where their vaguely epic songs—only one track here, the nine-minute “Feuerzeug”, is less than 10 minutes in length—gain an allure by gradually stacking up moments of powerful suggestion. It doesn’t always reach the level of spiritual purity it could, but there’s a touch of steel and a sense of pacing that was missing from Föllakzoid’s prior work, positioning III as a gateway for a much a deeper dive into altered states.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the first album Yoko Ono recorded after the death of her husband, a brittle and gorgeous capsule of hope triumphing over grief.

Season of Glass

They wouldn’t stop playing “Imagine.” In the immediate aftermath of John Lennon’s murder on December 8, 1980, Yoko Ono lay staring at the ceiling of her apartment in the Dakota building in Manhattan while the inescapable sound of the song she’d co-written with John—a credit he’d denied her for years—leaked in on a nightmare loop, played by mourners congregating on the street below. “What I learned,” she said later of this time period, “was that I didn’t have much control over my destiny or fate.” After 24 hours, she got up, shakily, groping for a tape recorder. As the vigil continued below her—composed largely of the Beatles devotees who until this moment had been her greatest tormentors—Ono hit record and howled the first words that came into her mind: “I don’t know why/It was getting so good for us.” Precisely one day after she’d held her husband’s dying body in her arms, she’d written her first song about the experience.
That song, called “I Don’t Know Why,” was harrowing and plainspoken. “You bastards!” she wailed. “Hate us! Hate me! We had everything!” her voice trailing off into a sob. The “bastards” could be anyone standing in front of the world she and John envisioned—war profiteers, for sure, as well as politicians, corporations, the usual suspects. But it’s a fair bet that, for Ono, more than a few of those “bastards” were standing outside her building.
Ono had always treated trauma as raw material. In 1964’s famous Cut Piece, she invited audience members to scissor off pieces of her clothing while she stood motionless. On “Baby’s Heartbeat,” she incorporated tapes of her miscarried child’s fetal heartbeat. Ono’s fearlessness in confronting the dark places in her psyche is a large part of what traditional audiences hated about her, but she made it a lifelong mission to choose the idea that terrified her most and then pursue it. “For art,” she once said, “I would do just about anything.”
So when Ono headed back to the studio in March 1981, barely three months after Lennon’s death, it was entirely in character. The band that she and John had hired to record their comeback record, 1980’s Double Fantasy—the album that was meant to reintroduce the couple to the world—was assembled and ready to work. Ono still had songs left to record. Her life with John was over; her lifelong work as the widowed “Mrs. Lennon” was just beginning.
Ono fashioned her fifth solo album, Season of Glass, as a survivor’s statement, a kiss from the Dakota’s balcony to the mourners below. For the cover, she photographed Lennon’s blood-smeared wire-rimmed glasses on the table of that balcony, placed next to a half-drunk glass of water, the foggy view of Central Park’s trees and the Manhattan skyline behind it. She framed this as an act of demystification—“This is what John is now,” she said pointedly—but it was just as easy to see the bloody glasses as the presentation of a relic, the mortal remains of a pop-cultural saint.
The world might have imagined what Yoko Ono in mourning would sound like—shrieking, moaning, howling—yet this was not the face she turned to the world. On “Goodbye Sadness,” “Toyboat,” “Silver Horse,” and “Mother of the Universe,” Ono sings in gorgeous, long-breathed melodies, often multi-tracked in harmony, while the music gently rocks and sways, offering muted variations on her husband’s beloved doo-wop and soul ballads. It is, in a word, glassy—smooth, brittle, transparent. She was no longer using her voice as a “warrior” might wield a sword, as she once put it. These were lullabies to hope, delivered with the beatific calm of a dying opera heroine’s final aria.
