The experimental duo have long embraced music’s anarchic potential. Their latest project, exploring the nuances of machine intelligence, might be their most confounding and ambitious.

AAI

Mouse on Mars believe in the creative potential of chaos. “Music is a strong anarchic force,”Jan St. Werner, a member of the duo, told the New York Times in 2018, effusing about its propensity for mutation and cross-fertilization. In a genre often premised on the reliable pleasures of steady beats and familiar tropes, Mouse on Mars revel in the unpredictable. At the time of the interview, St. Werner and his bandmate Andi Toma were promoting their album Dimensional People, a lab experiment involving custom-built percussion robots, bespoke mobile apps, and three-dimensional sound spatialization, plus the voices of Amanda Blank, Spank Rock, and members of the National, Beirut, and Bon Iver, among dozens of others. A volatile mix, it made good on the group’s interest in music’s joyfully intractable nature.
St. Werner’s observation about music’s mutability might double as the mission statement for the group’s new album, AAI. The title stands for “anarchic artificial intelligence,” and it may be their most uncategorizable project yet, using AI as both form and content, structure and subject matter. On the surface, AAI sounds like a continuation of some of the ideas on Dimensional People. Longtime percussionist Dodo NKishi’s forceful polyrhythms drive the songs, which come wrapped in weird, shimmery textures that glisten like oil slicks. There are long, hypnotic drum jams and short, disorienting atonal bursts; at the center of it all is the voice of Louis Chude-Sokei, a Boston-based professor of African American studies. He contributes an accompanying essay—part theory, part speculative fiction—that lays out many of the album’s themes about machine intelligence, and some songs double as philosophical lectures. In the early track “Speech and Ambulation,” Chude-Sokei muses, “We reduced language to symbols and assumed that machines were merely the perfection of logic. We did not imagine them capable of desire…. What we still don’t know is what machines want. Now that they are no longer defined by computation, how will they talk?”
In a sense, the song is an answer to that very question. It turns out that the voice is not really Chude-Sokei’s, but rather that of an AI that has been trained to mimic his speech. If you listen closely, you can detect traces of this sleight of hand; there’s an occasional strangeness to the pronunciation, like a non-native speaker testing an unfamiliar word. But there is no gotcha moment, no big replicant reveal; Mouse on Mars have bypassed the easy drama of deep fakes to delve into the realm of synthetic essence. Where Dimensional People’s voices were often run through electronic processing until they sounded almost like synthesizers, here the voice is a synthesizer, in effect. Working with software tools designed by the Berlin AI agency Birds on Mars, among other technical collaborators, Mouse on Mars are able to “play” the AI’s voice as though it were a software instrument, changing its speed and pitch, glitching its enunciation, even altering intonation and emotional resonance.
Out of this manipulation come the album’s other voices: a chorus of weird, wraithlike sounds, part human and part machine. Constantly mutating, they assume all sorts of forms: stuttering beatboxing, silvery vocoder, glitched-out gobbledygook. These layered voices are chopped up and spun into a rich, mercurial fusion of rhythm and melody: basslines, arpeggios, drones, and even drums seem to have been fashioned out of scraps of the AI’s voice. On “Walking and Talking,” the effect is akin to some of Matthew Herbert’s madcap escapades in sampling, stretching the telltale sounds of speech into a teetering architecture of rhythm and tone; on “Go Tick,” chopped-up syllables take on the syncopated gait of DJ Rashad’s rolling footwork.
Chude-Sokei’s text raises provocative ideas, but it’s not always clear how they are meant to play out on a musical level. He writes of machines, long relegated to second-class status, clamoring for subjecthood. “What are the anarchic sounds we are hearing?” he asks. “Are tools again seeking recognition?” But it’s impossible to determine how much of the album is the product of machine intelligence. Is there really a ghost in the machine, or are Mouse on Mars simply nudging a digital Ouija board? But perhaps it doesn’t matter. For all their conceptual bent, Mouse on Mars have never let their concepts eclipse the music; part of the pleasure of the duo’s output is its very inscrutability. Decades later, I still have no idea what’s actually happening in an album like Instrumentals or Autoditacker; the soundsbeckon in their mystery.
That’s equally true here. And even a passing familiarity with AAI’s conceptual framework reveals a neat narrative flow embedded in the album. The record obliquely tells the story of an AI coming into being—pulling itself up by its boot disk, assuming something like autonomy. Early in the album, there’s a sense of nascence in the wordless humming and intricate drumming, as though the rhythms were the precondition for artificial life; halting, speech-like sounds gradually congeal within this musical equivalent of the primordial soup. Soon, the AI is babbling absent-mindedly away, proudly intoning, “I’m walking, I’m a walking machine/I’m walking, I’m a walking machine.” By the album’s midway point, “Artificial Authentic” has arrived at pure, ebullient pop. And with the record’s final stretch, the AI is off and running. It apes its “parents” on “Seven Months,” which recalls the curious sound of early albums like Radical Connector. It invents new languages on the cryptic “Paymig.” And on “New Definitions,” the album’s climax, drums and synthesized voice strut triumphantly into the future, a thrilling new breed of IDM.
Throughout their career, Mouse on Mars’ work has doubled as an interrogation into the nature of creative practice. Along those lines, perhaps AAI is not just an album about AI, but a way of suggesting that all art is a form of “artificial,” trans-human intelligence—a node, however minuscule, in an unfathomably vast neural net. After all, an artwork does not just mimic; it poses questions as well as answering them; it takes on a life of its own; it generates desires that only it can satisfy. (Machines “made new desires possible, some so powerful that only machines could satisfy them,” writes Chude-Sokei.) With a bit of luck, an artwork may even reproduce itself, if a smidgen of its DNA is passed along via sample, quotation, or simple inspiration.
The concept of an anarchic AI may seem counter-intuitive; isn’t the whole point of machine learning to make the world more efficient? But AAI, which St. Werner has described as “a dialogue with technology,” proposes a kind of thought experiment: What might it mean to grant machines agency, and even empathy? It is also an ethical proposition, a reminder that art can help shape a better world. As Chude-Sokei writes, “New life always announces itself through sound.” Listening for it, suggests Mouse on Mars, is on us.

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The Drums continue to perfect their 1980s-inspired indie pop formula on their latest album, while adding some dark humor to the mix.

Abysmal Thoughts

Yes, that is “Abysmal Thoughts” in quotations—the Drums, those throwback-pop stalwarts, are using their fourth album’s title as an act of academic citation. It’s an unspoken truth that both indie pop and Western philosophy try to address the same fundamental questions: Why does love feel so good? Why does pretty much everything else blow? Though it’s unclear where frontman and songwriter Jonny Pierce picked up the titular phrase, it is found repeatedly in Nietzsche’s gift to alt-bros, his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s variously translated as “abyss-deep thoughts” and stands in for the awareness that the world is larger and more horrible than we can ever truly understand. To Nietzsche, this is an unavoidable part of being human, but so are art and lightness. The necessity of pairing happy and dark thoughts has always been a hallmark of Pierce’s work. The Drums’ 2010 debut single “Best Friend” captures that idea frankly: “You were my best friend, and then you died.” They keep up that duality on “Abysmal Thoughts,” but with a bit more seriousness and attention to detail than on previous albums.
Pierce has always been upfront about the influence the Drums have drawn from indie pop favorites the Wake and others from the Factory and Creation Records scenes in 1980s UK. And this album features plenty of the glittery guitars beloved by indie pop purists, most notably on the single “Blood Under My Belt,” which goes spelunking in a chord with a few different pedals. A common complaint about the Drums’ previous albums was that the production was fatally thin, their anthemic songs sounding a mile wide and an inch deep. It made them seem like they missed the point of why the Wake were so damn good—their magnum opus Here Comes Everybody is a work of gentle, crisp production, where the guitars are kaleidoscopically layered, and the drum machines have almost organic imperfections. Here, Pierce takes that legacy more seriously, and it’s most striking on the margins: the skittering snare on “Head of the Horse,” the sly saxophone on “Your Tenderness,” or the Chelsea Girls-evoking woodwinds on “If All We Share (Means Nothing).”
There are also the indelible markings of the Smiths all over, especially in the way the songs make room for more complicated basslines and slippery arpeggiated chords than your average rock band. That being said, there really isn’t any anxiety of influence on this album; Pierce is assured as a songwriter. From the beginning, his songs have featured frenetic rhythm sections and lyrics that split the difference between hyper-specific and utilitarian. (Looking back now, even his old band Elkland’s notable 2005 single “Apart” is recognizable as a Pierce song.) His unconventional bard’s spirit comes out on the upbeat and fuzzy “Shoot the Sun Down,” whose chorus consists mainly of the line “I put a blanket over my face” as a strangely universal way to describe a terrible hangover.
Like the best bands of the C86 era, the Drums craft these songs by taking a basic template and perfecting it. “Abysmal Thoughts” distinguishes itself by adding in a dark sense of humor.  “Are U Fucked” essentially takes the chord progression from the Cure’s “Killing an Arab,” marries it to disco percussion, and really rides hard on the title in its refrain: “Are you feeling fucked, are you feeling fucked right now?” The result is a would-be a banger at a party that you don’t especially want to be invited to.
In drawing inspiration from cult bands, the Drums are starting to make records for an audience that is looking for something pretty specific—that particular balance of darkness and light, of guitar effects and tight songwriting. On “Abysmal Thoughts,” they do it exceptionally well. The title track is the last song, and it repeats that phrase again and again, Pierce’s voice in a gospel cadence, a cowbell and a slide whistle accenting it, letting a listener know the good will come back again.


The Brooklyn art-rock band continues to be proudly over the top on its relentless and theatrical second album.

