The debut from the amazing, helium-huffing Atlanta rapper features production from Brodinski and a grip of other European producers that makes it a standout among the city’s rising stars.

The Graduation

Late last year, a pairing like the teenaged Atlanta rapper Lil Reek and 31-year old French producer Brodinski would not have been able to stir up any significant conversation within the Atlanta rap scene. At the time, Metro Boomin had 10 damn songs on the Billboard Hot 100 and it was the high point of an era where it felt like every rapper’s trajectory was to graduate from their beatmakers and land in the laps of the super producers like Metro Boomin, 808 Mafia, Mike WiLL Made-It, etc. But rap moves fast and now there’s an environment where rappers are expected to build with their producers. A debut mixtape like The Graduation from an artist with buzz like Lil Reek is appealing because an Atlanta rap project with a sound rooted both in the city and trance-inducing French electro music in the past would have been cast aside for more traditional records.
In the few months since Brodinski inspired him to give the booth a try, Reek has become a rapper who can seemingly flow over anything. The off-kilter production on The Graduation—handled mostly by European producers Brodinski, Mister Tweeks, and Ikaz Boi—is filled with uncanny pauses and buildups that usually come before major drops on EDM tracks. The intro, “Rock Out,” shouldn’t be easy to rap over: It’s a couple of tweaks away from belonging in a Mad Decent DJ set. But Reek catches the beat effortlessly and blinds you from the fact that it’s not a typical South Atlanta instrumental.
Lil Reek is fun and that feeling is elevated because of how little we know about his rapping ability, everything is a surprise. His voice is odd, pre-pubescent but also slightly raspy, similar to rising Atlanta rapper Young Nudy. On the airy standout “Blind Man”—featuring the album’s sole acceptable guest verse from Atlanta’s songwriting wizard Key!—Reek leans into his voice and adds a smidge of Auto-Tune, hitting a smooth and controlled melody. And then when he wants to, he strips down his voice and lets his South Atlanta accent and hoarse inflection loose like on “Drip”—the closest Brodinski comes to making a straightforward Atlanta trap beat.
The mixtape also serves a purpose beyond being a rap debut, as it’s a reward to Reek from himself for recently graduating high school. He never does capture the celebratory vibe that he set out to create, apparent by the description of the project’s meaning he gave Mass Appeal, “Dedicated to everything that I done worked for, please 13 years in school...it’s most definitely gonna be a lit graduation.” Producers like Brodinski would have been capable of creating more grand production to represent the party-like feel of a graduation, which ultimately is a good decision because the slightly darker tone makes it easier to assimilate the music into Atlanta’s rap circle. Reek also uses the opportunity on “Im Back” to reflect on his strange last couple of months where he unexpectedly had to balance the life of a high school senior while also being a budding rap star, which is a let down because Belgian producer Mister Tweeks isn’t able to balance that South Atlanta rawness with the European flash like Brodinski and strays too far into the world of electronic music.
The Graduation is accessible enough where a single can be posted on WorldStarHipHop without the comments being flooded with Future avatars saying “What the fuck is this?” Lil Reek had to make sure that the tape was a sufficient introduction that established himself as a young presence in an Atlanta rap scene that is overwhelmingly competitive and critical. It’s a project that is impressive because at the risk of being ostracized as an alternative rapper—which would unfairly put a ceiling over the endless potential of Reek—he paired with Brodinski and other European producers to create an album that displayed how to standout in Atlanta without being excessive. Two years ago, a rapper from Atlanta with this much raw ability would have been surely scooped up by Metro or Southside by now and put under their wing, but now the mixtape has a unique has a place in the city: a young artist who will make both the Southern rap purists and trend-seekers for a brief moment get along.


Sheer Mag's music stuffs hip-shaking hooks and burly riffs within impeccably structured pop songs, wrapped in lyrics both open-hearted and openly political. They’re the Jackson 5 raised to play punk rock, with an F-5 tornado for a singer.

III EP

"Jar of whiskey, Skinny Lizzy, that's all I need," sang Christina Halladay on "Sit and Cry," the second song off Sheer Mag's debut 2014 EP. Many rock bands swear allegiance to Lizzy-inspired, booze-fueled riff rock, but Sheer Mag make the formula sound uniquely vital, which makes them uncommon amongst most rock bands in 2016. Their music stuffs hip-shaking hooks and burly riffs within impeccably structured pop songs, wrapped in lyrics both open-hearted and openly political. They're the Jackson 5 raised to play punk rock, with an F-5 tornado for a singer.
Earlier this month they released III, their third EP in the last three years. It upholds the band's gold standard as they continue to refine their formula: kick drums like rifle shots, earworm guitar riffs played with electric glee, no-frills solos no less punk rock for their existence. Halladay still sounds like she's coming through a crackling speaker, as does the rest of the band, but her soulful, gale-force voice is more legible than ever. It's thirteen-and-a-half minutes of pure pleasure.
III is evenly split between love songs and political songs. "Can't Stop Fighting" addresses the chronic violence against women in Ciudad Juarez and in the world at large, with Halladay howling for collective action. "Night Isn't Bright" accomplishes the astonishing task of delivering lines like "It's plain to see these days that there's an agitation / We live and we die by a politics of simplification" without coming off as joyless. Sheer Mag will trick you into dancing while singing about overthrowing the system. You will have fun as you debate whether voting for Bernie over Hillary represents true change, or just a rearranging of the Titanic deck chairs. The songs are imbued with the tangible, bleeding passion that often accompanies political awareness, lest you think wokeness to be the sole province of the dour. They remind me of the MC5, another working-class garage band who used swaggering rock as a vehicle for righteousness.
The love songs find Halladay sounding more vulnerable than usual. She sings about men who've wronged her through their apathy, despite her fearlessness in seeking clarity. "At least I tried," she sings on "Worth the Tears," "and the time we had was worth the tears that you made me cry." The highlight might be "Nobody's Baby," which is built around a clipped riff and a refrain both defiant and depressed. "I'm nobody's baby, I'm nobody's girl," she sings, with the resignation of someone attempting to stay strong despite the pain they feel. The fearlessness of Sheer Mag's politics makes them stick out, but they're also unafraid to get bruised—a contrast of tough and tender that makes their music all the more potent.
It bears mentioning that Sheer Mag are strident anti-capitalists. III was released with no head's up and no PR, all for the price of a latte. (You can stream the EP in its entirety without paying a dime.) The lyrics are printed on their Bandcamp, lest anyone mistake their pointed intentions. They've reportedly turned down offers from plenty of labels. Their upcoming Coachella set seems hilariously out-of-place, though one imagines them concluding a furious set by burning their cash fee on stage ala the KLF. The string of EPs would naturally point toward an upcoming LP, though we can't be sure. For now, they're more than welcome in these limited bursts. They're totally locked into the sound, for all it'll give them. Pour another drink and turn it up.


On his second album, the Sydney punk fleshes out his filthy bubblegum scuzz with riffs, jokes, the requisite car song, and even a few unexpectedly vulnerable moments.

Goodnight Neanderthal

A good punk demo can feel either like a riveting mission statement or the fuck-around doodles of some booger trying to make their friends laugh. Kel Mason’s first bedroom-recorded outing as Gee Tee, in 2016, was the latter: a collection of goofy, sample-heavy punk songs about cars, flame decals, and driving too fast. This balaclava-wearing weirdo from Gold Coast, Australia named his project after a Rat Fink-adjacent muscle car illustration, and he rode the gimmick to an excellent 2018 self-titled album. In that underheralded lo-fi power-pop collection, earworm synth melodies and belligerent power chords showcased a songwriting talent capable of more than just easy punchlines. It turns out a song about loitering at the gas station can be funny and a banger.
Goodnight Neanderthal is a long-awaited follow-up for those who eagerly scooped up the last half decade of Mason’s prolific 7" drops, compilation spots, and Bandcamp loosies. Despite laboring over this collection of filthy bubblegum scuzz for the last two years, the Sydney-based punk ultimately settled on just 10 songs totaling 18 minutes of material. With a full band and the backing of the venerated garage-rock heads at Goner Records, he didn’t want any duds on this one. (“I get really picky about what I release,” he said of the album. “If I don’t think it rocks, I don’t see the point in putting it out.”) Two months before Mason sent it off to Memphis, he quickly wrote and recorded the majority of the album’s songs, scrapping much of what he’d done in the months prior. Goodnight Neanderthal bottles the energy of that spontaneous burst of creativity. True to his mission, the new album has no skips.
While Gee Tee is no longer defined by its early motorhead caricatures, Mason leans heavily into the project’s storied playfulness. The album’s title track is defined by a big gaudy keyboard melody oozing Technicolor joy, which is counterbalanced by a bunch of tough-guy shit. Fuzz-caked power chords chug along while Mason sings from his gut about how he just got bonked over the head by a big club. His resilience to blunt-force trauma isn’t his only cartoonish trait; Mason taps into a variety of exaggerated voices, lending each song a distinct vibe. He’s a nasal brat on “Bad Egg,” wondering over a killer rapid-fire guitar hook about a nasty smell in the kitchen. (Spoiler: It’s you—you’re the bad egg!) He’s a goblin with vocal fry on the burly “Heart Throb,” insisting that you can’t get enough of him even when this piece of shit cakes his hair in dirt and grease.
Unsurprisingly, Gee Tee also operates in the tradition of punk songs that find conviviality in horror and the apocalypse. “Within the Walls” pits rollicking carnival music against forces lurking out of sight. In one of the most joyous-sounding songs, “40k”—seemingly set in the universe of the tabletop classic Warhammer 40,000—Mason enthusiastically heralds the nuking of the planet. Over a spare, beautifully written keyboard line, the chorus is engineered for screaming along: “’Cause you’re dying in the 40k!”
Gee Tee have a reputation for rowdy shows, and Goodnight Neanderthal is full of songs that would thrive in a room full of beaming, sweating, shoving punks. Pop sweetness is balanced pretty evenly with scummy and distorted guitars, though the best song is its most subtle. Stacked next to the album’s boldest aesthetic moves, “Rock Phone” shows how much Mason can accomplish with a more minimal approach. The story is simple: Living in the future is a burden, so he ditches his smartphone in favor of a Flintstones boulderphone. Underpinned by layered guitars, the song manages to acknowledge the depression inherent in always being plugged in while also offering a universal plea that goes way back in the history of popular music: “Please call me on my phone.”
It’s not a Gee Tee album without a car song, and “(I Hate) Drivin’ in the City” is his best one yet. Staccato little synth stabs push forward relentlessly, and the chorus’ unbelievable guitar lick seems teleported from a ’70s hard-rock radio standard. Six years in, Mason is far away from the first Gee Tee demo: Instead of bragging about how sick his whip is, he’s riddled with anxiety and swears he’ll never drive in a big city again. His songs feel catchier and more robust than ever. Between this and “Rock Phone,” Goodnight Neanderthal is the most relatable record this Australian rock’n’roll cartoon character has ever made. Maybe Gee Tee never needed a car in the first place.