Rubberneckers or armchair psychologists could easily impute trauma. Perhaps this was the sound of shock, numbness, resignation. The lyrics are full of unanswered prayers: The “Silver Horse” that arrives to bear her away someplace beautiful has no wings, while the tiny triangular sail on the horizon turns out to be just a toy boat. But one of the most fascinating things about Season of Glass is that apart from “I Don’t Know Why” and the savage “No, No, No,” the majority of it was written years earlier, at a time when Ono was not the Dear Leader’s widow but the most hated spouse in the history of popular music. The album is less a eulogy than a piece of unfinished business, and any relation to John’s murder are mostly tricks of the light.
The heart-rending opening ballad “Goodbye Sadness,” for example, stems from Lennon’s infamous mid-’70s “Lost Weekend, ” a bender that lasted more than a year. After Ono sent him packing, Lennon disappeared into drinking and drugs, getting shitfaced with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and sleeping with the paramour Ono had handpicked for him, May Pang.
The wistful second track, “Mindweaver,” cannot help but scan, in context, like posthumous mythmaking (“He was a mindweaver…”). But Ono wrote it in 1980, when Lennon was in Bermuda, and the song depicts their relationship at its most exhausting and draining (its original title was “Mindfucker”). The lyrics to “Extension 33” might seem coarse or shocking in the context of John’s murder—“Once I had a love, it nearly killed me/But now I have my freedom”—but the song dates from the same mid-’70s time period as “Goodbye Sadness,” when Ono briefly exited the toxic cloud of Beatledom and, as her 1975 album title had it, was Feeling the Space.
Save for the exception of the gunshots that ring out at the beginning of “No, No, No,” these songs didn’t spring from Lennon’s murder, but they did pointedly address his absence. Yoko Ono was five years ahead in everything—in conceptual art, staging loft concerts, punk rock. Now, ironically, she was five years ahead of her own grief. If John Lennon seems maddeningly alive in these songs, it’s because when she wrote them, he was.
Season of Glass hit No. 49 on the Billboard charts, the highest of any of Ono’s solo records. Critics who had spent the previous decade sneering at Ono suddenly found themselves full of charitable things to say: Stephen Holden called it her “most accessible and assured album” in Rolling Stone, while Mark Cooper, writing for Record Mirror, said that “Yoko has made a record of fragility, grief, and ultimately, of great human strength.” That same year, Double Fantasy, which alternated songs between John and Yoko, won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
The gimlet-eyed Ono was far too attuned to savage ironies to let this reversal pass by unnoticed. “For 10 years I was the devil, and now suddenly I’m an angel,” she noted. “Did the world have to lose John for people to change their opinion of me?... If it brought John back, I’d rather be hated.” She was aware, no doubt, that had John not been killed, Season of Glass would likely have been just another Yoko Ono solo record, dismissed savagely by critics when it wasn’t outright ignored. She wasn’t saying anything that she hadn’t said before; this time, the only difference was that people were, momentarily, listening.
For much of the ’70s, she and John had been carrying out a public conversation about gender roles. It was loud, heated, and messy, and for a good portion of the decade, the public seemed to barely tolerate it. After the dissolution of the Beatles brought a premature end to the greatest pop-cultural show on Earth, John and Yoko became something like the decade’s equivalent of a hate-watch. John wrote songs to and about Yoko on every album, and Yoko returned with songs of her own.
But did anyone, really, listen to her half of the conversation? The press treated Ono’s presence like an insult, upon which her albums heaped injury. Beatles kids had not taken kindly to this severe new stepmom—her frightening ululations, her weird macrobiotic diet—nor did they much enjoy being exposed to Dad’s lustful zeal for her: Did they really need to put the nude pictures everywhere?
With the Beatles, the psychosexual lines were always blurred. Ono always suspected that her husband’s feelings for his songwriting partner, Paul McCartney, were more intense and tangled than a simple best friend, and Lennon both made disturbing offhand comments about his Freudian lust for his mother and clung to Ono in ways that were unmistakably childlike. On the morning of his death, Anne Liebowitz photographed him clinging to his wife, nude, in the fetal position, a pose Lennon said summed up their relationship dynamic “perfectly.” Just as Beatles fans saw their idols as some combination of older brother, parental figure, and sex object, John worshiped Yoko, calling her “Mother” while also sketching erotica of her.