Godcaster

For Godcaster, everything has to be magnified or it’s not worth examining. Every aspect of the Brooklyn collective seems designed to overstimulate: their six eclectic members, their out-of-breath, cosmological lyrics, and their commitment to song titles no one has thought of before (example: “Tiger Surrogate Hunts the Praying Mantis”). They’re a band clothed in aureate imagery and dedicated to taking itself seriously. “We’re Godcaster and we’re the greatest band in the world,” vocalist Judson Kolk announced at a recent New York show, with a matter-of-fact calmness. After cutting their teeth in the Philadelphia DIY circuit, Godcaster have evolved to craft inventive art-rock on a monumental scale, powerful enough to lend credence to their confidence.
While their live show is a large part of the appeal, Godcaster also translate their furious, youthful energy into their studio recordings. Beating within their self-titled second album is the heartbeat of English art-punk band Cardiacs, combined with a mania like what would happen if Deerhoof started a cult. Godcaster is not background music: These songs feel like hot, hellish wastelands, and listening all the way through is an active exercise. “Didactic Flashing Antidote” is a relentless 10-minute journey that resounds in your chest. The dirge-like “Death’s Head Eyed Hawkmoth” could soundtrack a demented Western; Kolk’s voice meanders and pleads while the band remains impossibly steady, instilling hysteria and helplessness.
Godcaster’s early work—a spate of recorded-live EPs in their Philadelphia days and 2020’s Long-Haired Locusts—was looser and more capricious, like a band that formed in of Montreal message boards. But as they continue to mature, they’ve slipped into something that feels religious and hypnotic. Vocal duties rotate between members of the band, and their onstage delivery is reminiscent of a strange off-Broadway play. Elephant 6-esque lyrics like “I see lovers speak in tone/Smell anthurium’s pheromones” and “Ecstatic reaction/In fleshly contraption” are urgently cast against a background informed by Native American and Greco-Roman folklore. To Godcaster, the image of love is never anything less than exploding planets or weeping demigods.
There’s a relentlessness to Godcaster’s magnitude that occasionally verges on monotony. While their new, more focused sound is effective—they’re safely out of “elevated jam band” territory—by the time you reach the 11-minute-plus “Draw Breath Cry Out,” it feels like they might have dealt all their cards. But when flutist Von Lee sings on the stripped-down penultimate track “Pluto Shoots His Gaze Into the Sun,” her gossamer voice is  arresting all by itself. “How beautiful/My heart is full,” she sings. It’s a vital breath at the end of Godcaster, a vibrant contrasting wash before you plunge back into the brutality of closer “Gut Sink Moan.” On Godcaster, the band maintains its characteristic mayhem and mythology while continuing to diversify: You can already hear how far they’ll keep pushing forward.


The legendary 84-year old composer, accordionist, and electronic pioneer reaffirms her mastery at conjuring three-dimensional worlds from simple words on a page.

Pauline Oliveros: Four Meditations / Sound Geometries

Four Meditations / Sound Geometries

Pauline Oliveros is a virtuoso at creating environments for musicians to explore. The legendary 84-year old composer, accordionist, and electronic pioneer is perhaps best known for her tape experiments from the ’60s, but her musical scores are just as innovative. Most of them contain text rather than musical notation, and eschew hard-and-fast directions in favor of poetic guidelines to be interpreted. In other words, she doesn’t tell people what to play, but how to play—and just as importantly, how to listen. Given this creative freedom, her collaborators often respond with something that’s less like music to passively listen to than spaces your mind can enter and probe.
The two lengthy pieces on *Four Meditations / Sound Geometries *are prime examples of how Oliveros conjures three-dimensional worlds from simple words on a page. In the case of “Sound Geometries,” the music is literally 3-D, as Oliveros filters the sounds of Belgian ensemble Musique Nouvelles through her surround-sound based Expanded Instrument System. “Four Meditations” is wide and deep, too, due in part to the liberty she grants the musicians. As Oliveros puts it in her score, “Since there is no written part to watch, all the performers’ attention can be given to sound and invention.”
The main focus of attention for listeners of “Four Meditations” will likely be the voice of Ione, Oliveros’ long-time collaborator. Though her fellow musicians all make vital contributions, Ione’s vocals are like a bright star around which all other sounds orbit. She’s adept at glossolalia-like stretches of abstract sound, improvising in the same league as expert voice experimenters such as Yoko Ono and C. Spencer Yeh. But her use of literal language is just as important.
At one point Ione slowly intones “I am who I am,” then flips that into “I am who you are,” seeming to comment on music that inverts definitions and blurs boundaries. In fact, much of “Four Meditations” is about convergence and divergence, as the musicians continually connect and separate. In that sense, Oliveros’ guidelines for a section called “The Tuning Meditation”*—*where she gives musicians the option of “playing a pitch that no one else is playing,” “just listening,” or “tuning in unison”—pretty well characterizes the entirety of “Four Meditations.”
A similar dynamic marks “Sound Geometries,” but its effects are subtler. Compared to “Four Mediations,” it’s more familiar sounding, at times evoking a well-honed jazz group. All the rolling horns, pointillist piano, and moaning strings are continually inventive, though sometimes easy to lose track of (one movement bears the apt title “Arriving Anywhere, Nowhere, Somewhere”). But that just means you have to listen closely to discover the riches of “Sound Geometries,” something that Oliveros—who, after all, created an entire institute called Deep Listening—surely intended.
It’s rather stunning that work this open and free of constraint can sound so calm. Though the tension that comes from loud, energetic improv can be thrilling, there’s something equally compelling about music that applies pressure while maintaining patience. The best word for it is probably “hypnotic,” but that doesn’t do justice to the way Oliveros puts a spell on your ears. She draws you so far into the environment of *Four Meditations / Sound Geometries *that you might forget you don’t actually live there.


The new album from Ellinor Olovsdotter, the Swedish one-woman outfit known as Elliphant, finds a happy middle ground that ditches the more hard-edged dancehall sound present on her early EPs for a sun-flecked, light reggae tone. Featuring guest spots from Azealia Banks, Twin Shadow, Skrillex, and others.

Living Life Golden

Nailing a breakout record is a tricky beast. There are tried-and-true methods to assure that your latest record reaches new heights, both commercially and critically. Lock down some high profile collaborations, concoct a palatable, mainstream sound, maybe secure a promotional sync here and there. Think of artists like the Weeknd or Sia—five years ago, their present level of stardom would have seemed somewhat improbable. Living Life Golden, the new album from Ellinor Olovsdotter, the Swedish one-woman outfit known as Elliphant, is a mostly gratifying, albeit calculated, attempt at gaining that level of success.
In her short career (her 2013 debut album, A Good Idea, was released in Sweden only), Elliphant's sound has shifted schizophrenically from dancehall to reggae to synth-pop to EDM to Scandipop. It's easy to see where she has garnered comparisons to M.I.A. and Santigold, but until now lacked the consistency to rival those more established artists. Living Life Golden finds a happy middle ground where Elliphant ditches the more hard-edged dancehall sound present on her early EPs for a sun-flecked, light reggae tone. It flourishes, while still hammers home a more slickly-produced, pop structure. In a post-Iggy Azalea world, a Swedish woman rapping in a Jamaican-esque semi-patois has a broad potential to bristle, and it must be said, Elliphant has always walked that line rather dangerously. Luckily, on tracks like “Love Me Long,” a collaboration with Major Lazer and Jamaican reggae superstar Gyptian, she delivers her vocal with such acumen that it saves the songs from pastiche. “Love Me Long” is a relaxed, passionate duet laid on top of a glitchy, shuffling dancehall beat, and when Elliphant and Gyptian sing to each other, "Do you ever get lonely / Do you ever get stoned?" and “Do you ever feel lonely?/ Do you ever feel stoned?,” it's difficult to reproach either of them, because what is a reggae love song but that exact lyric?
“Everybody," an upbeat, off-kilter track featuring Azealia Banks is another highlight, and ironically, it could be Elliphant's low-key ticket to a new level of popularity. Banks' entire career could be described as rocky at the best of times, but recently she's found a much-needed second wind, which is reflected in her energetic verse. Matching Elliphant beat for beat, they sound like twin sisters word-battling during recess, and one could easily imagine them starring together in a bad girl, “Telephone”-style video. Another somewhat left-field feature on Living Life Golden is Twin Shadow, who lends his writing and wall of layered guitars to “Where Is Home,” which would fit as well into his discography as it does on this record. Like most of the album, it showcases the eclecticism that Elliphant has been trying to capture since she first started releasing music. In fact, the record's only true low point comes at the hands of frequent collaborator Skrillex, on a track called “Spoon Me” that is honestly so toneless it careens straight past mediocre into the realm of the bizarre. Over a light EDM beat Skrillex could have tapped out on his phone, Elliphant raves on about the merits of a good cuddle, somehow uttering the line: “Spoon me, baby, you can't spoon too tight/ Hands on my boobie yeah/ Dick on my booty now.” I'm laughing, but it's not funny.
Whether or not Living Life Golden will actually work as a breakout for Elliphant remains to be seen; it's not a home run. But it's enough of an evolution for her that it could finally open some new doors for an artist whose potential has been somewhat limited by her stabs at sonic diversity. With the absolute best aspects of her pop musicianship present, a little bit of luck could see her next record perfect her sound even further.


This remarkably consistent, 25-track collection of bits and bytes from assorted past Oval eras flies by in an easygoing blur, rendering sounds in a fluid and volatile technicolor that's missing from even the project's classic records.