On Super Saiyan Vol. 3, the standard bearers for Chicago’s kinetic bop scene inch closer toward rap’s center, with mixed results.

Super Saiyan Vol. 3

Rappers ranging from Soulja Boy to Chance the Rapper have referenced the '90s anime series “Dragon Ball Z" in their lyrics, while others have dropped entire songs and mixtapes inspired by the show. None, however, have taken the metaphor quite as far as Sicko Mobb, whose bubbly, hyper-melodic sound evokes few things more than a cartoon world rendered in bright hues. To be sure, this is still street rap, albeit street rap that’s engineered for fast-paced, expressive dancing; "party music," as member Lil Trav put it last year. In their native Chicago, they’ve become posterboys for the bop scene, serving as a counterpoint to the darker drill music associated with the city’s south side.
Super Saiyan Vol. 3, the third in Sicko Mobb's series of "Dragonball"-themed mixtapes, finds the duo further extending their reach beyond the confines of bop. They're working with established producers from outside of Chicago, drawing in collaborators from the neighboring footwork scene and landing high-profile features. They’re imagining what it would be like to truly break out and workshopping the sounds that might get them there.
For all of its experimentation, though, Super Saiyan Vol. 3’s strongest songs find the Mobb doubling down on the aesthetic they’ve distilled over the course of three years and just as many mixtapes. Tracks like "Spazz on Ya" and the west-side anthem "Out West Chicago" display the group’s gift for giddy speed runs over syrupy, day-glo beats. More impressive yet are the songs where they manage to pull other artists into their sonic orbit. Take the tape's lead single, "Expensive Taste," which features a hook from fellow Chicagoan Jeremih over a bed of shimmering synth arpeggios. Jeremih disappears, chameleon-like, into the Sicko Mobb sound, adopting Lil Ceno and Lil Trav’s rapid cadence so readily that he’s barely recognizable. Even so, he manages to sneak in some of the song’s best lines ("Got lobsters on my plate/ Got oysters in my Rollie").
A few of the trial balloons here push the signature Sicko Mobb sound in interesting directions. "Eaters" coaxes an uncharacteristically airy chiptune beat out of footwork legend DJ Nate—squint and you’ll hear Kanye's "All of the Lights" rendered in miniature, trumpet fanfare and all. On the anthemic, 808 Mafia-produced stomper "What You Sayin," Trav and Ceno completely forego the gooey Auto-Tune vocals that have become their trademark, proving that straight-ahead trap-pop is more than within their reach.
Sadly, not every attempt to inch toward rap's center pays off. Tracks like "Throwin Money" and "Won't Take Long" are undeniably catchy but veer toward generic radio fodder—there’s not nearly as much here to distinguish Sicko Mobb from their peers. Even worse, the tape’s back half is weighed down by repetitive, lethargic songs like "Going In" and "Last Time." The latter aims for the sort of introspective number that might cap off a Kanye or Future record but with the exception of one pensive Trav verse, feels like a tedious retread of the same old boasts. Projecting energy has rarely been an issue for these guys but it sounds like they haven’t yet figured out how to do so at slower speeds.
In "Dragon Ball" lore, Super Saiyan refers to a series of evolutionary transformations a character can undergo in order to become more powerful; just when a hero seems to have hit a wall, a new level of Super Saiyan is revealed. Evolution seems to be a key objective of the Super Saiyan series: with each new mixtape, Sicko Mobb continue to refine their core sound while branching out in new directions. Super Saiyan Vol. 3 is a bit of a mixed bag, despite the fact that it features some of the duo’s strongest work yet. Thankfully, something tells me that this isn't even their final form.


Part of the fun of this covers album from the Spacebomb Records crew is hearing how Matthew E. White and Flo Morrissey rethink how male and female voices can relate and react to each other.

Flo Morrissey / Matthew E. White: Gentlewoman, Ruby Man

Gentlewoman, Ruby Man

Like all Spacebomb records, the new covers album by English singer-songwriter Flo Morrissey and American musician Matthew E. White is as much about the Spacebomb sound as it is about the singers or the songs they’re singing. For most of the 2010s the small Richmond, Virginia, studio/record label has been refining a silky sound that recalls the florid productions of ’70s R&B visionaries like Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield without succumbing to revivalism. Rather, that aesthetic seems to form an implicit argument about how the past can be revived and even rewritten for the present.
Every Spacebomb record sounds good on some level, even one as minor as Gentlewoman, Ruby Man. Morrissey and White met at a Lee Hazelwood tribute show in London in 2015, singing “Some Velvet Morning” together and striking up a friendship. Vocally, they’re a fine match, each with a laconic delivery that makes them distinctive, albeit limited, interpreters. That Hazelwood tune didn’t make the album cut, possibly because neither is interested in assigning roles based on gender. In fact, part of the fun of this album is hearing them rethink how male and female voices can relate and react to each other. Rather than role play romantic conversations, they trade off lead and backing vocals, and their platonic dynamic only adds to the giddy bounce of Little Wings’ “Look at What the Light Did” and intensifies the eccentric imagery of Frank Ocean’s “Thinking About You.”
With the exception of James Blake’s “Colour of Anything,” which here sounds like an outtake from the Virgin Suicides soundtrack, Morrissey and White fare better with the more recent material than with the old. They play it fairly safe on Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” and they play it even safer on George Harrison’s “Govindam.” Somehow their version of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” is even more dour than the 1967 original, thanks to White’s heavy-lidded vocals and an all-elbows R&B groove. The song sticks out not merely as a poor choice of material but as the rare poor showing by the Spacebomb band.
Perhaps their most successful cover is the one that seems the unlikeliest. For many listeners—okay, almost all of them—“Grease” will forever be stuck to the 1978 movie like a wad of hardened bubblegum to the underside of a desk. Barry Gibb penned it as a last-minute addition to the film adaptation of the musical, and since then it has ushered several generations of viewers into that world of the idealized 1950s. By ripping the song right out of the opening credits and placing it alongside nine other covers, Morrissey and White manage to find a new way to hear “Grease,” one that is more Bee Gees than Travolta/Newton-John. They underscore the shaky self-assertion of Gibbs’ lyrics, especially that existential bridge: “This is a life of illusion, a life of control,” they sing together. “Mixed with confusion, what are we doing here?” If Frankie Valli, already an oldies act when he recorded it in 1978, spoke for a generation that had grown up only reluctantly, this twenty- and thirtysomething duo sound terrified that age might not actually grant wisdom.


With a handful of hits, placements on albums by Young Jeezy and Rick Ross, and a major-label debut on the horizon, the Atlanta rapper's new mixtape is his first big move of the year.

Astronaut Status

If success brings expectations, then Future is at the point where his mixtapes are starting to matter. With a handful of major and minor hits and recent placements on albums by Young Jeezy and Rick Ross, Future has a major-label debut somewhere on the horizon, but the album will undoubtedly languish if he can't keep his momentum going. Astronaut Status is his first big move of the year, and though the tape doesn't really bring much of anything new to the table, it is Future's strongest, most listenable mixtape yet, and that alone is notable enough.
As much as any of his mixtapes, Astronaut Status puts Future's talents as a songwriter at the forefront. There's nothing here that's elaborate or notably deep, and in fact Future trades on his ability to write quirky, catchy little songs that you could easily picture as playground chants. There is an inclination in the rap world to tag songs likes these as disposable, but the ruthless efficiency in Future's writing makes these tracks endure, even if it's in your head and against your will. There's a circular, almost music-box quality to tracks like "Nunbout" and "Swap it Out", with Future driving the same idea and melody into the ground, that gives them an organic, homespun feel. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine these songs as one-takes, or not being built up much further from demos, but sometimes melodies are indelible enough that they don't really need much more than that. The playground element of the songs is important-- plenty of rap songs have liberally interpolated actual playground classics, though Future's ability to mine the space between seriousness and something close to childish taunting is unique.
Future has said in interviews that he wants to make stadium music, and though that's enough of a jump in ambition that it could lead him down a disastrous path, he does succeed on Astronaut Status when he widens his scope or pushes himself vocally. The obvious standout in this regard is "Deeper Than the Ocean", a track with Spanish guitars and a squealing solo that finds Future singing in a cracked, raspy voice about the pain in his life. The sentiment is real and the lyrics a bit jarring, even if the execution is slightly ridiculous-- but it would only be a small leap of faith to close your eyes and imagine Future as Adele performing "Someone Like You" at the Brit Awards. Elsewhere, "Spaz on Y'all" and "Birds Take a Bath" are more conventionally anthemic, but nonetheless show that Future is capable of picking off where Akon left off, which I promise is more important than it sounds.
Future could likely go on like this forever, prolifically releasing mixtapes with more than enough good songs to justify their existence. At some point, he will need to strike gold again, and in the murky waters of pop-rap hitmaking, it's hard to tell if anything on Astronaut Status stands up to the songs that helped Future ascend to this status in the first place. Until all of that shakes out, though, we can do just fine enjoying his catchy, goofy songs as they are.