Now that this conversation had been violently silenced, it suddenly seemed precious in retrospect. Before, Ono had been an obstacle, blocking access to the Great Man; now she was his only living representative. Overnight, she found herself transformed from, as she once said from the stage while introducing the song “Coffin Car,” “this ugly Jap who stole your monument or something from you” to Lennon’s emissary—“the keeper of the wishing well,” she called it. If the world ever wanted to know anything of John Lennon ever again, it would have to go through her.
The day that Lennon was shot, he and Ono had been working on a song of hers called “Walking on Thin Ice.” It was a freezing blast of post-punk, a song so alien to the world of the Beatles that it takes effort to remind yourself that it’s John Lennon playing guitar on it, wrenching gasping sounds out of a 1958 Rickenbacker. The song’s inspiration came from Lennon’s Bermuda visit, when he went downstairs to some hip club and saw people losing their minds to the B-52’s’ “Rock Lobster,” a song full of the same blood-curdling cries that Ono had unleashed to a sea of frozen faces during Plastic Ono Band’s live concerts. When the final session wrapped for “Walking on Thin Ice,” Lennon could be heard saying: “I think you just cut your first Number One, Yoko.”
“Walking on Thin Ice” doesn’t appear on Season of Glass; it was released as a single, instead, three weeks after Lennon’s assassination. (It did eventually make it to No. 1, in remixed form, although it would take 22 years to get there.) The omission of “Walking on Thin Ice” from Season of Glass feels like a glitch in the historical record. The song straddles the same uneasy divide as the album, gesturing towards a future that contained no Lennon, no McCartney, and really, no more ’60s at all, made by one of its last living representatives.
“Walking on Thin Ice,” along with Season of Glass’s “No, No, No,” lived in the same chilly meat locker that hosted a new generation of British bands, like Joy Division, who formed in the deindustrialized grayscale town of Salford, an hour away from Lennon and McCartney’s Liverpool. These people had no picaresque “Penny Lane’’ to fondly gaze back on, no nourishing childhood memories of hope, and their music reflected it. Lennon, for all his fondness for tart-tongued comebacks and surface shocks, would probably never have been able to bear a band like Joy Division. This was music that never even knew contentment existed, let alone exhibited a desire to strive for it. Contentment, meanwhile, was the only thing Lennon’s songs ever yearned for, and his best late-period solo work often sighed with it—“Borrowed Time,” “(Just Like) Starting Over,” “Watching the Wheels.”
If Lennon was unable to participate in the future that he saw coming, to his continuing frustration, he had a surprising eye for spotting it. He grasped early the significance of the conceptual art that Ono helped pioneer with her work in Fluxus. He heard the violent, shuddering energies she unleashed onstage, even if he could only gesture toward them on his own—“Mother” is a classic, one of his most powerful solo songs, but the screaming he assays on the coda is a bunny-slope ride compared to the shrieking, face-first cliff plummet that his wife uncorks on “Don’t Worry, Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow).” He played guitar on all these songs, even the ones where she was directly rebuking him for his occasionally shameful behavior, as on “Death of Samantha.” Indeed, for all his possessive rages, his bursts of machismo, Lennon was, in the end, just a fan.
“No No No” and “Walking on Thin Ice” pointed forward to the increasingly bleak decade Lennon would never see: Thatcherism in his homeland, Reaganism in his adopted one, the AIDS crisis sweeping through the artistic demimonde of his and Ono’s downtown New York scene. Lennon, prone to depression and easily discouraged, would likely have foundered in this bleak climate. But Ono was prepared to breathe in it.
The collision of future and past lasted up until the grisly moment Mark David Chapman dropped to one knee and fired five shots at Lennon’s back, sending Lennon staggering into the lobby of the Dakota, shouting “I’m shot!” while Ono screamed for help. As he fell to the ground, the finished tape of “Walking on Thin Ice” fell from his hand, skittering across the lobby floor.