OvalDNA

Glitch is one of those microgenres that seemed to disappear halfway through the last decade. When the German outfit Oval-- early on reduced to founding member Markus Popp-- made its return in 2010 with O, it was hard to decide how to react. Especially since O was one of its most difficult and fussy efforts yet, and largely divorced from Oval's previously established and instantly recognizable aesthetic as heard on landmarks like 94 Diskont and Ovalcommers. With a palette based on the sound of live instruments, O lacked some of the algorithmic wizardry of Popp's best work and was a fatiguingly lengthy listen either way. You'd be forgiven for thinking that OvalDNA, coming just a year later and clocking in with another 25 tracks-- and this after the complementary 15-track 12" Oh-- is something like overkill.
Here's the surprise: OvalDNA is actually a collection of bits and bytes from assorted Oval eras past. The even bigger surprise? While it indeed sounds like the old Oval we know and love, there's nothing even remotely scatterbrained or assorted about this one. Not only is OvalDNA remarkably consistent and thematically sound, it's so well-sequenced that its 25 tracks fly by in a glorious, easygoing blur, a far cry from that fatal fragmentation that ate away at O. Its variety renders these sounds in a fluid and volatile technicolor missing from even early records like Systemisch. In a way, it's the best of both Oval worlds.  Included in the package is a DVD with ten bonus tracks, a music video, a documentary, and 2000 AIFF files of sounds and elements from the entirety of Popp's musical output "intended for music producers."  Okay, so maybe it's a little overkill, but coming from an artist who made a public installation inviting people to render their own interpretations of his work (as part of 2000's Ovalprocess), it shouldn't really come as a surprise either.
Like so much of this music, sometimes it's hard to tell whether or not the decay and destruction that pries apart the layers is accidental or planned, but here the manipulation feels effortless, executed with a smart and steady hand. There are many varieties of Oval on offer, though it's most often a warm-hued, even honeyed sound palette rather than the acerbic distortion of, say, Ovalcommers. While some tracks like "Savvy" do focus on harsher, more challenging sounds, even these-- or the hushed, rushed thermal swooshing of "70 Kino" and its choked string section-- feel oddly accommodating. OvalDNA doesn't dip into the same well of asceticism as the conceptually driven sound-design experiments you'll find on labels like Mille Plateaux or Raster-Noton; instead, each stutter and skip feels melodically driven, each sample caught and clipped mid-moment like a key to some larger world of musical delights that we're given glimpses of but are never actually led to-- dig the teases at jungle on "Mare Fax"-- on account of the album's sprightly pace.
Even if it can be a tease, some moments on OvalDNA are downright welcoming: It's hard to think of anything from Oval since the legendary "Do While" as beautiful as "Australasia". One of the album's more compositionally complete tracks, it juggles jerkily plucked strings, organs that whir to life before being pulled apart into groaning rumbles, and drums that stutter across the stereo spectrum at random. That might sound like a mess, but the elements just slightly coalesce to form a stirring, heart-tugging refrain gently morphing over the track's three-and-a-half minutes, a chief example of the accidental alchemy of OvalDNA. "Octaeder 0.2", which formed the centerpiece to Oval's live contribution to the Henri Pousseur tribute 4 Parabolic Mixes, proves the emotional potential of these flurries of compressed ones and zeroes, while the more recent Oval material is at least coincidentally referenced with a number of tracks that make live-instrument samples their focus ("Credit Line"), stumbling on an odd hybrid of acoustic and computerized sounds in the process, like twang rendered with right angles.
Approachability is one thing, and OvalDNA has it in spades, but there's also the issue of relevance: Can a veteran act in a largely outmoded genre still command attention with an outtakes collection? Certainly, any fan of Oval (particularly those lapsed after O) will find a lot to love in OvalDNA's gentle reassurances, but even for a newcomer, these sounds are idiosyncratic and stimulating enough to get lost in. OvalDNA is curiously timeless, as if these tracks were encased in amber, still holding that intriguingly alien gleam and shine as back in Oval's halcyon days, even polished up a little nicer this time. It might not be something we knew we still needed, but at the least, OvalDNA is a solid addition to the canon of one of the most innovative electronic acts of the 1990s.


The Atlanta rapper leaves the candy-coated comfort zone of his previous mixtape and stands out in a competitive rap lane.

Kill Streak

If Tony Shhnow had been a part of the Atlanta rap scene over a decade ago, he probably would have been laying down verses in Zaytoven’s mother’s basement. The twenty-something-year-old raps as if he spent his teenage years immersed in the music of Southern trap stars like Gucci Mane, Bankroll Fresh, Young Scooter, and that era of Soulja Boy when he really liked Lex Luger beats. Regardless of the heavy inspiration, Tony doesn’t quite make music that fits neatly into any subgenre. On his 2020 mixtape Dis Should Hold U Over, he raps about the same hustles that have been at the core of his region’s most recognizable hip-hop for generations, though it sounds like it takes place in a fantasy of rainbows and unicorns because of bubbly Cashcache production. This juxtaposition has helped Tony carve out a lane for himself in the underground of arguably rap’s most competitive city.
But in an unexpected twist, Tony Shhnow abandons this candy-coated comfort zone on Kill Streak. The album is entirely produced by versatile New Jersey beatmaker GRiMM Doza, who laces Tony with brooding instrumentals that meet somewhere in the middle of Dilla-influenced beat loops and the East Coast flash of Dame Grease. It’s an extreme shift.
Before Kill Streak, Tony’s songs were more of a mood than anything else, and it was less about what he was saying and more about his slick delivery. But that’s not the case here; it’s almost like a long radio freestyle with a rotating selection of loops and DJ drops that resemble the devilish Evil Empire tags. The album also disregards regional rap barriers. It’s not often you hear of a rapper opting to drastically stray from production with local ties. (This is part of what made a collaboration like Migos and Alchemist feel like such a novelty.) But Tony’s switch-up feels earnest and not just for the sake of being unique. Most importantly, he seamlessly transfers his Southern flair to Doza’s chilly beats. “Pistol in my jeans, this bitch hold up my pants/I’m so in love with money in public, we hold hands,” says Tony on “SFX Room,” in a laid-back flow that would be just as effective on standard Atlanta fare as it is here.
On a few occasions, Tony sounds out of his element. Tracks like “Palm Reader” and “DOD,” on the backend of Kill Streak, feel as if they were originally a capellas and forcibly merged with the production. Nevertheless, Tony Shhnow and GRiMM Doza catch a groove. “I’m from the street, ain’t never had shit, don’t know how to treat the fans/I know how to bag work, flip money, and use my fuckin’ hands,” raps Tony on “Many Men,” flexing his wordplay on a Doza beat that sounds made to play in your earbuds through a brutal walk to the corner store in the Northeast winter. And “Waist Deep” shows how the pair are able to complement each other without having to temper their love for their respective regional influences: Doza’s gloomy beat would have ended up on Coke Wave in another timeline, and Tony rhymes like the student of Gucci he is. Collectively, the two embrace their roots, even as they venture into unfamiliar territory.


As a lifelong Midwesterner just back from my first trip to New York-- my mind all abuzz with comparisons, my ...

Insignificance

As a lifelong Midwesterner just back from my first trip to New York-- my mind all abuzz with comparisons, my heart torn between the city I know and love and the city I'd only just begun to discover-- the last thing I needed was to arrive back in Chicago to the news that Jim O'Rourke, one of the city's finest and most ubiquitous musicians was taking off for the Big Apple, leaving nothing but a string of bile-flavored words about the Windy City and its musicians in his wake.
And then along came the new album. From the very start, Insignificance comes across as yet another spit in the face, as O'Rourke's ever-steady voice intones the following: "Don't believe a word I say/ Never thought you would anyway/ I may be insincere/ But it's all downhill from here." Upon hearing this, I was furious. His initial comments-- which essentially left the city's music scene for long-dead-- were bad enough, but now he seemed to be asking me to ignore them, to write them off as, well, insignificant. What gall. This was where I drew the line.
Immediately I conjured an image of O'Rourke the Rock Star. It wasn't just the uncharacteristically loud electric guitar and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am drums that burst from the speakers the moment I popped in Insignificance and pressed play. It was the lyrics. I've always had a tremendous amount of respect for O'Rourke the musician, no matter my feelings about O'Rourke the media figure, and I've always been thankful that the two have never crossed paths. But Insignificance crosses that line again and again. "If I seem to you a bit remote/ You'll feel better if you call me a misanthrope/ Well, what ever floats your boat/ But as for me, I'd rather sink my own," he continues on the album opener, "All Downhill From Here," just as the feedback gives way to calm vibes and piano. While O'Rourke's lyrics typically revel in playful ambiguity, these come across as a dreadfully obvious response to his own less-than-favorable image. Frankly, I hadn't the patience.
While generally less envelope-pushing then his more difficult-to-find work, O'Rourke's string of Drag City releases have always served as an opportunity to try on an assortment of masks. Bad Timing was the John Fahey tribute; Eureka the ode to the lost days of grand Bacharachian orchestration; Halfway to a Threeway a short but pleasant acoustic interlude; and now-- judging from the opening moments of Insignificance-- we'd reached Jim O'Rourke's rock n' roll phase.
The lyrics on Insignifigance initially seemed to be those of a man overestimating his own importance, even as the album title suggests otherwise. Pleas to the public to "get off my case" may work for Thom Yorke, but Jim O'Rourke, talented as he might be, hardly carries the kind of cache for distressed-woe-is-me-rockstar-anthems. Maybe labeling the package Insignificance is intended as a signifier that O'Rourke is in on this joke. Maybe the title is intended to suggest that we've been taking the music, the lyrics, and the bold statements a bit too seriously. But, self-aware or not, lyrics like these come across as more than a bit self-indulgent, which makes the music, at times, that much more difficult to embrace.
Which is a shame, because Insignificance sounds good. Sure, the arrangements are simpler and more rock-based than any of his previous efforts, bearing a resemblance to his production work with Smog, but not to any of his own material. Yet, again, O'Rourke proves himself to be an apt musical chameleon, every bit as adept at Elvis Costello-style rock songs as he is at more left-field arrangements. These may be pop songs, but they're hardly missing the signature O'Rourke touch-- they may start with over-amplified guitars, but they all give way to something else, be it harrowing steel-pedal and harmonica, or a long blast of feedback. And of course, a back-up band that includes Wilco's Jeff Tweedy on guitar and harmonica, Chicago Underground's Rob Mazurek on cornet and Ken Vandermark on saxophone doesn't hurt O'Rourke's cause any.
And so, the musical arrangements refusing to leave the confines of my brain, I got to thinking. Ever since the international shit hit the fan a few months back, I've been marching about telling all manner of people to try to understand your enemy's point of view before you label them as "enemy." So, rather than take the label "hypocrite," I stepped back. I gave Insignificance another shot. And another. And after a while I realized that it isn't the smirking, well-calculated affront to me and my hometown that I'd originally thought it to be. Lurking behind these spiteful lyrics is an uncharacteristically human portrait of a man caught between his obligations to one city and the seemingly infinite possibilities offered by another. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could relate to Jim O'Rourke.
In its second half, Insignificance mellows out, suggesting a return to the relaxed vibe of Halfway to a Threeway. On the slow, acoustic number "Good Times," O'Rourke sings, "I'd like to raise the Titanic here/ Take a walk/ Down its molded streets/ And feel right at home/ 'Cause the dead don't talk," and the listener is left completely in the dark as to whether "home" refers to New York or Chicago.
On "Therefore I Am," O'Rourke sings, "Me, I've traveled 'round the world/ I've seen so many things/ Why'm I talking to you?" His voice is as calm and collected as voices come, writing off the insult as a joke, but the music-- built around a simple but forceful repeated guitar riff-- betrays him, threatening to call him on his bluff at any moment.
Jim O'Rourke may not always be likable, but Insignificance makes him real. And ultimately, this is far more important. I may still be irked at O'Rourke, and I still feel the sting when I hear lines like, "It's quite a gamble to speak out of place/ Those things'll kill ya/ And so could your face/ These things I say might seem kinda cruel/ So here's something from my heart to you/ Looking at you/ Reminds me of looking at the sun/ And how the blind are so damned lucky." But now that's all beyond the point. Jim and I don't agree on much, but Insignificance is catchy enough-- and real enough-- to make me look beyond all that.
So maybe in the end, the title Insignificance doesn't refer to O'Rourke's lyrics or to his boasts and claims. Instead, maybe it refers to a fragile man trying to fool himself into believing that uprooting himself after decades in one place is just that: insignificant. The result is a shockingly insightful and resonant look at the workings of a musician generally more given to hiding behind absurdly twisted turns of musical phrase than letting us in on the inner-workings of his mind.