The Massachusetts-based drummer and producer buries pop music in experimental chaos using studio wizardry and a deft compositional touch.

You’re a Crusher / drocan!

A scan through Dan Drohan’s Bandcamp page reveals a musician restlessly tinkering with the molecular structure of composition. The Massachusetts-based drummer and producer’s forays into exploratory electronic composition with real-time drums mostly defy classification. Maybe these attempts to create new forms of beauty and intrigue in sound could be called “organic cyborg music.” Amid all the weirdness in his latest album You’re a Crusher / drocan! is a pop record struggling to emerge from the wires. Slivers of melody shoot through the cacophony, but they quickly become subsumed in the pile-up of disjointed rhythms and melted-plastic textures. This perpetual battle gives the album’s its essential friction.
You’re a Crusher / drocan! is divided into two segments, the first ostensibly experimental and the second nominally pop. But to call drocan! “pop” is like calling the idea of death a nuisance. Created with multi-instrumentalist Mike Cantor, the poppier section that comprises the second half of the record indulges in fun-house-mirrored studio wizardry. “The Garden” evokes Cornelius’ 1997 album Fantasma, but on much stronger and stranger drugs, its angelic vocals reverbed into a choir of anomie. “Passwords” sounds like a brutalist version of Japanese city pop, with Drohan pounding out kettledrum thunder. “Through the Night” purveys cherubic Panda Bear vibes, but is much less cloying.
As diverting as drocan! is, it’s the first half, You’re a Crusher, that delivers the real fireworks. “Leave it Loading” rides rickety, uptempo beats and a wonky, foghorn-like bassline akin to Hugh Hopper’s in early Soft Machine over decaying yet vibrant keyboard dabs. This alien, warehouse-pop aura splits the difference between Swell Maps and This Heat. “You’re a Crusher” serves as the bridge to drocan!, filtering Animal Collective’s awry-mushroom-trip inversion of the Beach Boys through Black Dice’s warp-everything-to-the-max mulcher. “CUPOFDRO” comes across as a modern American take on Autechre’s bafflingly complex IDM puzzles. The cumulative effect of this rampant sonic distortion is a cheerful kind of madness. Drohan creates his own bizarre universe out of a mix of organic and synthetic elements, and then arrays the parts in often breathtakingly original ways. He may not be reinventing the wheel, but he is retrofitting it with some spectacular rims.

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


Patti Smith's new guitar-driven album, her first since 2007's Twelve, is a meditation on exploration and adventure.

Banga

Somehow, over the course of the four years it took her to write and record the material on her latest album, Banga, poet-singer-photographer-mother-activist-shaman-clarinetist Patti Smith managed to do some things she hadn't done yet. She acted in a Jean-Luc Godard film, appearing in his 2010 videotape polemic Film Socialisme and, in a highbrow/lowbrow swivel, then later made her television acting debut in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. She wrote her first memoir, Just Kids, a chronicle of her ardent friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, which earned a National Book Award and critical acclaim. And-- a proud autodidact all her life-- Smith even belatedly racked up a few college degrees, so to speak, receiving honorary doctorates from Rowan University (she dropped out in 1967) and the Pratt Institute. All in all, a pretty average couple of years in the life of Patti Smith, who's spent decade after decade ticking a red pencil against her chin, circling uncharted waters like want ads, and setting sail.
Much like the years during which she was working on it in fits and starts, Banga is a hodgepodge. A song about Amerigo Vespucci comes a few minutes before an elegy for Amy Winehouse; an idyllic ballad inspired by Nikolai Gogol rubs track-list elbows with an idyllic ballad written as a birthday present for Johnny Depp. And all the while Smith scatters handfuls of references to "the future" and "the 21st century" across Banga, suffusing the record with a palpable sense of futurity, horizon-gazing, and, yes, hope. Still, its bright, guitar-driven sound is even-keeled enough to make its motley cast of characters and jumbled, all-over-the-place temporality feel oddly cohesive, as though its parts were carefully fused together in a room where the clock has no hands. Remember those words that shot out of her lips like hot lightning on her brilliant 1978 record Easter: "I don't fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future." Well, more than three decades later, Banga is the work of someone interested in fucking with everything.
Smith's earliest and most iconic albums were animated by her explosive, dribbling vocal style ("If you miss a beat, make up another," Sam Shepard once advised a nervous Smith before an early theater performance, and everything about her method of singing proves she took those words to heart), but what we've learned over her past few records is that Smith's molten lava delivery has cooled off a bit with age. Which means that the longer, spoken-word pieces on Banga-- the underworld swirl of "Constantine's Dream" or the stoic "Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter)"-- don't careen with the breakneck energy of, say, Horses' centerpiece reveries of "Land, of a Thousand Dances" and "La Mer (De)". Smith's now got one of those speaking voices that-- like Werner Herzog playing God in voiceover-- lends a cosmic gravity to every word she utters, even when she's improvising. This occasionally makes the denser and more conceptual lines feel leaden ("Constantine" begins, "In Arezzo I dreamed a dream/ Of Saint Francis who kneeled and prayed"), but there's something wonderful about the way it's etched certain lingering qualities of her idiosyncratic vocal thumbprint in stone. For all its imagery of Mercury and magpies, I think "Tarkovsky"'s most humanizing charm to be that Smith still pronounces "wuter" with a New Jersey accent.
Banga meditates on ideas about exploration and adventure, and though the longer tracks tackle these themes more explicitly (the 11-minute "Constantine" was inspired, serendipitously, by a postcard she received of a Dimitri Levas painting of a conquistador), it's actually the shorter, less assuming tracks that best capture that spirit of discovery. The opener "Amerigo"-- which reimagines Vespucci taking a more sympathetic view of the indigenous people of his "new" continent-- has an infectiously buoyant energy that doesn't distract from its political consciousness. The same could be said of the driving, scaled-mountain intensity of "Fuji-san", which Smith wrote in the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. The elegies-- "This Is the Girl" for Winehouse and "Maria" for the late French actress Maria Schneider-- are sweet, desolate, and fittingly understated. ("It is a song I wish we never had to write," Smith says of "Girl" in the liner notes.) Smith overstates Banga's overarching themes on the final track, a cover of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" that's smooth sailing until a small children's choir storms the helm at the end to sing, "Look at mother nature on the run in the 21st century." It's a moment of respite from the somber "Costantine" that precedes it, but-- especially coming from someone as cliché-obliterating as Smith-- it feels uncharacteristically heavy-handed.
Though neither a high point nor a low point in her freewheeling, four-decade career, Banga has the same charm of Smith's best albums: It flits with the impressionistic fascinations of a single mind. Even now that she's got those honorary Ph.Ds, Smith is still the eternal college freshman at heart, constantly stumbling upon new artistic heroes and then drawing from them fathomless and unabashedly ebullient inspiration. Horses tacked upon its walls cut-out, doodled-upon photos of Arthur Rimbaud, William S. Burroughs, and Bob Dylan; Easter subbed them out for Jackson Pollock, Jimi Hendrix, and Jesus Christ; and Banga keeps the cycle going (though with a decidedly Russian flair) with Tarkovsky, Gogol, and Mikhail Bulgakov (the record's title is the name of the dog in Master and Margarita, a book with which Smith says she was "smitten" when she first read it four years ago). Ultimately, it's Banga's earnestness about the thrill of discovery that makes it feel so out-of-time and refreshing. It runs counter to that sense of maxed-out ennui that governs the way so many people talk about art and artists in the age of Wikipedia-- when posturing that you know it all is more attractive than confessing blind spots, if only so you can bemoan the fact that it's all been done before. Though more in spirit than in sound, Banga pulses with the notion that there are still good books we haven't read, old ideas waiting to be fucked with, and new lands we haven't yet explored.


The self-assured debut EP from the 20-year-old singer-songwriter deals with those pure and devastating first loves.

Margaux: More Brilliant Is the Hand that Throws the Coin

More Brilliant is the Hand That Throws the Coin, the debut EP from the NYC-based 20-year-old Margaux Bouchegnies, is uncannily wise and self-assured for someone her age. “I want to see myself malfunctioning/I want to see myself skip in place,” she sings on “Hot Faced,” over a knotty and beautiful string arrangement, sounding a million miles from the moment of shame she sings about. Hearing a line like that makes you think about what it would feel like to watch yourself fuck up from space.
Bouchegnies’ music lies two steps away from a lot of familiar indie rock: Her voice recalls Julia Jacklin, and her arrangements might have been plucked from a Fleet Foxes record. But the music she makes from these reference points proves difficult to pin down. A song like “Palm” feels sympatico with jazz standards and Françoise Hardy tearjerkers if anything. “Day time seems as blue and heavy as the lake by home,” Bouchegnies sings, as guitars chirp like cartoon songbirds. When she sings about love, it sounds like she is doing so from the inside of a snowglobe and is asking you to crack the glass with a teaspoon.
Her songs often deal with the sort of first love that feels devastating in its purity—the kind that leaves you crying on the couch not because anything bad happened but because one day the joy will dissipate. It is a profoundly early-twentysomething experience, and Bouchegnies writes about it without cliché. “Please keep reading your book out loud/I like to hear your voice/I like to see your mouth,” she sings on “Faced With Fire.” Her voice quivers as she considers “time’s relentless melt,” and behind her an upright bass lurches like a rocking chair on an uneven porch.
“Cave In,” is the EP’s most spectacular moment, shifting from low, nervous verses into a thicker, darker chorus, strings and fuzzed-out bass thudding into each other. The arrangement keeps building, each new sound adding to the track’s chattering momentum and amplifying the force of the chorus. The song feels like a first kiss, like drinking a beer at a party too fast because you’re anxious. But “Cave In” is not about collapsing under pressure and feeling small, like the song’s title suggests. It’s a declaration of power. “Lay down/This your final offer,” repeats Bouchegnies in the song’s chorus. More Brilliant is the Hand That Throws the Coin is just that: a statement of serious self possession, a record of huge songs written by a young person with an unnerving degree of precision and command.