Marina Lambrini Diamandis' second album is a high-gloss record made with Dr. Luke, Stargate, Greg Kurstin, and Liam Howe, and dressed in layers of philosophy, mythology, and blonde wigs.

Electra Heart

In Marina Lambrini Diamandis' oft-cited comeback interview with Popjustice last August, she introduced the concept that would lead into her second album: that of Electra Heart, a kind of not-quite-alter-ego/character/affectation/cinematic simulacrum that would feed into the follow-up to her 2010 debut LP as Marina and the Diamonds, The Family Jewels. Representing Greek tragedy, the "loss and failure" side of the American Dream, a daddy complex, and the vacuity apparently lingering inside us all, over six months prior to the eventual release of the LP there was very much a feeling of Marina over-complicating the whole affair: trying to dress up the high-gloss record that she had made with Katy Perry's collaborators (seemingly at the behest of her major label) in layers of philosophy, mythology, artifice, and blonde wigs. (There's a babyish song here called "Hypocrates", misspelled for seemingly no good reason, and with no reference to the philosopher in the song.) It must have stung like billy-o when Lana Del Rey came along and executed precisely what Marina was aiming for, hardly having to open her much-discussed mouth in order to explain herself whilst Marina tied herself in conceptual knots. In short, Electra Heart bears no profound relationship to Greek mythology or philosophical thought beyond exploring situations of basic human pathos (or lack thereof), but its rare affecting moments are heavy with tragedy.
The Family Jewels was disliked by many for its vaudevillian Sparks-like gaucheness, Marina's self-aggrandizement and cock-a-hoop vocal (though there's no doubting the chops of a song like "Hollywood"). But there was a sense of personality to the music as well as Diamandis' deep, hiccupy voice, and a promising sense of audaciousness that's been all but lost here. Working with Dr. Luke, Stargate, Greg Kurstin, and Liam Howe, the songs on Electra Heart fall into three basic categories: the bland, swampy banger (sub-category: "Lies"' Skrillex-lite), a regal, electronic strut falling somewhere between Depeche Mode at their poppiest and the Doctor Who theme tune, and very cloying, nursery rhyme music-box ballads. The campy ding-dong of "The State of Dreaming" is as close as Electra Heart gets to fun, with huge church bells whooshing from side to side in the mix like a pantomime dame testing the trajectory of her ball gown skirts. Relegating great early single "Radioactive" to the bonus tracks on the deluxe version of the LP is nearly as daft as some of the waffle that Marina comes out with here.
Marina really, really wants you to know that she's into pop culture, though the lazy, meaningless strings of references that comprise a good chunk of the songs here aren't any kind of postmodern comment on the Tumblr-ification of society, but just plain bad songwriting. The bombardment of archetypes and clichés is exhausting: "Beauty queen of a silver screen" persuading someone to buy her "a big diamond ring" on "Primadonna"; the titular "Homewrecker" (where excruciatingly bad spoken word verses clash against a pretty triumphant chorus) whose "life is a mess, but I'm still looking pretty in this dress." "Teen Idle" is just horrible, a glitchy ballad that sounds as though it was recorded in a church, where she wishes to be a "virgin pure/ A 21st century whore," "a prom queen fighting for the title/ instead of being 16 and burning up a bible/ feeling super super super suicidal," a chorus of Marinas echoing "super." She wishes for "blood, guts, and angel cake" because "I'm gonna puke it anyway," a weird preoccupation of hers that also crops up in "Homewrecker" ("girls and their cosmic gourmet vomit"), continued from "Girls" on her debut. But as for ending the ego, Marina does seem obsessed with ideas of finality and death-- knowing "where I will belong/ When they blow me out" on the quavering, celestial "Fear and Loathing"-- seemingly finding solace in the reliability of microcosmic, compact celebrity tragedies, perhaps in the face of the parts of this album that ring desperately true.
"You only ever touch me in the dark/ Only if we're drinking can you see my spark," she sings on "Lies". "The only time you open up is when we get undressed," she laments on "Starring Role", which glimmers like clashing porcelain before a stuttering, empowering chorus where she refuses to be a supporting cast member in an alluded-to love triangle. "Doesn't mean that I am weak," she asserts on "Power & Control", repeating, "I am weak, I am weak, I am weak" in an increasingly ephemeral voice. "Every day I feel the same/ Stuck, and I can never change/ Sucked into a black balloon/ Spat into an empty room" goes "Living Dead", a snappy, taut Soft Cell-like number. It feels like shaky ground to say that these vulnerable moments are Electra Heart's finest, catchiest, and hardest-hitting songs, Marina's soaring vocals packing some genuine emotion, picking up on themes of self-loathing that don't need blasé allusions to bulimia in order to indicate emotional emptiness; where the often transcendent states of sex and alcohol collaborate for profoundly dispiriting experiences. Her honesty, at least, is empowering. Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record, it's a real shame that it's come hamstrung in this unnecessary concept, ready for people to laugh when Marina fails to pull it off. If she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four, Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums. Let's hope there's a next time.