The K-pop girl group’s enjoyable but weirdly dated EP offers a mishmash of EDM styles ahead of their big Coachella debut.

Kill This Love EP

Right now, BLACKPINK are the biggest K-pop girl group in the world. The rise of these four women has been precisely engineered by their label YG Entertainment—the South Korean entertainment conglomerate responsible for launching the careers of K-pop stars Big Bang, 2NE1, PSY, and many others—which cherry-picked a multicultural group to appeal to a worldwide audience. Only vocalist Jisoo was born and raised in Korea; vocalist Rosé was born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Korean-born rapper Jennie was raised in New Zealand (both are fluent in English), and main dancer and rapper Lisa lived in Bangkok until she was 15. The girls perform in Korean and English, then record Japanese versions of each of their songs to maximize accessibility in multiple markets.
It’s been said that the decades-long Hallyu wave of Korean pop-cultural exports (which includes K-pop and K-dramas) is a government-funded and endorsed agenda to boost the nation’s global soft power and economy. But between BLACKPINK’s English-language advantage and the current explosion of global pop music in the United States, there has never been a female idol group more readily primed to follow BTS’ footsteps and fully cross over in America.
Last June, BLACKPINK’s U.S. takeover began when their massive international hit “Ddu-Du Ddu-Du” peaked at No. 55 on the singles chart. And this weekend, they will be the first K-pop girl group to perform at Coachella, four women spreading the gospel of K-pop to a mass of drunken festival-goers and easily influenced Instagram clout-chasers through perfectly synchronized choreography and simple hooks. Their new EP is specifically timed to make sure that BLACKPINK is able to convert the maximum number of Americans into Blinks (what they call their fans) ahead of the festival and the North American leg of their world tour.
Kill This Love EP is a collection of five songs that exist largely to promote one massive single. The title track is the clear centerpiece, a trap-EDM banger with intense TNGHT horns and militant snares. Taking on a femme supervillain persona à la Taylor Swift‘s “Bad Blood,” the girls rap and sing about their determination to end a toxic relationship as if it’s a life-or-death situation, although without a catchy Swiftian hook. The song, like the rest of the songs here, is only half of the full BLACKPINK experience. The accompanying music video cranks up the drama, as the girls, clad in Tomb Raider and Suicide Squad-inspired outfits, whip out hip-hop moves in the middle of a giant bear trap. It’s such a confident and spectacular rehashing of pre-existing Western iconography that’s been popular in the past three or so years that BLACKPINK almost trick you into thinking that they’re presenting something completely brand new.
Though BLACKPINK can sing and dance with precision, the production of Kill This Love is also weirdly dated, like it was crafted earlier in the decade and then forgotten in a time capsule for five years. “Don’t Know What to Do” could have been a great pop song when EDM songs with acoustic guitar like Flo Rida’s “Whistle” were topping the charts or when that dolphin-flute synth sound was all the rage. Then, Kill This Love is confusingly rounded out by the country-tinged pop ballad “Hope Not,” which features heartfelt performances from all the members, but seems out of place within the rest of the project.
BLACKPINK’s core philosophy is rooted in mixing the hard and the soft, a concept fitting of their name. But because the sonic elements here are such polar opposites, it seems like another A&R tactic to ram in every genre, mood, and feeling to make the group marketable to the widest audience possible. Isolated from the visual components that complete the K-pop experience, listening to the EP feels like whiplash. This is further exacerbated by the fact that BLACKPINK is a rare K-pop idol group who doesn’t have a clear leader or front person. The individual talents and personality of each member are allowed to shine, encouraging fans to obsess over the specifics of their favorite member—even if it results in a bit of a genre mishmash.
Though BLACKPINK’s music isn’t groundbreaking or innovative or even that great, they’re still fulfilling YG Entertainment and South Korea’s larger mission to build a cultural presence in the rest of the world. To judge BLACKPINK solely as musicians would be like critiquing a United Nations ambassador for something as trivial as how well they can tie their shoe. They are specifically packaged to be representatives of South Korea and appeal to as many people as possible; they are edgy but not offensive, soft but not pushovers, and they were trained for years specifically so they could be flawless when they reach an American stage as big as Coachella. If their music isn’t changing the game, it’s on purpose.


The Montreal ambient musician’s albums all resemble each other in their broad strokes and abiding stillness. They are beautiful, terrifying, and bittersweet all at once.

From Here to Eternity

Kyle Bobby Dunn’s music is often described as “ambient drone,” but where that style can be austere and even forbidding, the Montreal musician’s work is warm and welcoming; where drones are often static, Dunn’s music is powered by deep harmonic movements, as fundamental as the tides, and just as imperceptible. His albums, all of which resemble each other in their broad strokes and abiding stillness, sometimes feel like invitations to disappear into a mood, the precise nature of which might vary depending upon your own headspace: contemplative, beatific, serene, sorrowful, perhaps some sublime amalgam of all those things and more.
Or maybe they’re just invitations to disappear, period. An early album was called Music for Medication—glance quickly at the title and you might think of yoga or Zen, but no, that’s “medication” with a “c,” and the word is well suited to his blissfully horizontal pieces, their promise of both sweet release and its bitter, mortal kin. For all the obvious beauty of his work, with its gentle play of tension and resolution, there is also a terrifying finality implicit in pieces whose broad arc threatens to outlast us all.
Keyed to a time beyond time, Dunn’s recordings tend to go long: 2012’s Bring Me the Head of Kyle Bobby Dunn, an IV drip of liquid tones, meted out 15 tracks in the space of two hours; 2014’s equally drifting Kyle Bobby Dunn & the Infinite Sadness stretched slightly longer. From Here to Eternity, his first album in five years, runs almost three hours. The shortest piece is less than two minutes, the longest more than 23, but unless you’re really paying close attention, you will not notice these durations; all his tracks are but shadows of a single permanence.
It’s difficult if not impossible to say how he has made these pieces; the source material sounds acoustic, with the rich, buzzing resonance of strings, piano, oboe, and bowed metal, but smeared until there are no audible attacks, no evident origins whatsoever, just sounds that have always been there and always will be, moving like kelp or clouds. This is hardly a music without precedent—there are similarities to the work of Tim Hecker, the Caretaker, and, especially, Stars of the Lid and A Winged Victory for the Sullen—but something about the gracefulness of Dunn’s signature, as well as its inky intensity, is his alone.
What does become apparent over time is the range he manages, even with such broadly consistent materials and themes. Despite the uniformly glacial pace, it becomes clear that not all glaciers are alike: There are tracks that sound like the instant after a church bell has stopped ringing, stretched toward infinity; there are elegiac pieces reminiscent of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic; there are environments that build from darkness to blinding light, like the last moments of a life played out in slow motion. A few are deeply affecting for reasons I can’t pinpoint.
“Years Later Theme” and “La Stationnement de finders,” with their gently detuned layers and air of resignation, are two of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard.
Dunn’s approach has remained so consistent across his career that the difference between this album and its predecessors is one of degree, not type, but it’s safe to say that From Here to Eternity plumbs newfound depths: There is a coppery burnish that was not there before, a tendency to float just beyond the bounds of our usual limits of musical perception. There is a sense of presence here that’s hard to put your finger on—an undercurrent, a shadow, something felt but not heard. It’s particularly noticeable in the closing “Eternity, the Stars & You,” an 18-minute track that starts out sounding like an ambient remix of the Cocteau Twins or This Mortal Coil: Deep in the mix, way below the shimmer of what might be reeds or hurdy gurdy, rumbles something like the drone of a faraway airplane. The sound intensifies and the harmonic intervals of his chords collapse, become dissonant. There might be voices in there; they sound like angels wailing. It’s beautiful and terrifying all at once, and it just builds like that until, some invisible peak having been reached, it fades swiftly to blackness. To try to capture the infinite on tape is a fool’s errand; what is so rewarding—so honest—about Dunn’s attempt is his willingness to look beyond his majestic vistas and stare directly into the sun.


Philadelphia singer-songwriter Rosali Middleman constructs verdant, contemplative rock songs whose soft exteriors conceal a steely core of cool observations about heartache and vulnerability.

Trouble Anyway

Our world is divided into binaries, useful and otherwise: female and male, hot and cold, weak and strong, hard and soft. The structures they offer for organizing our thoughts and lives are simple, if reliably interrupted by reality. And sometimes we could all use a break from them. On her second album, Trouble Anyway, Philadelphia singer-songwriter Rosali Middleman rejects binary thinking with ease in a series of verdant, contemplative rock numbers. Within their soft exteriors, each of her songs has a steely core built from lyrics that examine heartache and vulnerability.
The central theme of Trouble Anyway is right there in the title: Middleman touches on trouble with love, with life, with figuring your way through the world. But she manages all of it with a sense of calm that ripples across the record, keeping her tone cool and even-keeled for the duration. Even a sighing line like, “The trouble I found lying in your arms is the trouble I’d be troubled with anyway,” from “The Trouble,” feels like a distant, clear-eyed assessment—Middleman doesn’t seem to regret her romantic ordeal. On “Who’s to Say,” she reclaims her power by challenging the roles foisted on her by an unnamed antagonist. She ends the song by coolly noting that she’s no longer lonely without his restrictive presence in her life.
But Middleman’s calm doesn’t stem from indifference. Rather, it feels like she’s laying her cards on the table in order to narrate her own game of emotional solitaire. Instead of conveying her feelings through grand gestures, Middleman reveals her heart in the granular details of her songs: She sings the title of “I Wanna Know” with the familiar tension of carefully tempered disappointment, acknowledging the nagging feelings of futility that accompany heartbreak in the lines, “Tears, they rolled away/Cried a lake/What am I today?/Cry a little longer.”
Middleman’s 2016 debut, Out of Love, was relaxed and mostly acoustic, save for unobtrusive electric guitar and light percussion. But for her Trouble Anyway backing band, she recruited a larger cohort of talented pals, including harpist Mary Lattimore, Nathan Bowles on banjo and drums, more drums from the War on Drugs’ Charlie Hall, and guitars courtesy of Purling Hiss’ Mike Pollize and Paul Sukeena of Spacin’. Collectively, they animate Middleman’s songs without overpowering them. On the eight-minute “Rise to Fall,” she benefits from the crew’s heady instrumental heft as she sings about uncertainty and alarm; the track’s jagged guitar lines, matched with flecks of harp and violin, capture an impressive range of nuanced emotion.
“If I Was Your Heart” is the album's glimmering jewel, striking a satisfying balance between lighthearted charm and profound sincerity. Lattimore’s sparkling harp touches make for a tasteful garnish atop the tune’s comfortable sway, and even as Middleman asks, “Who’s at fault for fading the lights?,” the music maintains a hopeful undercurrent. Middleman leaves the what-if of the titular refrain unanswered, and that lack of resolution feels refreshing—the song creates open-ended space for daydreaming rather than hammering for a hard answer.
Trouble Anyway only falters when tracks like “Who’s to Say” and “I Wanna Know” wander into extended outros that linger too long. But patience pays off, as Middleman leaves listeners room to contemplate their own tribulations throughout the record. Closing number “Maybe I’m Right” is its most stripped-down and succinct track, recalling Out of Love’s simplicity. It’s easy to share Middleman’s confidence, even on unsteady ground, as she offers a final mandate of sorts: “Starting to question the path of a line/Maybe I’m right.” She makes a convincing case.