Slay-Z, Azealia Banks' latest EP, features production from the likes of Kaytranada and collaborations with Rick Ross and Nina Sky. It is not as hard-hitting as her debut Broke With Expensive Taste, but it still shimmers with her undeniable skill and personality.

Slay-Z

By now, the world understands that Azealia Banks is not perfect. She's offered us plenty of evidence on that score. But she remains uniquely human, and that messy humanity — raw and real and sometimes wrong — is on display as much in her statements to the media and on her Twitter page as in her music. Audiences heard bits and pieces of this on her initial singles and EPs like 1991, but it moved to the forefront on Broke with Expensive Taste, her sharp, poignant and infectious debut album. Released outside of the typical label structure, BWET was a triumph, however short-lived, from an unclassifiable artist of the new millennium. As danceable as it was affecting, the record embodied the sort of charms that we recognized in Banks’ music from the start.
Slay-Z, her latest mixtape featuring production from the likes of Kaytranada and collaborations with Rick Ross and Nina Sky, is not as hard-hitting as BWET, but it still shimmers with Banks’ skill and personality. Banks continues to move further into new territories in her work: "Big Talk" is a hard-hitting and directly trap-influenced slow builder featuring Rick Ross. It's a new sound for Banks, who has distinguished herself both as a vocalist and as a rapper by repurposing a variety of different genres across the decades, most notably the sing-song pop appeal of '90s house. Despite this diversion, Banks is able to make it work, her deft voice snapping and stretching like a rubber band to match the beat and production rather than fight against it.
Still, she continues to double down on her love of ’90s NY house. "The Big Big Beat," one of the best songs on the record, sounds less like a homage to the bright, Top 40 version of the genre and more deeply rooted in the real stuff. It is an underground anthem, one that bubbles under the surface instead of hitting you over the head like "212," but it has the staying power of all her best music.
That is the thing about Azealia Banks: she still puts out consistent work, and each release feels like a well-timed reminder of how good she can be. For all of her questionable tweets or political affiliations, her music still touches on feelings that other artists rarely touch: Consider the sly vulnerability of Broke with Expensive Taste's "Soda," a song that became something of an anthem for misunderstood, creative, emotionally unfulfilled young black women navigating a world that continues to disregard our deepest desires and emotions.
And it is the sort of thing that makes people willing to give her artistic chances. There were very few gut punches as memorable as listening to Broke with Expensive Taste for the first time. And on Slay-Z, there are hints of that power. They don’t shine nearly as bright as her almost flawless debut record, but they keep us watching and listening.


On the minimalist companion to 2020’s NO, the Japanese trio lands a delicate balance of dream pop and drone. It feels like a sanctuary.

W

For 30 years, Boris have made room for orchestrated chaos and calm. From amp-blown classics like 2005’s Pink to the subdued dream pop of 2011’s New Album, the Japanese trio has leapt with peerless authority between brilliant light and brutal darkness. A companion to 2020’s trouncing NO, their latest album, W, rounds off what band members Atsuo, Takeshi, and Wata have called “a continuous circle of harshness and healing.” The result is a muted weave of exploratory minimalism: It’s the most their music has felt like sanctuary in years.
While the leveling punk of NO packed in the fresh unrest of life in lockdown, W breathes deep and plots anew. Marking Boris’ debut on indie label Sacred Bones, the music feels like a rebirth. Incorporating talc-soft textures that they’ve hinted at but never explored so fully, opener “I Want to Go to the Side Where You Can Touch…” swiftly suggests change. Folding sub-bass and a choir of sine waves with widescreen ambience evoking Slowdive’s Pygmalion, it is a perfect ratio of stacked drone and sugar-spun dream pop.
The trio has long grasped the distinction between density and mass. Like icecaps suspended above the ocean, the hulking drones on albums like Flood and Amplifier Worship seem buoyant despite obvious weight. It’s an auditory sleight of hand, drawn out in space and time. On W, this delicate balance is fine-tuned on the centerpiece, “You Will Know (Ohayo Version).” Among the most beatific songs Boris have committed to tape, thick squalls of feedback hug slinking phrases that sound teased from some alien cello-fretless bass hybrid. Across nine minutes, little separates its feelings of bliss and ill-boding.
The gossamer lead vocals of guitarist Wata, which debuted on 2011’s majestic Attention Please, have never sounded so assured. Take the Björkian “Icelina,” where syllables softly hover above globules of bass and thrifty synths, or “Drowning by Numbers,” a sinister yet vaguely seductive single that weds writhing bass with scorched guitar textures that nod to Cocteau Twins circa Garlands. Much like Kotao Tomozawa’s cover art of some eel-like tangle, Wata’s delivery is eldritch yet inviting. Even when she’s simply counting to 10 in a hushed, ASMR-like tone, the tenor of her voice is enough to dominate the band’s dusky, infernal funk.
Despite being billed as interlinked statements, and the fact that their titles combine to spell “NOW,” the through-line between NO and W is gold foil thin. From a less seasoned group of changelings, the wide berth—and narrow window—between the former’s thundering hardcore and the dusky drone pop of W might seem jarring. With Boris’ tact and loyalty to low-end, however, both albums manage to play to their strengths. On W, the bludgeoning “The Fallen” revisits their indignant brand of sludge. Conjuring Pink highlight “Blackout”—not to mention the band’s noted reverence of the Melvins—it lands a purgative curveball midway through the record. Aided by fellow Tokyo musician suGar yoshinaga on production, both this song and the down-tuned portent at the close of “Old Projector” pleasantly jolt rather than completely blindside.
“The world will keep changing,” Takeshi said in a 2020 interview. “Like a reflecting mirror, Boris will keep evolving.” As with Low’s metamorphosis on Hey What—another benchmark release from a band of indie lifers who never stop moving—Takeshi, Atsuo, and Wata have reflected abstract magic on W. Like a port in a storm, the foundations may occasionally shake, but, for the duration of the record, it feels like the safest place to hide. Whether through doom, drone, shoegaze, or beyond, Boris’ music has a restorative, unifying source: the pursuit—and occasional discovery—of something akin to pure peace.

Buy: Rough Trade


The Detroit scam rapper doesn’t overthink his music: This is just 13 funky instrumentals punched up with funny pop-culture references.

Bin Reaper

In the last three months, the Detroit rap trio BabyTron, StanWill, and TrDee (collectively known as The Shittyboyz) have emerged with punchline-heavy, ahead-of-the-beat raps in which they send their girlfriends into department stores with stolen credit cards and ruin the credit of grannies so they can punch themselves a gift from Saks Fifth. The production should be classified as “breakdancing on cardboard type beats”; their producers flip ’80s dance pop reminiscent of the Beverly Hills Cop theme song into typical funky Detroit instrumentals.
The most polished of the trio is ShittyBoyz BabyTron, a 19-year-old that rocks a bowl haircut like a Disney Channel star, wears throwback NBA jerseys like a frat boy at a music festival, and raps confidently about the scams that have supported him since the days when he used to keep a credit-card chip reader in his high school gym locker room.
In August, the ShittyBoyz stumbled into a small but fervent following. The trio were beneficiaries of the rise of the 18-year-old Teejayx6, who made Detroit the epicenter for raps about IP strength and stolen social security numbers this past summer. BabyTron’s debut solo mixtape, Bin Reaper, arrives at a moment that’ll decide if the ShittyBoyz gimmick has legs or if it’s bound to get lost in the internet cycle.
Bin Reaper is simple, and BabyTron doesn’t overthink the situation: 13 songs of pop culture-referencing punchlines and ’80s video game arcade beats. Sometimes he’ll compare his credit card punching to an anime like One Punch Man; he’ll rap over a sample of Undertaker’s WWE theme song. At one point, he compares his criminal record, which probably has him on a government watch list, to NBA players like Zion Williamson, Clint Capela, and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Detroit superproducer Helluva laces BabyTron with grooves that sound direct from a Richard Simmons workout video. “Jesus Shuttlesworth” and “Scampire” are maybe the mixtape’s two best tracks; unsurprisingly, they’re both just BabyTron shit-talk and funky Helluva flips. BabyTron even holds his own when he tackles a more typical Detroit beat. “Now I punch shit like Jean-Claude Van Damme,” he brags on “Pro Surfers,” going toe-toe with Michigan punchline savant Rio Da Yung OG.
By the time Bin Reaper reaches its final track, some of the flips are tired, especially when left in less capable hands than Helluva’s (See: “Special Thanks” and “Top Ten”). But the appeal of BabyTron’s music, like so much of Detroit rap, is that it feels like it was made in a bubble. Take any song on Bin Reaper, adjust the pop-culture references, and tell somebody unfamiliar with the ShittyBoyz that it was made in 2000, or 2010, or 2019, they would believe you. BabyTron has a gimmick and he’s aware of it. But it’s a good gimmick, and sometimes in rap, that’s all you need.


On his fifth solo album, Big Sean gets personal, leans on a slate of high-profile guests to provide most of the entertainment, and struggles to deliver anything that isn’t fundamentally embarrassing.