Their first album in three years, the latest from Silver Jews finds songwriter David Berman in a more focused mode, writing lines that seem to straighten out some of his bent lyrical aesthetic. Nashville's Mark Nevers (Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Lambchop, the Clientele) produces.

Silver Jews: Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

"In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection." As first lines of an album go, this one, the opening shot fired on Silver Jews' 1998 album American Water, is among the greats, up there with Raw Power's "I'm a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm" and Straight Outta Compton's "You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge." It's an especially great line coming from Silver Jews' David Berman because "perfection" as a concept has little place in his universe. In this landscape, flubbed notes exist alongside amazing guitar solos (when Berman's buddy Stephen Malkmus is around, anyway), shirts are untucked, keys are more suggestions than rules, some of the best lyrics in rock history are interspersed with unapologetic groaners (I could kiss the guy who wrote, "Come to Tennessee/ 'Cause you're the only ten I see") and characters are often flawed to the point of paralysis.
Perfection being what it is for Silver Jews, and Berman being so comfortable with that notion, it's easy for fans to gloss over the rough patches. I have a feeling I'm not alone when I say that on every SJ record-- save American Water, almost-- I still skip around a bit. The nature of Silver Jews allows for inconsistent albums, even though the records appear infrequently. Two or three or four duff tracks on one record is nothing to get worked up about, and they may even add to the ramshackle charm. And so while Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the first Silver Jews album in almost three years, has the usual small handful of eh-to-just-OK tracks, it also feels different from prior Silver Jews albums in a way that's hard to put a finger on.
Part of it could be the lack of knockout songs. There are no instant entries to the SJ canon, nothing here that knocks you on your ass, not a single "How did he write that?" moment. And this problem is there from the beginning, the opening, where SJ have always killed: Where Tanglewood Numbers grabbed us by the throat with "Punks in the Beerlight" and The Natural Bridge turned a chair around and sat us down to explain "How to Rent a Room", Lookout Mountain opens with the plodding and dull "What Is Not But Could Be If". You feel like you just tripped and fell awkwardly into the album.
It doesn't help that the production is oddly harsh and distant-sounding; where Berman sounds best clear and uncluttered, so that it seems like he's engaging you in conversation, on this record his voice has a weirdly persistent metallic reverb clinging to it, like he's broadcasting from inside a tin can and you're straining to connect with him. Something about the sound makes him sound a bit uneasy, stiff, and a touch less confident. Busy Nashville producer Mark Nevers handled a chunk of the recording and all the mixing, and the warmth he's been known to give albums by Lambchop, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and the Clientele is missing here. Berman's bassist and vocalist wife Cassie is, as she was on Tanglewood Numbers, far too high in the mix. There were some weird choices made in the studio.
I shouldn't dwell on the production, since this band started out as the lo-ist of the lo-fi, recording white noise-packed songs on answering machines-- and besides, you listen to Silver Jews for words. But an album that finds Berman in a more focused mode lyrically, writing lines that seem to straighten out some of his bent lyrical aesthetic, would do well to come with a more welcoming sound. In any event, there are still good songs with quotable lines here, thankfully, and the tunes throughout are solid. The lengthy, bouncy, Dylan-y "San Francisco B.C.", in particular, is packed with lyrical nuggets: "We had sarcastic hair/ We used lude (sic) pseudonyms/ We got a lot of stares on the street back then" and "She said, 'You don't make enough to provide for me'/ I said, 'What about the stuff that we-- quote-- believe?'" are two. (I love how you can picture the fingers in the air setting aside the word "believe.")
If the focus throughout seems to move away from stringing together rich, penetrating images, Berman is still skilled enough with words to make him do what he wants them to. The peppy, rushed "Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer" is a surreal short story, with a title character who is a dishwasher at a restaurant "Open 'til the end of time" and who falls for a girl "all strung-out on hard street fat." And then the weary countrified lament "Strange Victory, Strange Defeat"-- which wonders about the "handsome grandsons in these rockband magazines" who have supplanted "the fat ones, the bald and the goateed"-- works pretty well, even if the second half of the song doesn't stick. The closing track, "We Could Be Looking for the Same Thing"-- a cozy ballad that finds David duetting with Cassie-- strips the lyrical flourishes back almost completely: Lines like "Where the days turn the weeks into months of the year" and "I've been around some and I've seen enough to know/ We could spend happy lives, inside the days of you and me" could have been written by any number of singer-songwriters. That seems purposeful: Berman seems to have something specific that he wants to get across, and he's OK saying it in what, for him, is a direct way.
With both Lookout Mountain and Tanglewood Numbers, there's been discussion about these records being made after Berman's time staring into the abyss, when he survived a suicide attempt, worked through a serious drug problem, got married, started touring, and generally got his shit together. So it's tempting to hear some of the differences with this record-- the tamer imagery, the more even keel, the highs that aren't so high-- as somehow mirroring the changes in Berman's personal life. For me, though-- since I never knew how tough Berman had it while enjoying his records up through Bright Flight, never had a clue as to depths of his suffering, and never heard his music in that context-- it seems wrong to start thinking about such things now. Instead, I prefer to think of Lookout Mountain as an album of pretty-good songs from a guy who has written some unbelievably great ones, and will, more than likely, write some more of that quality down the road. There's never been any kind of definable arc with the Silver Jews, no movement toward a fixed point; it's more about keepin' on keepin' on. Once perfection is off the table, and you're just doing the best you can with what you have, there will be moments like this.