Back in early March, the New York group swelled to a septet for an intimate, unrehearsed gig at a Hudson Valley bar. Their intricately textured grooves have rarely sounded more dynamic.

75 Dollar Bill Little Big Band: Live at Tubby’s

Live at Tubby’s

There’s an anodyne moment on 75 Dollar Bill’s Live at Tubby’s that might’ve been scrubbed from the recording in another era. Before the final song, saxophonist Cheryl Kingan asks if anyone is headed after the show toward Catskill, about 30 miles up the Hudson River. A man in the audience offers her a ride; she sings back, “Amaaazing!” Then the band jumps into “WZN #3”—a nearly 25-minute journey that brushes up against the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” Henry Flynt’s drone work, and Pharoah Sanders’ playing on Ascension—as though her request was unremarkable.
Back then it was, at least for another few days. To end their 2020 tour of the Northeast, 75 Dollar Bill packed Tubby’s, a Hudson Valley bar and grill, to its 80-person capacity for an impromptu gig on March 7. Touring as a duo, guitarist Che Chen and drummer Rick Brown called some old friends to fill out the lineup, and without rehearsing, the septet, dubbed the 75 Dollar Bill Little Big Band, played a couple sets. This would be the last 75 Dollar Bill show for the foreseeable future.
Since forming in 2012, the New York band has typically emphasized texture over genre: Any given recording might encompass a dart thrown at the ECM catalog, a twister of fuzz guitar from the Western Sahara, a dispatch from Alice Coltrane’s ashram, or all of those combined. That texture is never richer for 75 Dollar Bill than it is on Live at Tubby’s, as the group expands infinitely within the boundaries of each composition.
It’s apparent early in the recording that there’s a special feeling in the room. Just as Brown and Chen are locked in, exploring space with the Little Big Band, the crowd is obviously thrilled to accompany the ensemble on its journey. Feeding off that communal energy, 75 Dollar Bill breathe new life into songs like “I’m Not Trying to Wake Up,” from 2016’s Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock. While the studio version is more polished—Live at Tubby’s is not the most professional live recording—the band’s performance is more dynamic here. Kingan accents Sue Garner’s basslines, creating a mud-thick effect, and Karen Waltuch’s improvised viola solos attack alongside Steve Maing and Chen’s ascending guitar runs. Brown, normally the lone rhythm section, thwacking hands and mallets into a plywood crate, is augmented by a live drummer. Together, they explode in a percussive blast near the end of the track, crescendoing into an Amon Düül-type acid-rock freakout. The studio version sounds like a dirge by comparison.
“Like Like Laundry” is a full 11 minutes shorter than the 33-minute studio version, but the live performance bursts at the seams as endless layers of improvisation unfold over a single mesmerizing riff. Chen’s masterful soloing is no longer the centerpiece, which is no knock on him. Instead, his guitar dances within Maing’s modal spirals as the dual percussionists build a swell of polyrhythms around them. It’s a dazzling, hypnotic effect, and the result is greater than the sum of its parts, evincing a palpable chemistry between the musicians, rehearsed or not.
Halfway through the record, Brown mentions that 75 Dollar Bill “isn’t really a covers band,” but nonetheless will play one in the spirit of the friends joining the duo onstage. “Friends and Neighbors” originally appeared on Ornette Coleman’s own impromptu live album Friends and Neighbors: Live at Prince Street, recorded at his downtown New York loft in 1970. It’s strange enough for Coleman, the architect of free jazz, to include vocals on a composition, and weirder still for the instrumental 75 Dollar Bill to pick precisely that track to cover live. But it’s perfect symmetry for a spontaneous jam session among friends almost exactly 50 years after Coleman’s recording. The band shouts in unison, over percussive stumbling: “Friends and neighbors, that’s where it’s at! Friends and neighbors, that’s a fact! Hand in hand, that's the goal! Hand in hand, that's the goal! All the world: soul, soul, soul!”
Today, that cover allows us, in our antiseptic bubbles, to imagine the beauty of human touch, saxophones spraying droplets, sharing a joint with a stranger. Live at Tubby’s is a time capsule that enables us to live in a world diametrically opposed to this one, back when kinship and proximity were inalienable and essential, and when hitching a ride with an audience member didn’t carry the implicit threat of contagion. Had the album been recorded a month earlier, perhaps it wouldn't have as powerful an effect as it does. It’s difficult to find serendipity in any of the last nine months, but Live at Tubby’s comes close. It’s a document from an archaic universe, a reminder of life before the plague year(s), and the promise of a rebuilt, but sadly distant, future.

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On Peace Is the Mission, Major Lazer pierce out of their genre-blurring funk by cashing in and going full pop. Where Diplo and co.'s previous two full-lengths tried to mesh opposing forces, here they are finessed into no-nonsense stadium rattlers featuring the likes of Ellie Goulding, 2 Chainz, Pusha T, Travi$ Scott, and DJ Snake.

Peace Is the Mission

Major Lazer's image has always been a bit slippery. Having gone through a number of member and affiliate changes since UK producer Switch—one half of the founding production team, along with Diplo—jumped ship in 2011, their ever-evolving mission has been confusing, sloppy, and not entirely easy to nail down. Their debut album Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do was a singular artifact of Diplo's fascination with global dance music, for lack of a better catchall, for which he is often called out as an appropriator. Despite the fact that he and Switch worked on the album in Kingston and recruited dancehall bona fides for every track, from icons like Vybz Kartel and Mr. Vegas to up-and-comers like Brooklyn bashment luminary Ricky Blaze, it was still sticky with an undercurrent of tourism.
But with all of the pitfalls Major Lazer has faced since its inception—solo Diplo's hypeman Skerrit Bwoy's departure for religious pursuits; mismatched guests like Dirty Projectors' Amber Coffman and Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend for sophomore album Free the Universe—Peace Is the Mission finds the group finally emerging from their cocoon. What helped to pierce them out of a murky, genre-blurring funk, it turns out, was the confidence (and perhaps the notoriety and resources) to cash in and go full pop.
Even though Diplo already had work with major pop stars on his CV (namely, Beyoncé's "Pon De Floor"-sampling "Run the World (Girls)" and on Madonna's recent Rebel Heart), it was Major Lazer's inclusion on the Lorde-curated soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 that truly marked this sea change. Their contribution, "All My Love" featuring Ariana Grande, maintained their penchant for dancehall-inflected festival dubstep and worked in a winky interpolation of "Lollipop (Candyman)" by Aqua (yes, the "Barbie Girl" group), all with a much slicker sheen. The song could have been just another paycheck, a chance to go for polish on a non-album project while staying esoteric with their own work, but lead single "Lean On", a collaboration with Danish upstart MØ and DJ Snake of "Turn Down for What" fame, indicated that they were sticking to this new refinement.
These tracks also illustrate what Major Lazer excel at: crafting intricate, innovative EDM for honey-voiced singers that pushes boundaries people like David Guetta and Calvin Harris seemingly refuse to touch. Album opener "Be Together" with Chicago sibling duo Wild Belle combines breathless yearning and skittering percussion in a way that sounds new, while the warbled soul of "Powerful", featuring vocals from Ellie Goulding and reggae artist Tarrus Riley, swoons in a way we don't expect from the production trio. With his performance, stripped of patois and giving every Top 40 pretty boy a run for his money, Riley offers the album's best example of Major Lazer's ability to synthesize their influences. Where the previous two full-lengths tried to mesh opposing forces, here, they are finessed into no-nonsense stadium rattlers. Riley can master an EDM power-ballad, while the menace of a rapper like Pusha T meets its match with dancehall vet Mad Cobra on "Night Riders". Even a refreshed "All My Love" benefits from additional vocals from soca singer Machel Montano.
"Lean On" and "Powerful" will likely end up the big hits of Peace, but tracks like "Too Original" with Jovi Rockwell and Swedish singer Elliphant, "Light It Up" featuring a guest appearance from R&B-reggae duo Brick and Lace's Nyla, and Chronixx-featuring "Blaze Up the Fire" also show a group locating its footing. They accomplish the, well, mission the group has trained its sights on since its genesis—and it's because they've linked with artists who also deal in fusion. They're not forcing it. There is no doubt Peace Is the Mission will suffer some criticism from dancehall purists, those exhausted by EDM and people who hate Diplo (a hate that he has certainly worked overtime to earn), but their maturation is palpable across the album's nine tracks. In the process, they've made a great pop record through uniting some of the globe's most exciting and celebrated pop artists.


Recorded on the humble Korg Volca FM during a vacation on the Big Island of Hawaii, this atmospheric, unobtrusive album lives somewhere between landscape sketch and spiritual sojourn.