Detroit 2

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Big Sean was like a streetwear Tumblr come to life, able to rap like Gucci Mane’s kid brother in one song, only to shift gears and drop a pretty serviceable Consequence impression in the next. The Detroit rapper’s manic energy and corny punchlines recalled Quagmire from Family Guy, a comparison that Sean himself stoked on his 2011 track “I Do It,” when he spent a few lines rhyming things with “giggity-giggity” and then rapped, “I’m Quagmire.” His “Marvin & Chardonnay” fit like a glove within the dizzying heights of Rustie’s transcendent 2012 Essential Mix, while the Nicki Minaj collaboration “Dance (A$$)” yielded both a pitch-perfect homage to the ghettotech of his hometown as well as perhaps the decade’s finest song about butts. Before too long, he’d carved out a niche for himself as a squeaky-voiced goofball, a fast-rapping Fabolous soundalike who was a welcome addition to any posse cut, able to parachute into songs provide some high-energy levity, and tastefully bow out before you had a chance to think too hard about what the hell an ass-state is.
The problem, though, is what happens when you’re stuck with a whole album’s worth of Big Sean. He doesn’t make bad records per se—this is a guy who releases music under the imprimatur of Kanye West, so there’s a certain level of grim competence to each of his full-lengths—it’s just that every time Big Sean attempts to reveal a deeper side of himself, he can’t help but come across as a woefully unpleasant person.
On Detroit 2, the rapper’s fifth solo album and the ostensible sequel to his 2012 mixtape, Big Sean positions himself as an enlightened despot. He rules over a kingdom in which wisdom is gained by woo-woo self-help books, relationships are transactional (“I can’t waste the sex on you and give you everything you can’t give me back”), and cancel culture is an existential threat to your brand (“It only takes one time to fuck up your whole Wikipedia.”) Between that stuff, the multiple judgments he renders on people’s “vibes,” and the ayahuasca reference on “FEED,” it seems like Big Sean has spent the past few years internalizing the hyper-capitalism of the early-’70s New Age movement. Sure, at least it’s an ethos, but the places it takes Big Sean to feel incongruous with our current moment.
Take “Lucky Me,” the album’s second track. Over a shaggy soul beat from Hit-Boy and DJ Dahi, Sean reflects on the fact that he has dated numerous famous women, building up to the line, “It’s a living nightmare when your dream girl has to get canceled.” It’s a sentiment that feels vapid on its face, and becomes borderline sociopathic when you recall that earlier this summer, Big Sean’s ex-girlfriend, the actress Naya Rivera, died in a boating accident while saving her son’s life. Even if the line is meant to be about another woman, Big Sean’s insistence that someone’s personal struggles might specifically be a problem for him is, well, jarring. Things take a turn for the even more bizarre just moments later in “Lucky Me,” when Sean starts rapping about how he was diagnosed with a heart condition at 19, only for a naturopath to cure it with magnesium. “That’s how I know that Western medicine weak,” he concludes, the rare hint of bass in his voice. Which, fine, but also, we are currently experiencing the biggest public health crisis in a hundred years. He doesn’t have a moral duty or anything to not rap stuff like this—or, for that matter, “No sir, I don’t even do flu shots” from the otherwise pretty-great “Harder Than My Demons”—but it does make listening to Big Sean during a pandemic feel more pointless than it usually does.
Unfortunately, on many of the songs where Big Sean leaves his personal feelings about Western medicine to the side, he falls into the trap of assuming the style of a particular trend or artist but never quite selling the pose. Instead, he remains almost entirely anonymous. He sounds kinda like Young Thug on the song that Young Thug is on, kinda like Travis Scott on the song that Travis Scott is on, kinda like Wale on the song that Wale is on, and kinda like Lil Wayne on the song that Lil Wayne is on. And whenever he’s not employing a double-time flow, he gives the listener enough time to consider the absolute vapidity of lyrics like, “Laser focus, AOL, been had AIM,” or, “Full circle like exactly what the fuck karma is,” or, “My third eye and fourth eye open… damn.”
There are moments on Detroit 2 that feel special, but Big Sean himself rarely has anything to do with them. Dave Chappelle, Erykah Badu, and Stevie Wonder each pop up on interludes to tell delightful little stories that don’t necessarily involve Big Sean himself. (Chappelle’s, for instance, is about smoking weed with Danny Brown and then meeting Big Sean’s dad.) Eight of the record’s beats were handled by Hit-Boy, who transposes his stadium-sized sensibilities onto even the most sedate instrumentals in ways that are never not thrilling. On “The Baddest,” No I.D. takes a crack at flipping the same Godzilla-theme sample from Pharoahe Monch’s “Simon Says,” ends up recreating the track he’s paying homage to but with skittering trap drums, and it sounds so good that not even Big Sean can fuck it up. Lil Wayne absolutely tears into the loop of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” that undergirds “Don Life,” blowing his host out of the water and momentarily sketching out an alternate universe where the best beats on the album found their way into Wayne’s hands.
By far the best and most ambitious track on the album is “Friday Night Cypher,” which stitches together the past, present, and future of Detroit’s hip-hop scene. Over the course of nine and a half minutes, Sean invites a cast ranging from Tee Grizzley to Payroll Giovanni to Kash Doll to Boldy James to Eminem himself to showcase what makes them great, with ambient cheering and a contiguous, constantly shifting beat helping recreate the hazy vibe of a late-evening cut-up session in the studio. Sean’s tucked into the middle of the track and is absolutely in his element, touching on the Based God’s Curse(s), Meek Mill’s “Tony Story” story-raps, and browsing Zillow for kicks and giggles. It’s fun, effortless nonsense—in other words, the Platonic ideal of a Big Sean verse. And the best part? When his verse is over, Big Sean simply fades into the background, having made his mark and, for once on Detroit 2, not overstaying his welcome.

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


Chicago multi-instrumentalist Nick Levine’s solo debut will feel familiar to Pinegrove fans but struggles to expand on the band’s formula.

Blue Heron

When Nick Levine released 2017’s Karaoke EP, the first project under their alter ego Jodi, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist had already spent five years in the background of indie rock. An on-and-off guitarist for Pinegrove since their Meridian days, Levine provided the marvelous pedal steel duet with Evan Stephens Hall’s vocals on “Light On” and the composed banjo that buoyed the surface of “New Friends.” Karaoke was a lush, introspective six-song trip, pairing Levine’s reticent lyricism with the bedroom acoustic licks of past Pinegrove projects. Conceptualized at a cabin in the Catskills and recorded at Lazybones Audio in Silsbee, Texas, their follow-up, Blue Heron, stretches an EP worth of material into a sparse, sometimes unsatisfying debut LP.
As a backing musician, Levine has bolstered Pinegrove songs with the supple flair required to keep the pacing steady; their lead arrangements on 2016’s Cardinal were crucial to defining the band’s sound. But Blue Heron struggles to find its pace, striving to be in many places at once by refusing ever to linger. Each song stumbles into the next, blurring scenes together rather than settling into their landscapes. The frequent migrations bring an unwelcome sense of urgency, particularly near the end of the album, with a pair of minute-plus tracks (“Water” and “River Rocks”) that could have been left on the cutting-room floor. “Hawks” parallels the record’s wider ambiance: a promising build-up, a long middle, and a pretty back half interrupted by needless filler.
The biggest fault lines appear in the instrumentals roaming beneath the vocals. The melodies on a song like “Slug Night” are tender and faint, especially weak when Levine’s voice demands grander accompaniment. Throughout Blue Heron, Levine evokes lovely imagery—wild birds, flora, swimming holes, the moments of joy hiding within anxiety—in a monotone warble, taking few risks with their voice and instruments. The final effect feels stringy and unfinished.
Blue Heron’s brightest points ditch the strained poetics for specific language. On “Buddy,” a wintertime ode to missing friends who’ve departed on tour, Levine sings, “I’m counting on something to/Come alive/So I don’t come out alone.” On “Softy,” a patient ballad of undefined love and affectionate touch, they sing, “I’m your biggest fan/Hear the show of hands.” Both tracks are standouts, balancing the twang of Levine’s underutilized pedal steel against the drawl of their lead guitar. These songs echo Karaoke’s lyrical strengths, drawing clear distinctions between two thematic tropes—self-reflection and romantic longing—that Blue Heron often conflates.
This album certainly sounds like a Pinegrove side project: off-kilter indie folk fused with language-arts rock and East Coast emo, draped in self-loathing melancholia. It’s a familiar sound that deserves a fresh approach, but Levine’s songwriting is conservative, never deviating too far from the formula. Though their work is attuned to the human condition—recognizing the way our surroundings impact our psyches, especially in the presence of those we love—on Blue Heron, this delicate rebalancing of emotional ballast often feels like a one-sided conversation. Full of vague, faceless characters who act as anonymous plot devices in their own stories, the album leaves the burden of self-absorption and ambiguity in its wake.

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


On walks around Manhattan, even on sun-scorched days, mysterious precipitation falls on your head. Whether this comes from urinating birds ...