On her second album, Boston singer-songwriter Ellen Kempner constructs affecting narratives filled with grief and hope.

A Place I’ll Always Go

Imagine you have gone weeks eating TV dinners and suddenly you find yourself in the grocery store’s produce section. You handle the apples and peaches simply because you have forgotten what fruit feels like. The aisles are well lit and bursting with life, but still your mind turns to the loved one you’ve recently lost, then to all the emotional baggage attached.
Scenes like these, with a tactile rush of vulnerability, are what Palehound’s leader and songwriter Ellen Kempner does best. You can feel the moment she describes because her songwriting is all about feel. And this grocery-aisle epiphany—as heard on her new record‘s best song, “Feeling Fruit”—is marked by Kempner’s sweetly picked guitar, which seems to rot from the inside. As she hums and whispers to herself, the mounting musical tension slowly boils off. It’s a tiny crushing sadness rendered in technicolor, suspended for what seems like forever in a song that’s only two and half minutes long.
The 23-year-old Boston rocker’s sophomore LP is ripe with loss. In one of the record’s other memorable scenes, found on “If You Met Her,” Kempner recalls a moment she shared with a young friend who died suddenly, arguing at a Dunkin Donuts while eating blueberry glazed pastries. Delivered over an infectious jangle and cheerily unflinching beat, the song has a bittersweet ache. Kempner tries to make sense of it all and comes to few conclusions, other than knowing her friend would love her new girlfriend.
For all the grief here, there’s also light. While Kempner was mourning her loved ones, she also happened to fall in love for the first time and fully embraced her queerness. This struggle between moving forward and being tugged back, by actual memories and by the muscle-memory of anxiety, is central to A Place I’ll Always Go, giving it more of a thematic center than her 2015 debut, Dry Food.
Kempner’s project has matured in more ways than one as she’s bubbled up through Boston’s DIY scene. Dry Food was lo-fi and grungy, like it had a little dirt under its fingernails (in a great way); A Place I’ll Always Go is cleaner, the guitar crunch glinting and the production having room to twirl. There are echoes of earlier bands, with songs that brings to mind Smith Westerns (“Turning 21”), Beach House (“At Night I’m Alright With You”), the Strokes (“Flowing Over”), or Wilco (“Room”). But Palehound have always sounded like variations on classic indie rock, arranged around Kempner’s unique whisper of a voice and way of seeing the world that draws out the moodiness. This undercurrent distinguishes the project, and makes Kempner worth following.
There is a lot of music about anxiety in the air these days, but Ellen Kempner’s voice is specific and visceral. It's the work of someone who can't hold it in, an emotion she captures quite well on “Flowing Over.” Lucky for us, her nervous, oversized heart knows not to tell, but instead show.