Hawaiki Tapes

Synthesizers are often celebrated as instruments of infinite possibility, but many electronic musicians are more inspired by their machines’ limitations. A recent spate of experiments has found a number of artists making records with a single device. Nine Inch Nails’ Alessandro Cortini recorded his 2017 album Avanti using only an early-1970s EMS Synthi AKS. The same year, Dawn of Midi’s Qasim Naqvi made FILM entirely on a Moog Model D, an analog synthesizer of a similar vintage, while Vancouver’s Cloudface made the sedate, bleepy Variations on a 1980s Korg Mono/Poly. Those are all hallowed instruments, but some musicians have made do with much less: Benjamin Brunn’s wonderful Pieces From a Small Corner of Paradise was recorded on the humble Korg Poly-800 mkII, a plastic digital/analog hybrid from the mid-1980s that could be worn on a guitar strap.
M. Geddes Gengras embraces an even humbler instrument on Hawaiki Tapes, a modest album recorded while the longtime Angeleno vacationed on the Big Island of Hawaii. His machine of choice, the Korg Volca FM, fit easily in his handheld luggage: Part of the Japanese electronics maker’s recent line of affordable, back-to-basics grooveboxes, the Volca FM retails for around $140 and measures roughly 10'' by 6'' by 2''—smaller than a tablet computer and thinner than a hoagie. As its name indicates, the machine is dedicated to FM synthesis, an arcane method often associated with the Yamaha DX7, released in 1983, that’s easily recognizable for its bright, glassy sheen.
Gengras avails himself of those vivid timbral qualities across this atmospheric, unobtrusive album, conjuring chimes, bells, and flutes in majestically paced tracks that suggest crystal pyramids emerging from the mist. He worked at night, running his Volca directly into a handheld recorder, and that sense of quiet isolation looms large. Tempos are glacially paced, reverb stretches to the horizon, and harmonic development is practically nil: One-bar arpeggios spin in languid circles while Gengras slowly tweaks his synth’s parameters, brightening and burnishing its tone before sending it back into the shadows again. The music’s unpredictable movement is a little like the play of light as the moon passes behind patchy clouds.
The Volca FM can only play three notes at once, and it has no onboard effects besides chorus. To compensate, Gengras availed himself of two reverb and delay pedals, yielding results that are at once restrained and suggestively layered. (On three tracks, he also added Moog bass parts once he was back in his studio.) He wrings an impressive range of sounds out of his instrument, from singing-saw drones to sparkling new age fantasias that nod to gongs or wind chimes. One of the album’s best tracks, “Mauna Kea,” is strongly reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s canonical Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, with dewdrop synths creating accidental counterpoints as they run through ping-pong delay. Another highlight, “Mauna Loa,” benefits from the contrast between earthshaking sub-bass and a whimsical, flute-like melody. Even accounting for the strange, glitched-out textures of “Lō'ihi” and “Nāhuku,” though, Gengras only manages to stretch his instrument’s palette so far, and over the course of 68 minutes, one occasionally wishes for a little more variation.
While many tracks are named after the island’s geography—“Hilina Slump” refers to a landslide on the south flank of Kilauea, while “Kapoho” is a bay on the island’s southeast coast that recently made news after being inundated with lava—the album title references the mythological ancestral home of the Polynesian people. In sound and mood, Hawaiki Tapes lives somewhere between landscape sketch and spiritual sojourn, much like Electronic Recordings From Maui Jungle, a pair of albums by Anthony Child, better known as the UK techno artist Surgeon. Child’s compositions are similarly restrained, and though his Buchla modular synthesizer (which is orders of magnitude more expensive than the Volca) generates a wider range of sounds, he’s drawn to a similarly ethereal palette and a similarly meditative mood.
This can be tricky territory: the white tourist seeking transcendence in a colonized landscape. (Child, at least, calls one song “Colonisation,” though he has another perhaps less reflectively titled “The Chief.”) But Gengras wisely avoids tipping too far into unearned mysticism. Ultimately, his search focuses mostly on the depths of his small plastic box— and it yields an unexpectedly fruitful bounty for an experiment cooked up on a hotel-room desk in the dead of night.


On her debut, the British-French experimentalist reckons with the body and the spirit in compositions so bright and ornate they feel like an inverted version of goth-pop.

the infinite spine

In the past decade, electronic artists have been fascinated with deconstructing the myth of the diva, reconfiguring its mold into strange, uncontainable new forms. Arca pulled apart the archetype’s entrails to find the machinery buzzing underneath. SOPHIE took a magnifying glass to its perfect skin, finding even more beauty to behold at the surface. And Yves Tumor has reveled in its haunted sexuality, plumbing its sinister lore in search of sick rock’n’roll pleasures. But amid all the bludgeoning club beats and mysterious dark magic, there’s hardly been room for anything resembling innocence. In a sea of uncanny angels, few have attempted to stare directly into the light.
On the infinite spine, Lauren Auder lets it in. Following a series of EPs on which the British-French producer blueprinted her iridescent orchestral pop, the infinite spine cracks her vision wide open. Deploying strings, horns, and choruses so dazzling they can take a second to adjust to, Auder crafts a kind of inverted goth pop, as if her gloomy songs have been shot through a photo negative, coming out impossibly bright. One can still hear the smudged, floating ethereality she brought to her early SoundCloud rap beats for the likes of Jeshi and Slowthai, but Auder centers her stark, hauntingly deep voice above everything else, boldly leading us through her tales of hard-won grace.
Throughout the infinite spine, Auder approaches her subjects as tenderly as a child cradling a porcelain doll. “118-madonna” takes flight amid pillowy woodwinds and French horns, though Auder subverts its life-affirming march with a knowing sense of tragedy. Evoking imagery of Britney Spears and JonBenét Ramsey, Auder casts a vignette of lost innocence against her own ongoing narrative of coming to terms with being trans. “Hell is a body in which I no longer can hide,” she sings, imbuing the song with a twofold frailty, its sweetness threatened to be consumed by darker forces.
Auder fills these tracks with references both biblical and historical, drawing particular inspiration from the Cathars, a medieval religious sect from her hometown of Albi, France that challenged the Catholic Church with its belief in the femininity of the divine. While the infinite spine’s lyricism may be dense, its songwriting is immediate: the hammering pianos of “city in a bottle” sweep Auder off her feet with a joyous theatricality, while the downbeat steel drums of “equus” contrast sumptuously against Auder’s twisting, ailed croon. Her confessions call to mind a history of bracingly direct queer singer-songwriters, with wisps of ANOHNI, Rufus Wainwright, and Perfume Genius percolating in her warbled baritone. She even embraces a degree of cheesy 2000s pop—when she breathily sings about “sitting in the back of a taxi car” on the sweeping “we2assume2many2roles,” you’d be forgiven for getting visions of Jack’s Mannequin and Vanessa Carlton.
Though Auder’s utilization of these nostalgic sounds could come off as calculated, she incorporates them with a natural ease, as if it were a perfectly logical next step for experimental music. Nothing on the infinite spine screams “hyperpop,” yet the album feels of a piece with its sensibilities; the sound of club music, pop, and all manner of 21st-century detritus commingling in a warm celebration of sincerity. The most blatant posturing comes in the more straightforwardly emo “the ripple,” whose chugging post-punk bass and Lil Peep-via-King Krule vocal barks strike the album’s least convincing note. Surrounded by so many moments that convey devastation with a wilted elegance, a loud wall of guitars just isn’t as powerful.
For all its fearlessly large pop moves, the infinite spine is surprisingly challenging. To truly appreciate its intense, earnest vulnerability requires a certain receptivity. But Auder’s songs have a way of burrowing in and flowering slowly, revealing their shimmering hooks and naked self-confrontation with a gentle, assured confidence. “Things have got pretty fucking bad in the public space for trans people,” she told NME last month. “We tried to integrate in a way that confirmed to cis expectations and that was clearly a failed mission.…[B]ut there’s hope in that. There’s a freeing notion in knowing that it was never about fitting in. It makes me want to double down on being true to myself because there’s no other way.” In its open-heartedness, the infinite spine emanates glowing self-acceptance—a light to nourish and protect.


The singer-songwriter’s sixth album remains enigmatic, processing trauma and joy through the force of its unvarnished arrangements.

Laura Stevenson

Transparency is in vogue. From major pop releases such as Billie Eilish’s introspective new album Happier Than Ever to the self-effacing indie rock songs of boygenius, artists have gravitated toward devastatingly specific and personal lyrical detail. New York singer-songwriter Laura Stevenson once operated in that mode, too, exploring her experiences with depression, self-harm, and troubled family relationships on records like 2019’s The Big Freeze and 2015’s Cocksure. But on her self-titled sixth album, she shifts her songwriting to be more equivocal and finds solace in the opacity. “I’ve always been forthright, but with [Laura Stevenson], I’m pulling back a bit,” she explained in a recent interview.
The songs on Laura Stevenson revolve around a harrowing incident in which a loved one was nearly killed; to protect their privacy, and to honor her new approach, Stevenson hasn’t disclosed details about what transpired. But the myriad emotions surrounding the experience permeate the album, which explores the traumatic event and its aftermath through Stevenson’s own multifaceted perspective. Opening track “State” is a microcosm of the album’s sound, ranging from hushed murmurs to unabashed rage. It begins serenely before bursting into tempestuous percussion and Stevenson’s bitter delivery. “I’m in a state again, but I stay polite,” she sings, before unleashing  a snarl: “It keeps me alive.” It’s a kind of vengeful mercilessness that we haven’t heard from her before.
Aided by producer John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile, Hop Along) and her former Bomb the Music Industry! bandmate Jeff Rosenstock, Stevenson finds a middle ground among her past projects. She evokes the folky touchstones of 2013’s Wheel on the acoustic-led “After Those Who Mean It” and closer “Children’s National Transfer” and conjures the 1990s-influenced Cocksure for “Sandstorm.” Much of this record’s emotional force lies in its arrangements, amplified by Agnello’s unvarnished production. “Don’t Think About Me” displays Stevenson’s impressive flair for melody, and “Moving Cars” lays everything bare with sparse guitar playing reminiscent of ’70s luminaries like Joni Mitchell.
It was during the making of this latest album that Stevenson discovered she was pregnant with her first child. Though these songs don’t directly reference motherhood, some feel infused with a protective, inquisitive urgency. On “Moving Cars,” she laments her inability to change what has already occurred: “I’m wide awake under supposed Perseid views/Could I stop before I let it get too far?” On the following track, “Continental Divide,” she reluctantly acknowledges that she won’t always be able to protect her loved ones from danger: “But what could I do right to keep you safe while you’re in flight/To keep the plane and all alight among its engines in the sky?”
Because these songs are so much more enigmatic than her previous output, they simultaneously foster a sense of universality and obscurity. It can occasionally be difficult to extract meaning from particular phrases: What does it mean when, on “Wretch,” she sings of “seizing in a parking lot, my eyes aglow with ballistic missiles and trials”? Still, she imbues her words with an intensity that compels you to lean closer. Laura Stevenson is often vague, but the emotion comes through.

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On their new record, the Chicago native fights the slow poison of the apocalypse with smooth R&B, galactic funk, and Afrofuturist fantasies.