To the 5 Boroughs

On walks around Manhattan, even on sun-scorched days, mysterious precipitation falls on your head. Whether this comes from urinating birds, air conditioning condensation, observation deck spitting, or suicide jumpers breaking down into their constituent beads of bloody moisture over the long 145-story leaps from skyscrapers, I've yet to determine. The Times Square subway station has been under construction for at least four years. The majority of Village eateries I frequent do not accept credit cards. The city tobacconists all spell the first letters of "Smoke Shop" with two pipes, making the storefront signs look more like "Jmoke Jhop." Garbage is laid out on the sidewalks, as real estate shortages allow for no alleys. The Mormon Temple across from the Lincoln Center has fantastic free peanut butter cookies, if you sit through one of their thinly veiled brainwashing video tours.
None of these elements of New York, which I find more indicative of the town, are mentioned on the Beastie Boys' To the 5 Boroughs. Instead, Adrock, MCA and Mike D offer obvious demographic and transit information on their "Open Letter to NYC". "Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin/ Black, White, New York/ You make it happen," they croon together on the chorus to the centerpiece of their sixth album. "Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten/ From the Battery to the top of Manhattan," they read like a free hotel map. What, nothing rhymed with Inwood? The song makes fantastic use of a Dead Boys sample (who were from Cleveland), but fumbles the execution with their Up With People chants.
Lyrically, the Beastie Boys fail to make a convincing justification for their hometown pride beyond slogans that could fit on a t-shirt. The answering machine message of Paul's Boutique conveyed more giddy pride in the nuances and uniqueness of the metropolis. In a trademark (or typical, or tired, depending on your perspective) deep pop culture reference, Adrock mentions Gnip Gnop, a 1970s Parker Brothers game that was like a cross of Pong and Hungry Hungry Hippos. "Jmoke Jhop" would have rhymed perfectly. In their attempt to point out the details of their city, the Beastie Boys offer little more than the view from the top of a sawn-off double-decker tour bus.
At this point in time, no measure of analysis regarding cadence, meter or goofy references will sway the pros and cons of the Beastie Boys' lyrics. They do what they do, and even my mother knows their M.O. What To the 5 Boroughs offers, contrary to naysayers who mock aging bands, are three voices showing intriguing texture from wear and experience. MCA sounds like the Harry Nilsson of hip-hop after a lost weekend. Adrock, especially, shows greater range in style. From his leisured easy-speaking on "Crawlspace" to the Eminem-like syllable play on "Hey Fuck You", he puffs his chest with laid-back economy and moves away from the stereotypical nasal whine of their younger days.
Where the true influence of New York exerts itself on To the 5 Boroughs is in the stark rhythms, which filter the cold continental-sampling breaks of rap pioneers like Jimmy Spicer and The Treacherous Three through Apple processors. The streamlined foundations both pay tribute to the crews that influenced the Beastie Boys to put down their Bad Brains and Reagan Youth aspirations and lays a hard digital direction for the Bush Youth to follow.
Unlike all previous Beastie Boys albums (with the possible exception of Licensed to Ill), To The 5 Boroughs sounds homogenous and singular in purpose-- dark, steel, and dirty like that incomplete Times Square station. Ill Communication and Hello Nasty reveled in genre-dipping, from hardcore and salsa to dub and disco. Their decision to settle into a focused hip-hop direction here seems like a sage move. The album succeeds in its seeming spontaneity. "Seeming" in that they possibly spent years making it. But whatever length of gestation, the album's easy air speaks to veteran, nothing-to-lose attitude of both the city and the group.
Still, my interaction with music goes well beyond simple, academic analysis of sound. Nostalgia, emotional context, the continued story and history behind the artist, the packaging, and everything else matters in my love and fascination with music. This is why writing for Pitchfork, which prides itself on discovering unknown underground artists, means so little to me anymore. Listening to music as some form of continued, insular experiment with recording driven by faceless, MP3-based rock bands bores me. I was immediately prepared to love To the 5 Boroughs from my history with the band-- from listening to Ill while playing Atari with Andy Eberhardt, to mowing neighborhood lawns with Gregg Bernstein and Paul's Boutique in a walkman, to holding my portable CD player off the front cushion of my Buick Century to keep Check Your Head from skipping as I passed over the speed bumps in the Marist parking lot every day after my Junior year, to shooting bottle rockets from poster tubes at passing trucks on 400 off the roof of the AMC multiplex I worked at when Ill Communication came out. It is not mentally possibly for me to switch on apathy towards the group.
When all is said and done, I have spun To the 5 Boroughs at least 30 times while working on some of the most rewarding and enjoyable creative work of my life in the past couple weeks, while visiting a city I love, and seeing people I missed. The album has become intrinsically linked to these experiences-- from my movie premiere this week to the surreal tour of the Manhattan Mormon Temple last week. The little number at the top of this piece reflects little of personal relation to the record. It's an arbitrary guide to how I would expect people to gauge the intent of this review. I will listen to this album for years to come. You might. Or not. It depends on your own complex web of past interaction with the Beastie Boys, linked memories to the music, or preconceived notion of how hip or not it is to listen to them in 2004.
Though I would fail to quantify the comparative "quality" of such albums, as I said before, I love Carl & The Passions as much as Pet Sounds. Divorcing the lives and backstory from the recorded product of a musical artist equates to making movies without characters. The sixth Beastie Boys album holds much more intrigue than some young dudes with bedhead thinking they're going to evolve rock and roll. I've ended up listening to it more than any other release this year.
This process has become unexciting and routine, which is why I bid the world of music writing farewell. Explaining why I love a record in the confines of its production, lyrics and instrumental "tightness" without detailing the first time I heard the band's song drifting from bowling alley in Poland or whatever confounds me. More power to those who discover new music from this site. I've figured out where I stand at this point, as have the readers. Like the Beastie Boys, I could continue to crank out divisive pieces of writing here until I go gray. I have more interesting stories to tell.


The UK rock band’s debut is a prime example of what happens when you grow up on Bikini Kill and the Slits.

Dream Wife

The London-based rock band Dream Wife didn’t mean to be taken seriously when they formed. In 2014, guitarist Alice Go, bassist Bella Podpadec, and Iceland-born vocalist Rakel Mjöll started the group as an art project while studying at Brighton University; it was only later that what began with a This Is Spinal Tap-esque documentary evolved into an outlet for, in Podpadec’s words, “meditating on dreaming big and being a woman.” Despite that backstory, the subjects Dream Wife tackle on their self-titled debut—leering catcalls, ageist stereotypes, and what it means to be in control of your identity—are anything but jokes. At its best, Dream Wife is a prime example of what happens when you grow up on Bikini Kill and the Slits. A rebellious fire lights in your stomach, and you try to bite off more misogyny than you can chew just to prove that your teeth are sharp.
This is an album that proudly wears its influences on its sleeve. Along with those clear punk forebears, the band’s members have cited artists like Be Your Own Pet, Sleigh Bells, and Le Tigre, a traceable lineage if you listen closely. But some of the most revealing parallels come from New York City’s early-2000s rock revival. The unhinged shrieks in “Let’s Make Out” and “Hey Heartbreaker” reflect Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ sneering intensity, while Mjöll’s hushed singing voice on “Love Without Reason” channels the other side of Karen O. Countless clean guitar melodies pay homage to the Strokes, particularly on “Kids” and “Fire,” and Podpadec, who played bass for the first time during the band’s college years, steers the songs with the same quiet confidence as Nikolai Fraiture. Dream Wife made a name for themselves by performing intense live shows across Europe; you can hear how they’ve studied their idols’ delivery to translate that sound to the studio.
The most invigorating moments on Dream Wife come when Dream Wife bring personal anecdotes to the fore. On stand-out track “Somebody,” the trio confront rape culture by employing a perspective-shifting dialogue. “You were a cute girl standing backstage/It was bound to happen,” Mjöll sings before flipping to first person: “I took on heaven to find peace/I took on the world to find me again.” The song’s chorus—“I am not my body/I am somebody”—summarizes the double bind of feeling like you’re the sum of your body while simultaneously being stripped of ownership of it. It’s an affirmation they want to loan to listeners.
The counterpart to that narrative is “F.U.U.,” a post-punk tirade where Dream Wife sound eager to rip a person who wronged them to shreds. “I’m gonna fuck you up/Gonna cut you up,” Mjöll yells, hurling the words at a wall. Her voice sounds like it’s going to bleed from screaming itself raw, and Icelandic rapper Fever Dream whips through a laconic guest verse to back her up. It’s a menacing moment of someone deciding she won’t take your shit anymore, and hearing that intense feeling caught on tape recalls the music that put Karen O and Kathleen Hanna on the map years back.
Yet those two songs are outliers on this album. Elsewhere, Dream Wife too often stick to widely-known truths, like not letting age define your character (“Act My Age”) or the thrill of a new kiss (“Taste”). Shove those tame lyrics into the band’s repetitive formula of controlled verses into explosive choruses, and the effect can be dull. If their debut fails to offer a consistent, forceful message the way their riot grrrl heroes once did, they have at least figured out how to capture some of those predecessors’ energy. For now, Dream Wife leaves you revved up and ready to go with nowhere suggested.


Stepping away from his habitual trap beats and claustrophobic atmospheres, the New Orleans producer goes in search of wide-open vistas and melancholy maximalism.