The Finnish experimental electronic producer and legendary Jamaican rhythm section team up in search of an elusive balance between their distinctive styles.

Vladislav Delay / Sly Dunbar / Robbie Shakespeare: 500-Push-Up

500-Push-Up

When French provocateur Serge Gainsbourg decamped to Jamaica in 1978 to cut a reggae record, the befuddled rhythm section of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare didn’t know quite what to do with the singer. “It was quite tense,” producer Philippe Lerichomme recalled in the Gainsbourg biography A Fistful of Gitanes. At least, it was until the two parties realized that the one French song all Jamaicans knew was Gainsbourg’s softcore classic, “Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus,” kicking off a strange collaboration that lasted four years. In the decades since, Sly & Robbie have provided the bedrock to any number of distant visitors, from Grace Jones to Carly Simon, Joe Cocker to Bob Dylan. They first teamed up with Vladislav Delay (aka Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti) in Norway for 2018’s warped dub fusion album Nordub, alongside trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær and guitarist Eivind Aarset, and subsequently toured together. Whether or not they were familiar with Ripatti’s dubby body of work, they made fast friends.
In January 2019, Ripatti decamped to Kingston to again work with the bass and drum legends, stripping things back to essentials to create 500-Push-Up. Working with little more than Sly & Robbie’s in-studio jamming, some overheard chatter, and atmospheric field recordings, Ripatti then took things back to his home studio on the tiny Finnish island of Hailuoto to refine further. On paper, it sounds tantalizing: dub techno’s smoggiest practitioner teaming up with as foundational a rhythm section as Jamaica (indeed, the world) has ever produced. But it never quite emulsifies.
Neither side rests on their laurels, but they frustratingly stagnate somewhere in between their two signature styles, the rhythms not wholly entrancing, the haze not absolute. 500-Push-Up follows a basic—redundant, even—pattern: Let Sly & Robbie lay down an unchanging pulse while Ripatti conjures noisy frequencies around it. At a certain density, draw it all back down. Robbie’s bass gets noisy and gnarled on “(522),” but it’s irritating rather than visceral, like Delay’s bracing return Rakka was earlier this year. No matter the amount of clanging metal and electronic effects Ripatti triggers on “(521),” Sly’s drums stay locked down like a concrete foundation in a hurricane. Which should be a thrilling sound, only Ripatti does little to shape the track into coherence. The digital detritus Ripatti dumps atop “(514)” sounds like an entire video game arcade glitching, the noise growing denser as Sly & Robbie rumble somewhere underneath it.
Ripatti draws on the austerity of classic dub productions by King Tubby and Keith Hudson, but he still manages to clutter up the dub, yielding undistinguished din. It takes nearly two minutes for “(513)” to get going, as studio chatter runs on and on (though there are some choice bits like “Sasu, you gonna get riddim confuse, bloodclot!”). A gluey white noise thickens around the elements to the point of opacity, sirens arising and metal gnashing somewhere in the smog, with Robbie’s migraine throb carrying on through it all.
At the most intriguing moments, they strike a balance. On “(520),” Sly & Robbie yet again lock into some distorted, snake-charming low end while Ripatti conjures a UFO’s whirring, the whole thing churning and thickening into a haze. It makes you wish for the immersive depths that made Entain, Multila, and Anima such brain-erasing explorations. Messy but not mysterious, lackadaisical rather than spacey, 500-Push-Up never quite plays to its parties’ obvious strengths.

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


On the duo’s first album in 10 years, Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala mellow out, abandoning their unhinged prog opuses for a kind of airy, Caribbean yacht rock.