Princess Forever

Dreamer Isioma is always a lover, even in times of pure chaos. In their past work, the Chicago native has depicted the contours of queer love via a gorgeous blend of dream pop, hushed rap, and smooth R&B. Their most recent record, Princess Forever, expands upon their impressive range, melding high-stakes storytelling and Afrofuturist aesthetics to convey the joy and turbulence of finding love among decay.
While many of the songs on Princess Forever build on the soft R&B of their previous records, the strongest tracks here are more eclectic, incorporating elements of disco, Afrobeats, and indie rock. The standout “Gimmie a Chance” coalesces harp, airy synths, and a funky bassline into an effortlessly smooth and danceable love song. Elsewhere, on “Touch Your Soul,” the artist captures a spiritual connection so deep that physical touch becomes unnecessary. It doesn’t matter who else touches their lover’s body, Dreamer proclaims, “because I can touch your soul.”
Princess Forever showcases the artist’s most cohesive storytelling to date. The lyrics make near-constant references to surviving an apocalypse, as Dreamer chronicles a burning world, or people migrating to live on other planets. Finding intimacy amid this chaos, Isioma argues, is to experience high highs and low lows; there is nothing in between. Dreamer writes about the album’s recurring themes—life among decay, love amid the rot—with fervor; the passion here sets their storytelling apart from previous releases. “Z’s Lullaby” describes the intensity of love at first sight, while on reverb-heavy slow jam “Technicolor Love,” possession and adoration become one: “She fuckin’ hates me but she’s mine,” Isioma sings. This kind of love is not easy, nor is it even particularly healthy. It is ardent, chaotic, and all-consuming, yet they also crave the stability of a life partner. When everything around you feels as though it’s going up in smoke, that kind of devotion can feel like salvation.
Princess Forever seems to argue that the antidote to the slow poison of the apocalypse lies in Afrofuturism. One of Afrofuturism’s liberatory promises is that the end of the world as we know it could lead to a better one for Black people across the diaspora. The intergalactic soundscape Isioma builds here gestures toward the freedom that might exist beyond earthly realms. Rather than framing the journey to find that autonomy as merely an escape route, Isioma suggests it could lead to an emancipatory future. “Saying fuck the world brings me inner peace/It’s all gonna blow up anyway/We’re all gonna float to outer space,” they proclaim on “Fuck Tha World.” When this world ends, a brighter one may emerge.
Though Princess Forever shows immense growth, Dreamer’s storytelling feels more memorable than some of the beats here. The production on “Fuck Tha World” and “Technicolor Love” are nearly indistinguishable from each other, an anomaly on a record that is otherwise unafraid of experimentation. And while much of Dreamer’s Afrofuturist lyricism is innovative and intentional, at times, the celestial motifs can feel monotonous and repetitive.
Much of Afrofuturist art deals with life-or-death circumstances: People are fighting for survival, for inalienable rights, for the abolition of racism and colonialism. But Princess Forever shines brightest in its celebration of the little moments—in its insistence that a fight for a new world order is also a fight for more pleasure, more romance, and more peace. “They say the world’s on fire/I call that a life on Mars/When our worlds collide/All I see are stars going light speed,” the artist sings on “Starz.” In these flashes, Isioma reminds us that from the ashes of a doomed world, the spark of new love can rise.


Collaborating with producer Hitmaka, the R&B artist abandons her concept-album ambitions for a free-flowing collage of simple, irresistible pleasures.

Pillow Talk

Last year, Tink stumbled into a revelation. The 27-year-old singer and rapper had tended to let her music marinate, meticulously poring over production details and lyrics before finalizing a project. But when she began working with producer and fellow Chicago-native Hitmaka, he challenged her to churn out songs at a faster clip. Within two months Tink completed an album: Heat of the Moment, a satin-smooth R&B record that instantly stood out as her freest and most sensual album in years. For a singer whose career had been burdened by out-of-pocket Aaliyah comparisons and unfortunate label drama, and whose work often arrived with clunky conceptual frameworks, this revised workflow felt like a healthy and exciting new direction for one of R&B’s most overlooked talents.
Tink’s latest offering, Pillow Talk, fine-tunes her collaborative chemistry with Hitmaka and further establishes the pair as one of R&B’s premier singer–producer teams. The album seamlessly flits between steamy slow jams and pristine pop songs, its architecture indebted to the opulence of ’90s R&B. Hitmaka’s glossy, pillowy production weaves trap and electronic elements into classic-sounding soul, giving Tink the ideal backdrop to flaunt her effortless, confident flows. She’s a nimble vocalist who blurs the line between singing and rapping; even when she’s crooning big ballads, there’s a sleek bite to her cadences, her vowels gliding so smoothly it’s like they’ve been greased. Pillow Talk is full of simple, irresistible pleasures: gorgeous beats and catchy hooks, reckless sexual escapades, melodies that glue themselves to your brain. Though occasionally overindulgent, Pillow Talk is undoubtedly a vibe, a record that balances the joys of intimacy with the unexpected consequences.
Across Tink’s catalog—eight mixtapes, two EPs, and three albums over 11 years—she’s experimented with a variety of narrative scaffolding to help give her projects shape. These have included voicemail interludes, diaristic preambles, and a misconceived talk therapy conceit, none of which played to her strengths as a raunchy, shit-talking hitmaker. Thankfully, on Pillow Talk, she abandons her concept-album ambitions and simply writes fun, dramatic songs about romance. There’s no arc, just a collage of emotive moments. In mid-album highlight “Mine,” Tink admonishes her man’s side chick for overstepping; “25 Reasons Interlude” is an unabashed love letter to monogamous bliss. Two of the strongest songs, “Switch” and “Opposite,” express skepticism about a guy’s credentials as a life-partner: “I’m hoping that God forbid/That you’re not a product of your past/We can have that shit that last,” she sings on “Opposite,” an edge etched in her voice. Mostly, though, Tink spends her time here burning up the sheets. On “Throwback,” which adds to the rich tradition of R&B songs about having sex to other R&B songs, Tink sounds totally liberated, while on “Drunk Text’n,” she seems devoured by desire.
Pillow Talk’s incessant hornieness can veer into unintentional comedy; two songs, for instance, have the word “cum” in the title. The most glaring hiccups, though, are when Tink leans too heavily on ’90s and 2000s R&B tropes. Take the clumsy 2 Chainz feature on “Cater,” which sounds like a check being cashed in real time, or the G Herbo-assisted “Ghetto Luv,” which recycles the played-out bad-boy-meets-bad-girl hip-hop/R&B crossover formula. These drawbacks, though, don’t meaningfully distract from Pillow Talk’s palatial glamor. Behind Hitmaka and company’s elegant production, Tink depicts the highs and lows of love with a swaggering nonchalance. Even when an old flame calls her up late at night, she’s not too proud to admit that she’s intrigued by the proposition. “Trying not to make it something/But I’ve been dealing with a lot,” she sings on “Goin Bad.” And who can blame her? She sounds like she’s finally having fun, letting her art follow wherever the night leads her.


Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi—who front Brooklyn rockers the Men—are probably the last guys on Earth who need a side project. On their new album as Dream Police, Hypnotized, robotic rhythms, laser-beam synths, and industrialized guitar noise introduce welcome new dimensions to Perro and Chiericozzi’s sonic palette.

Hypnotized

Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi are probably the last guys on Earth who need a side project. Not only has the band they co-founded, the Men, maintained a prolific rate of production (with five albums and two EPs in the past five years), they’ve been able to bend its sound to satisfy their every passing whim, be it loogie-hocking scum-punk, wood-cabin country rock, atomic psychedelia, or old-school '80s indie. And yet, they’re not ones to spend their days off between tours getting caught up on "The Walking Dead". Much of their downtime since 2010 has been devoted to Dream Police, where, with the help of producer Kyle Keays-Hagerman and a trusty drum machine, they’ve been workshopping song ideas that exist on the peripheries of the Men’s elastic sound, but aren’t really suited to that band’s five-man attack.
While Perro and Chiericozzi have previously issued Dream Police material in limited-edition cassette runs, they couldn’t have picked a better time to release their first proper album for Sacred Bones. On last spring’s Tomorrow’s Hits, the Men sounded like they were settling into a cozy, classic-rock cul de sac, sanding down the edges of their punk and country influences into an easy-going boogie. Though it was a notable adjustment, it didn’t open up any unexplored avenues for the band. So the robotic rhythms, laser-beam synths, and industrialized guitar noise that form the foundation of Hypnotized introduce welcome new dimensions to Perro and Chiericozzi’s sonic palette, and encourage a renewed streak of irreverent experimentation for a couple of guys who appeared to be digging in their heels. But while Hypnotized nudges Perro and Chiericozzi out of their established comfort zone, it also has the effect of making you appreciate the tightened-up craft and finely curated song selection they exhibit with the Men.
Hypnotized proves be a far more eclectic affair than initially suggested by its title-track single, which is exactly the sort of electro-blooze stomp you’d expect from a couple of scruffy rockers tinkering around with synthetic beats. The spectrum here spans Teutonic post-punk to somber psych-folk (really, pretty much every subgenre of rock except the arena-ready power-pop suggested by Dream Police’s Cheap Trick-nodding name), but several songs simply stretch out a one-note idea until there’s nothing more to do: the bass-grooved "My Mama’s Dead" imagines "Hey Joe" being half-remembered by a megaphone-wielding Mark E. Smith; "John" is a repetitious blues swing akin to the Stooges’ "I Need Somebody", but sapped of the menacing desperation. And though Dream Police carry over the Men tradition of penning acoustic odes to girls, the downcast lysergic lullaby "Iris" (appended with what can only be described in 2014 as "beer-commercial guitar") and highlands-bound hymn "Sandy" (a church-bell-clanging duet between Chiericozzi and Brooklyn artist Holly Overton) feel more random and out of place in this mechanized context than they would on a Men record, suggesting Perro and Chiericozzi may need to start yet another, folk-focused project to accommodate their unplugged urges.
The most successful experiments here don’t simply add tech textures to Perro and Chiericozzi’s guitar grind, but use them to reshape it, and invest the duo’s muscular crunch with a more androgynous energy: "Pouring Rain" folds early-'80s skinny-tie standards like A Flock of Seagulls’ "I Ran (So Far Away)" or Martha and the Muffins’ "Echo Beach" into late-'80s post-hardcore screech, while "Let It Be" is a glorious Neu!-wave instrumental that reroutes the Autobahn through the American heartland, its synth-smoothed pave job nicked with countrified slide-guitar licks. Of course, it figures that a couple of studious rock historians like Perro and Chiericozzi would cop a title that their heroes the Replacements likewise stole from the Beatles. But in this case, the song is less an explicit tribute to the classics of yore than an embodiment of the title’s contented, live-and-let-live sentiment—and an indicator that Dream Police do their best work when roaming lawless fantasias.


Son Lux's new LP Lanterns isn't piecemeal beats or hastily assembled instrumental clutter, rather it begs to be heard as the lingua franca of the past and the future, something that connects the analog and digital realms. And sometimes it totally gets close.