Hate Songs EP

The drive north from New Orleans up to Hammond, La., takes about an hour on the I-55, a lakeside route that offers the optimal listening experience for Hate Songs, according to local driver James Prudhomme. Take the trip for yourself with the help of Google Street View, and the wide-open waterscape of the bayou feels a world away from the Southern city streets that birthed trap, the style most closely associated with Prudhomme’s bass-heavy Suicideyear project. But if the tranquil backdrop seems at odds with his blown-out productions, it nevertheless chimes perfectly with Prudhomme’s melancholy introspection. And seeing as Southern hip-hop has always been optimized for the automobile, with window-rattling subwoofers adding to the 808’s visceral punch, it follows that we’d eventually find this solitary producer enjoying a drive outside the city limits.
The NOLA resident, formerly of Baton Rouge, made his name with two albums of gloomy, trap-derived beats released when he was still a teen. They stood out from the SoundCloud masses thanks to their woozy intensity and grandly baroque melodies, a combination that appealed as much to outsider rappers like Swedish sad boy Yung Lean and “Weird Atlanta” representative Rome Fortune as it did to cerebral electronic producers like Oneohtrix Point Never, whose Software label put out Prudhomme’s 2014 EP Remembrance. In the years since, Prudhomme has toured the U.S. and Europe and found himself absorbing influences—house, grime, and regional club styles—that have nudged his productions further towards the dancefloor. (Helpfully, he has also finally turned 21.)
The Hate Songs EP appears on the Scottish label LuckyMe, home to the trap-EDM chimeras of TNGHT, and Baauer, and the change of scene has injected a fresh energy into his work. These six songs were made between 2014 and 2015, when Prudhomme was relocating from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and finding his feet as a touring artist. Where previous Suicideyear records felt like the handiwork of a bedroom-bound stoner raised on DatPiff and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, on Hate Songs there’s a whiff of fresh air and a sense of widening horizons. “Summer Hate,” one of four tracks named for the seasons, finds his standard-issue, blown-out 808s brightened by tinkling keys, while trap-style hi-hats are smothered in grainy, heavily delayed synths.
“Mosh Mosh (Julie’s Song)” rolls along on clanging bells and a hint of Southern Gothic melodrama until the whole thing falls apart midway through, stuttering to a crawl before a soothing organ melody appears in the mist and the beat evolves into a half-time serenade. On “Flood (Autumn Hate),” written about Hurricane Isaac, a blown-out blast of reedy melody crumbles over trap drums, sounding like one of William Basinski’s disintegration loops. Prudhomme understands how to squeeze that little extra drop of emotion from familiar elements; back on the Street View cruise up I-55, clicking my way along a highway built on concrete stilts, his melancholy maximalism offers a different perspective of the view, just as the water below reflects the open sky.
Much of the EP deals in these satisfying twists on a tried-and-tested concept, but the most impressive track is also the most daring. “Spent Days Watching Horses Die” is a violent, monstrous hybrid—blown-to-bits bass overlaid with shredded, piercing synths that connect the tacky euphoria of trance with the vicious club mechanics of Kamixlo or Amnesia Scanner—while the crackly 2-step drums underfoot acknowledge Prudhomme’s newfound UK influences. It’s here at the edge of the familiar, in the greyish territory where new mutations both stimulate and irritate, where Prudhomme’s vision feels most vital. Hate Songs sounds like a set of markers on his route out of town and away from a sound he’s done much to develop, perfect, and effectively complete; there are strong signs this will be a journey worth following.


Will Oldham's new EP suggests that his formidable catalog may be weighing heavily on him. Although it's hard to parse the intention behind Now Here's My Plan, less than reverential takes on Oldham classics would seem to suggest as much.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Now Here's My Plan EP

Now Here's My Plan EP

Will Oldham may go by many different names and, in doing so, affect a wary distance from his audiences as if perpetually squaring off against his listener, but the man knows himself. He may be the most self-possessed artist working today, shifting and feinting and dodging to his own rhythm, his own sensibility. It may not always be apparent to outsiders or even to fans; in fact, his 20-year career is peppered with question marks and odd course changes, suggesting an aloofness that can be as fascinating as it is alienating. What is apparent, however, is that it all makes sense to him, such that even his most obscure asides carry the force of self-determination.
His latest headscratcher is an EP-- as Bonnie "Prince" Billy-- of new takes on old songs, titled Now Here's My Plan, presumably borrowed from this Shel Silverstein book. Perhaps the book's subtitle-- "A Book of Futilities"-- says more than the title itself: The weight of Oldham's catalog may be weighing on him, an inescapable burden that even this most mercurial artist cannot shake. Rather than crumple under so many songs, Oldham finds opportunity by redefining them, as he has done in the past. In 2004, a scant five years after introducing his Bonnie "Prince" Billy moniker, Oldham reassessed his back catalog on Bonnie "Prince" Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, on which he reconfigured some of his earliest material in a self-consciously C&W style. Perhaps it was a sly parody of the greatest hits package that often seems obligatory once artists notch a certain number of releases. Or perhaps he was just bored.
If there's any sort of parodic sensibility guiding Now Here's My Plan, Oldham's playing it awfully close to the chest. Backed by his tour band, he circles through six old cuts ranging from 1999 through 2009, offering new arrangements and in some cases dramatically different interpretations. The band is good, road-tested, and sympathetic to Oldham's most harebrained schemes. Emmett Kelly's guitar functions like a good movie score: It sets a tone while never intruding on the action, and while it might not always foreground the songs, he's always doing something intriguing. And Angel Olsen may be his best duet partner, with that seen-it-all break in her voice. The musicians-- including Ben Boye, Van Campbell, and Danny Kiely-- have variously appeared on recent Bonnie "Prince" Billy albums, including Wolfroy Goes to Town and Beware.
The band is so prominent on the EP that it takes on the feel of a tour souvenir, suggesting new arrangements worked out onstage. As such, despite the gravity of Oldham's lyrics and the solemnity of these performances, it sounds less weighty than their previous efforts. Few have written about the desperation that attends love and sex and companionship as evocatively as Oldham has done, so songs like "Beast for Thee" and "No Gold Digger" are welcome exhumations and strong showcases for Oldham's singing. Over the years his voice has grown a bit mushier with age, exhibiting a soft grain evocative of time and wear. He sounds more human, which lends this droning version of "Three Questions" in particular a directness not necessarily present in the original.
It's one thing to reset deep album cuts, another thing entirely to manhandle your biggest hit-- if "hit" can describe any Will Oldham song. "I See a Darkness" is most certainly his most well-known song: Not only does it anchor his best album, but it's also the one upon which Johnny Cash bestowed the status of modern country standard. On the new version, drummer Van Campbell quickens the pulse of the song with an insistent kickdrum tattoo, and Oldham's performance is spirited but less solemn. It's less an intimation of evil or tragedy and more like a reminder: "Guys, I completely forgot to mention-- I see a darkness, yonder!"
Essentially, Oldham has taken his weightiest song and rendered it inconsequential. It's neither a piss-take nor a stunt, but it does turn a career highlight into another deep cut. His brazen attitude toward his back catalog, which would be so easy to revere, is commendable, even refreshing. Whether Now Here's My Plan succeeds in its obscure goal is almost beside the point. Whether you'll listen to it more than once is another matter entirely.


On their third album, the Spanish garage rockers swing for the fences with a big, arena-friendly new sound.

The Prettiest Curse

The Spanish garage-rock group Hinds built their first two albums on girl-group harmonies and tight melodic songcraft recalling the Strokes or Black Lips. So what did Carlotta Cosials, one of the band’s frontwomen, mean when she recently told NME, “We’d been afraid of pop music for a lot of years”? Maybe she was thinking of drum machines and synthesizers, Diplo and David Guetta. Whatever the case, the trappings of lo-fi garage rock haven’t done much to disguise her band’s own popular appeal.
Now, though, Hinds are claiming to have shed their fear, and the band is billing its third album, The Prettiest Curse, as a turn to pop. What that means in practice is an expanded arsenal of instruments and a reduced sense of musical identity. The Prettiest Curse is glossier than 2018’s I Don’t Run, higher-fidelity in places, and sprinkled with synthesizers. At its best, the album is able to build on Hinds’ previous approach. But it’s less consistent than their last two albums, and fans may not be able to shake the feeling that an extraordinarily efficient machine has been upgraded for a slicker model that doesn’t work all that much better.
First single “Riding Solo” signals the band’s new ambitions with an arena-sized drum pound and a whistling synth. The chorus takes the band’s usual singalong and multiplies the backing vocals to give it the feeling of a live performance—or at least an ’80s-style hair-metal concert video. It’s hugely catchy and successful, and it sounds bigger than anything the band’s done before.
The issues with the album spring not so much from what’s missing as from what’s present—the songs are just too busy. The band worked with the producer Jenn Decilveo (Albert Hammond Jr., Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan) and whether it was her decision or someone else’s, the mixes here are more cluttered than they need to be. On “Waiting for You,” which turns what might be a complaint about a flaky boyfriend into a call for solidarity, that amplifying effect on the backing vocals shows up again, and this time it disguises the chemistry between Cosials and co-frontwoman Ana Perrote, whose back-and-forth vocals are the best thing the band has going.
Still, there’s plenty of worthwhile material here. “Boy” is as raucous, obstinate and fun as anything Hinds has released. It provides an ideal synthesis of the “rock” Hinds and the “pop” Hinds, and while your reaction depends on how you feel about shoutalong choruses and arena-friendly pop-punk, coming from this band it certainly sounds fresh.
The Spanish lyrics are another welcome development, which show up for the first time in their music, starting with the thumping, neon opener “Good Bad Times.” There’s something encouraging about the presence of the band’s native language. Whereas the traditional “turn to pop” often feels forced, as if demanded by an out-of-touch record label exec, the Spanish here speaks to their growing comfort in trying new things. They may have slightly diluted their sound this time around, but at least they’re struggling on their own terms. The highlights suggest there is an arena-friendly Hinds out there, still waiting to emerge in full.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson's reimagining of the famous symphony by the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki comes close to something by Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Colin Stetson: Sorrow - A Reimagining of Gorecki's 3rd Symphony