The Mars Volta

From the very beginning, the stadium-sized, major-label version of the Mars Volta never made any sense. The duo spent its first 10 years defined by an emotive improvisational style that was both technically proficient and utterly chaotic, a self-described “free-jazz entropy” that felt wholly out of place on alternative rock radio, never mind MTV and the Billboard charts. Bandleader Omar Rodríguez-López admitted as much while promoting their third album, Amputechture, in 2006: “We expected the band, from the beginning, to fail.”
But it’s that dissonance and artful madness that drew people to them, colored in no small part by a bewilderment that music like this had even escaped the underground at the turn of the century. Between the Mars Volta’s formation in 2001 and their breakup in 2012, Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala made music propped up by tension and intense pressure, waging sonic battles that they didn’t always win. But even after dissolving the band, they were never far apart, playing on each other’s solo projects, reuniting their previous band, At the Drive-In, and forming yet another one, Antemasque. Their new self-titled album is their first as the Mars Volta in 10 years: Recorded in secret to evade the watchful eye of a vengeful cult, it is a look toward the future from artists seeking to shed the burden of their past.
From the first notes, it’s clear the Mars Volta have mellowed out. The Latin percussion that once propelled their compositions toward the brink is now softened with a light funkiness, creating a sort of airy, Caribbean yacht rock. Tempos have slowed, tracks are much shorter (only two extend past four minutes), and the absence of tension offers a clarity often missing from their early work. The music is pleasant and inviting, punctuated by subtle flourishes rather than violent attacks. The relatively standard pop structures lift the veil created by their more characteristic wonky time signatures and lyrical abstractions; this is as vulnerable as they’ve ever been together.
Yet the same clarity that makes The Mars Volta the band’s most “accessible” record to date also reveals a darkness to Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics that hasn’t always been easy to decipher. It’s not the first time that Bixler-Zavala has sung in Spanish, but it does feel like the first time he actually wants us to understand what he has to say. Even at the band’s high-water mark, when he was writing about a friend’s overdose, subsequent coma, and eventual suicide, Bixler-Zavala’s impressionistic language served as a barrier between himself and the listener; you might have felt the pain and torment, but deciphering the narrative was difficult. His lyrics here are both direct and autobiographical, fueled by the seething rage that can only come from the pain of seeing someone you love suffer. “And if you want, I can bury him out by the Salton Sea in an empty grave,” he sings on “Vigil.” “The past has a way of coming clean.”
A fair amount of that clarity comes from the very public court case in which Bixler-Zavala’s family is currently embroiled. Chrissie Carnell Bixler, Cedric’s wife, is one of four women to accuse actor Danny Masterson of rape; Masterson is awaiting trial on three counts and faces 45 years in prison. The women and Cedric would later sue the Church of Scientology (of which the Bixler family were members) for allegedly surveilling and harassing them in Masterson’s defense, even going so far as to kill two of Carnell’s dogs. The ordeal has dominated the couple’s lives, and the compounded trauma, fear, paranoia, and righteous pursuit of justice loom large throughout the album.
It’s clear that Scientology had a profound effect on the band, as well. Cedric Bixler-Zavala initially looked to the church for support in (successfully) kicking his $1,000-a-week weed habit, but Rodríguez-López admits that Bixler-Zavala’s adoption of “absolutist” ideas ultimately led to the Mars Volta’s hiatus. That they only felt free to return to the Mars Volta once Bixler-Zavala got a peek behind the curtain of the religious cult is evidence that the story of the Mars Volta is that of two men who have loved each other for decades and are compelled to create together.
While much criticism of the Mars Volta has proceeded from an ill-defined concept of “self-indulgence,” this record—free of the noodling, non-linear song structure, and mad lyrical ravings that inspired so much derision—feels like their most intentionally self-indulgent. Abandoning their extremely specific aesthetic in favor of a more streamlined, personal approach, it’s nearly impossible to contextualize within the rest of the band’s oeuvre: More than just a new direction, it feels like the work of a completely different group, and with so many to choose from, it’s not immediately evident why they chose to label it a Mars Volta release. The previous iteration of the band thrived at the border of brilliant and unhinged, and The Mars Volta is too conventional to be called their best work. But it is certainly their most honest: a sober tale written by survivors, the first uneasy step into unfamiliar territory.