Lanterns

Somewhere unstuck in time is Son Lux, born Ryan Lott, still trying to navigate his way through relics of the past and curios of the future. At 34, he’s a consummate dilettante, moving seamlessly from, say, inventing instrumental patches used in the score of the time-traveling sci-fi movie Looper to producing beats for Anticon rapper Beans. That’s the heady hip hop label that put out his first official pop album, At War With Walls & Mazes, a collage of organic and electronic samples matted together under Lott’s completely breakable voice. It took Lott almost four years to compile his debut, a process that came together while he was composing music for TV ads, all in the spirit of accidental curiosity. And four years is an eternity compared to his follow-up, the far more dense electro-chamber pop album We Are Rising, which he wrote over just 28 days in 2011 at the behest of NPR.
In effect, Lanterns is the first Son Lux album made with an organic timeline and intention. It also happens to be a record of experimental music that strives to be something beyond just an experiment. Can flute trills actually live with an instrument built from Pro Tools? Can an arrhythmic baritone saxophone actually coexist with an 808 bass thump? For Son Lux, these aren't hypotheticals or theories scribbled into a notebook, these are the sounds of his native tongue and he wants to blend them all into a new language. Lanterns isn't piecemeal beats or hastily assembled clutter, rather it begs to be heard as the lingua franca of the past and the future, something spoken on a pseudo-spiritual plane that connects the analog and digital realms. And sometimes it totally gets close.
It's best to take in the wide-angle spirit of Lanterns, because Son Lux’s more than complex arrangements are always the highlight over his less than complex lyricism. When all his synapses are firing, he's conjuring something like "Lost It To Trying", the maximalist hybrid chamber pop masterpiece at the front of the album. The song tethers itself to a jittery flute/saxophone riff, first found at the end of every few measures, but midway through it starts to overtake the whole song. By the end, there are hundreds of jittery flute/saxophone riffs spinning beneath, blurring together into a whole society of sound while a few choir voices and a theremin sample float far above. If ever there can exist sound that is singularly Son Lux, this is the type of all-in songwriting to get there.
The other way to this sweet spot is minimalism, heard on Lanterns’ other peerless track, “Easy”. If “Lost It To Trying” was the sound of two whole worlds speaking at the same time, “Easy” is just a few delegates from each. The timbre of Lott’s frail voice has a default setting of I'm Definitely Crying Right Now, so a few digital effects layered on puts it to better use as another texture. He warbles, “Pull out your heart to make the being alone easy” and it just slithers inside you undetected like the rest of the song. These two contrasting moments make up the lifeforce of the album, and most of the remaining seven tracks are too often just the notes the staff: brilliant ideas that lose their brilliance when they come off the page.
Compare Lanterns to one of it's more well known contemporaries, Sufjan Stevens’ Age Of Adz. That's an album tuned to psychosis and schizophrenia, surreal dreams and outsider art. Its future/past dichotomy lives way out on the fringe and it drags you out there. Lanterns doesn’t have much in the way of surreality or gravity; instead it uses pat spirituality and repetitive hymnic platitudes as a cructh. It’s a pop album that doesn’t trust the simplicity of pop’s tenets. “No Crimes”, featuring a vocal turn by Peter Silberman of the Antlers, fixates upon a similar sprinting, orchestral framework as “Lost It”, only it’s all climax with no plot to support it. “Pyre”, like “Easy”, looks for success in sparsity, but more heaves its dead weight around than vibrates in an ethereal plane.
It feels like Son Lux resents this world. Lott writes about leaving the "wasting world behind" to be transported, or more likely resurrected, in "alternate worlds" and when you can practically picture him winged, robed, and wearing a halo—He sings on the final track, "I'll keep my lanterns lit." He's like a painter who doesn't always trust that what he has on the canvas is complete. He tweaks his muted beats, or adds players from indie orchestra ringers yMusic—who appear throughout, along with background vocals from Darren King (Mutemath), Ieva Berberian (Gem Club) and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond). All the many collaborators are always ready with a fleck of flute or a spot of violin or another layer of angelic choir to obfuscate something simple. Conversely, there's not enough danger or adventure when Lott brings out his love of Stravinsky or rap or electo-pop or maybe some weird amalgum of all three. It is hard to parse all that's disparate here, and in searching for its most personal form, Son Lux unwittingly dipped into the uncanny valley of digital music trying to become human—something a little too perfect to believe.


It’s the irascible British duo’s most varied album to date. Just don’t expect anything to change.

UK GRIM

Sleaford Mods don’t make music about how terrible things are in hopes that they will get better. Over the past decade, Andrew Fearn and Jason Williamson have channeled public discontent and everyday malaise in the UK, scrutinizing their country’s faults as well as their own. And though they’ve found personal growth and commercial success, the Mods’ outlook hasn’t brightened. On their new album, UK GRIM, things are bad and only getting worse. Government is incompetent; hypocrisy is alive and well in the upper ranks of society; consumerist conformity is a plague and music can’t save you. All this probably sounds like your recent doom scroll, but UK GRIM is balanced by the mutating electro-punk of Fearn’s production and the absurdist humor with which Williamson seeds his diatribes.
Fearn has always thought less is more. “I think people try too hard and there’s too much turd polishing,” he once stated of the competition. His approach is uniquely austere—a steady kick drum paired with chirping birds or clanking iron, plus a prowling bass. On UK GRIM, a simple formula (“Get a really crap drum beat and play a bassline over it”) still leads to unexpected places. If the lyrics offer no sense of consolatory hope, there’s still the chameleonic vibrancy of the music, and the strongest tracks contain a shifting guitar flourish that feels like connective tissue between the boldface beats and cantankerous vocals. In “On the Ground,” Fearn transforms the zaps of retro Atari games into rubbery, panicked synth-punk. The album’s most bizarre highlight, “So Trendy,” casts Perry Farrell in the role of a selfie-obsessed gym bro who ponders getting a “mushroom haircut and a cross earring.” Synthetic bleeps and blurgs pop up like a Whac-A-Mole, balanced by an ascending distorted guitar melody that morphs into fevered surf rock.
In Williamson’s quasi-spoken social commentary, no one comes out clean: You’re either full of shit or busy dealing with someone else’s. “I got crisis stamina,” he spews on the title track. “Full marathon, four poo breaks.” Further still: “I can feel the shit from your crisis rays/Spray out my back.” Ridiculous reality calls for ridiculous rhetoric, and UK GRIM is an overflowing toilet. But Williamson balances the biting takedowns—of Britain’s conservative party on “Tory Kong” and try-hard punk wannabes on “D.I.Why”—with referential character vignettes and chaotic scenes that turn self-reflective. “Right Wing Beast” begins by attacking ignorant partisanship but lands on a revealing monologue about the psychic toll that opposing values can take on a relationship. “I thought about deleting you on socials,” he admits, breaking his sing-song tone. “Because you keep coming in with stuff and it’s winding me up to be honest. I never see ya. I don’t want to either.”
Sleaford Mods don’t wave a flag for any particular issues: They only document what they see. Their enemies wear Palm Angels, All Saints, and “Top Gun sunglasses.” During her guest appearance on “Force 10 From Navarone,” Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw rattles off this list of grievances: “Fucking viral fucking Batman video/You fucking moron.” Even if you don’t track all the references, Sleaford Mods’ sense of fatigued resignation resonates. UK GRIM is their most varied album to date, but they don’t want to dull the shitstorm’s stench—they’re just here to blow off the steam.


Fusing post-punk touchstones with his heartland-rock heroes, a reinvigorated Timothy Showalter comes back to the light.

Eraserland

Timothy Showalter’s decade-plus career as Strand of Oaks teeters on an empirical belief that maybe there are no lines between art and life at all. His towering, synth-infused rock anthems and solemn guitar-and-voice meditations relay his experience in plain language: his adolescence in the small Indiana town of Goshen, his musical heroes, his fears and self-loathing, the messy emotional goulash of love and marriage. His rocker’s distillation of Henry James’ position—that “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life”—fuses a bold shoegaze and heartland-rock aesthetic with the lyrical posture of modern confessionalists like Mount Eerie and Margo Price. The contrast reflects the dimensions of Showalter, alternately a contemplative and reclusive figure steeped in the craft and an unrepentant showman who can command a room with comedic bits and tales of late-night ragers.
New album Eraserland finds him at his breaking point. It was written in a cloud of depression and self-doubt, following years of touring on the success of breakthrough record HEAL, and the acknowledgment that its follow-up, Hard Love, didn’t quite land with fans the same way. By winter of 2017, feeling depleted, Showalter took a sabbatical to—of all places—the Jersey Shore. Alone, he walked the beaches and meditated on his favorite albums. Listening to Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, he’s said, almost literally saved his life.
At the height of Showalter’s existential crisis, My Morning Jacket guitarist Carl Broemel rallied bandmates Bo Koster (keyboards), Patrick Hallahan (drums), and Tom Blankenship (bass) to back Showalter on a new suite of songs, a vote of confidence that proved to be a potent motivator. Eraserland soars in both its booming and hushed moments, a testament to the skills of this lockstep outfit. These seasoned players navigate Showalter’s emotional cosmos with equal parts professionalism and empathy. Country star Jason Isbell lends his understated shredding, while singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emma Ruth Rundle adds elegant background vocals. Together they bring an easygoing quality to what could have been an overwrought extension of emotional turmoil.
Instead, Eraserland’s lyrical constellations shine in plain, profound confessions. “I don’t feel it anymore,” the first line of opener “Weird Ways,” is less a slacker’s excuse than a stinging admission of defeat. The song portends Eraserland’s emotional arc: Anguish and despondence cues philosophical probing and rebirth, relayed through stories about family, friends, idols, and dreams. Such disclosure leaves little room for interpretation and, in less capable hands, might feel naive. Here, each sentiment radiates through Showalter’s fibrous voice and road-worn phrasing. By the end, he’s found some light. “If you believe you can be loved, you'll outlive your past,” he promises on “Forever Chords,” the album’s conclusion.
All this unfolds in sober meditations and electrified anthems where synths fuse with glistening electric guitar and ringing cymbals. Showalter’s preference for blending the celestial touchstones of British post-punk with the sinewy qualities of his American heroes has never been better executed than it is here: “Final Fires” melds the synth and guitar tones of the Cure with the upcountry jangle of Tom Petty, while the title track swirls in a haze of My Bloody Valentine’s crescendos and Joy Division's negative space. “Moon Landing” references the vibey narration and guitar jam of Endless Boogie. Somehow this totem of influences works, stacked one atop another in a monument to the newly refocused Strand of Oaks.