The story of Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 (often called "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs") is one of a runaway success nobody, even its composer, understood. Why did a 1992 recording of a work written 16 years earlier by a previously unknown Polish composer suddenly sell a million copies? Other modern Polish composers’ works weren’t exactly leaping off shelves. No one knew why, but critics, who by and large weren’t fans, offered theories; the piece was the lucky beneficiary of the early compact-disc boom, for instance. It was bathetic music, pandering to the worst and easiest film-score ideas that the general populace had about orchestral music. It sounded good at dinner parties. It was, in other words, a fluke, a misfire in the central nervous system of the collective unconscious.
As the years have accumulated, and the piece has maintained its grip on the public imagination, generating tributes and new recordings and finding use in multiple films, a simpler explanation gently suggests itself: this piece pierced something in us, gave us something we decided we needed badly. The timing of it will always be mysterious, but the basic fact seems plain: Music listeners have decided we need Gorecki’s piece, and we have made a permanent place for it in our lives. It has also, famously, saved some lives—in an NPR interview from 1995, Gorecki read aloud a letter from a 14-year-old girl, a burn victim, who told Gorecki that the music was the only thing keeping her alive.
It’s a simple piece, at least in a harmonic sense. Works in this vein, in which songful lines move slowly against each other (Barber's Adagio for Strings comes to mind), tend to require a brisk interpretive hand—all the pathos the music needs is in the notes, and to wring any extra juice from them is to watch the whole thing curdle. What is most surprising about avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson’s Sorrow - A Reimagining of Gorecki's 3rd Symphony is how fully it embraces the music’s inherent sweep. Stetson’s often known for bracing music, and his fans might have expected him to cut this big souffle with quinine. But from the first movement’s opening canon, with Stetson blowing long, low notes mimicking the orchestra’s double basses, it’s pretty obvious: Whatever this piece has meant to decades of listeners, it has meant something similar to Stetson. He clearly loves it, and his recreation is nothing it not a personal act of love.
He’s assembled a small force of about twelve musicians here, including violinist Sarah Neufeld, with whom he recorded last year’s Never Were the Way She Was. Stetson arranged and produced the recording himself, playing multiple instruments, and the soprano lament is sung by his sister, Megan. Greg Fox, the virtuoso drummer behind Liturgy and Guardian Alien, fills the background with splashes of cymbal color and produces a steady thrum of double kicks. Two guitarists play high, insistent tremolos, and as the first movement reaches its peak, I was startled to realize how similar this version sounded to something by a post-rock band like Explosions or Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Gorecki’s symphony, with its deliberately simple and clear framework and soaring themes, has a lot of the same emotional appeal as those bands. But Stetson’s arrangements give that correlation a meaningful nudge, and suddenly Gorecki’s work feel less like a distant cousin to post-rock and more like a direct blueprint. This is instrumental music that embraces its undying capacity for uplift, that shakes off distinctions between bathos and pathos, between mawkish and grave, as it blasts upward. The best moments in Godspeed and Explosions songs go for the emotional jugular without caring if you squawk in protest, and so it is with Gorecki's Third Symphony.
Gorecki was no sentimentalist by nature. His earlier works were mostly in the serial and twelve tone-based tradition, and they haven't exactly been embraced by a fanatical general populace. But in the folk-song laments that inspired his Third Symphony, he found something that touched his heart, and he trusted it. In his work, Stetson and his collaborators have found something similar, and they trust him, too.


The influential hip-hop producer's debut album, 32 Levels, has two distinct sides: a uniformly strong rap side and a pop side that’s not nearly as engaging or distinctive.

32 Levels

“The mind is so complex when you’re based/32 levels/Welcome to my world,” Lil B ad-libbed on “I’m God.” Upon it’s release in 2009, “I’m God” was largely received as an internet curio, its submerged Imogen Heap sample, unhurried beat and Lil B’s impressionistic, stream of consciousness rapping cutting a contrast against the crisper sounds of rap’s mainstream. Seven years later, the Clams Casino-produced track sounds more like a blueprint for modern rap production rather than an outlier. It’s hard to imagine the aesthetics of artists like A$AP Rocky, Vince Staples, and the Weeknd without the New Jersey producer’s murky, atmospheric beats, which made a beeline toward rap’s center following the release of “I’m God.” Following years of high-profile production work and a series of three well-regarded beat tapes, Clams has unveiled his debut album, 32 Levels, on which he stakes a claim to his now much-imitated sound.
32 Levels has very distinct A and B-sides, which split cleanly among the album’s 12 tracks. The A-side consists of six satisfying rap songs, each of which leverage different facets of Clams’ sound. Essentially, the first half of the record feels like a Lil B/Clams Casino album: the BasedGod graces four of these six tracks and the album opens with his signature “yessssss” ad lib. Clams Casino and Lil B were instrumental in each others’ rise, and these songs serve as a reminder that both artists still do their best work together. Here Lil B gets to test-drive the latest generation of Clams Casino beats: tracks that are more structurally robust if just as foggy on the surface. Lil B rises to the occasion, showing up in a way we don’t often get to hear. He tightens up his improvisational style to suit the mood, while staying loose enough to sink into the open spaces where Clams’ instrumentals exhale.
Like Clams, Lil B has exerted an outsized influence on his peers, and “Be Somebody” feels like an acknowledgement of that fact. Here, the far-more-famous A$AP Rocky shares space with Lil B over a lurching instrumental constructed from chopped-up vocal fragments, explosion sound effects, and breathy synths. “Witness,” meanwhile, is a darker, more-muscular update to “I’m God”; the song finds Lil B wandering through a funhouse of warped tones, slipping on his hardened, street persona for the occasion. Rounding out the A side are the instrumental “Skull”—a pan flute and piano-heavy slice of Temple of Doom trap—as well as the Vince Staples-featuring “All Nite.” While its creation pre-dates Summertime ’06, “All Nite” suits that album’s swampy, claustrophobic sound even better than the two Clams beats that made the cut. Here Clams crafts a foreboding sonic canopy—echoing bird chirps, hollow synths, a menacing low-end that bubbles up from below the track—while Staples delivers a string of threats with characteristically breathless abandon, looking beyond Long Beach with lines like, “My people ready for war.” It’s no wonder the pair continued working together, given that “All Nite" stands among the best songs of either artists' career.
While 32 Levels' A side is consistently stacked, side B is more of a mixed bag. Here, Clams shifts his focus to pop and R&B, inviting in a cast of guest vocalists to help push in a brighter, more radio-friendly direction. “Thanks to You,” featuring Sam Dew, is one of the more successful songs on the latter half: all gated synths and aqueous tones, it almost sounds like an outtake from Caribou’s Swim. “Back to You” is another highlight, a melancholy pop number that’s haunted by echo-laden shamisen plucks and spectral vocals. These songs are certainly serviceable, though not nearly as ambitious as the expansive tracks Clams produced for FKA twigs and the Weeknd, both of which drew from the same gloomy palette as his rap work.
Elsewhere on side B, the producer strays even further from his strengths. “Into the Fire,” a collaboration with Mikky Ekko, dispenses with the airy sonics of the pair’s previous collaborations in favor of a generic, synth-heavy pop sound. Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring brings his gravelly baritone to “Ghost In A Kiss,” which feels a bit like Tom Waits singing over a skittering trap beat—not exactly the most harmonious pairing. Clams chooses to ride out on a high note with the instrumental “Blast,” a vocal sample-driven track that would have felt at home on any of his beat tapes and which rappers will be itching to jump on.
If 32 Levels makes one thing clear, it’s how much Clams Casino has grown as a producer and songwriter since his early days as a bedroom hobbyist. The biggest question that he now faces is what distinguishes him as an artist—not just from the "cloud rap” beatmakers who followed in his footsteps, but from big-name producers like Noah “40” Shebib and Metro Boomin who mine similar terrain. On 32 Levels, Clams approaches the question from two different angles. On the A side, we hear him staying in his lane and refining his craft, cutting back on samples in favor of instrumental recordings, denser arrangements and tighter compositions. On the B side, Clams looks beyond his comfort zone, pushing toward mainstream pop with mixed results. Versatility, it turns out, may not be Clams’ strong suit, though that’s hardly a problem; as the first half of 32 Levels demonstrates, there’s still plenty of room left for Clams Casino to grow into his own sound.


Embracing cosmic empathy and some welcome collaborations, the Nashville songwriter’s fourth album bursts with easy confidence and kind, stoic wisdom.

Strays

Chris Martin claims that taking mushrooms taught him about the meaning of the universe; Harry Styles’ psilocybin track is a dull vibe piece about a woman who “lives in daydreams with me.” Celebrated Nashville striver Margo Price, thankfully, is keeping the burgeoning microgenre of songwriters on hallucinogenic detours at least a little zany. She and her husband and collaborator, Jeremy Ivey, went on an extended mushroom trip to write much of her fourth album, Strays, and less than three minutes in, she’s screaming: “Do you ever walk down the street and do you think to yourself… Am I being watched, man!?”
Price is no stranger to mythmaking: Only one of her albums has touched the upper half of the Billboard 200, and she’s already published her first memoir. But as that delightfully paranoid line on “Been to the Mountain” suggests, she’s not particularly prone to American dream fantasia. Although it may be a mushrooms record, Strays is less about stopping to look at the rainbows than finding a cosmic sense of empathy. Where Price once actively wrestled with her past and the fraught political landscape around her, she now assumes the role of wise, weary passerby, watching the wreckage of the world from afar as she keeps on cruising.
In the place of protest songs or personal exorcisms, Strays bursts with easy confidence and kind, stoic pearls of wisdom. “Though the picture’s always changing/You can’t change how the story goes,” she sings on “Landfill,” as she contemplates the regrets and false starts of her life. The lyric offers something like a mission statement for Strays. Price quit drinking between records and she’s said that she’s “feeling [her] emotions more deeply” than before. True to that process, this album mostly eschews personal specifics in favor of songs that try to capture the openness and freedom of forging forward sans baggage.
After 2020’s That’s How Rumors Get Started buried her idiosyncrasies under manicured production that felt overly reverential to ’70s classic rock, Price and producer Jonathan Wilson work to open up her sound. Here, she brings in collaborators slightly outside her wheelhouse (Sharon Van Etten) and others very much within (indie-pop duo Lucius, the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell), nodding to both the loose unspooling of psych rock and the clean minimalism of synth pop. “Radio,” a collaboration with Van Etten, begins with little more than a minimalist drum pattern before bursting into a sweeping, Springsteenish road anthem that could be a sequel to Van Etten’s own “Mistakes”: “People try to push me around/Change my face and change my sound,” Price sings. “But I can’t hear them, I tuned them out.”
A song later, on “Change of Heart,” she contends with her own checkered, well-documented history over an incessant, rollicking blues riff, singing, “I quit trying to change the past/I had a change of heart.” Price’s backstory has been welded to her music since the beginning—her debut album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, was basically bildungsroman in the form of wrenching country-folk—and on these songs, she sings about letting go.
As opposed to the tightly laced, high-shine Rumors, Strays feels warm and permeable, and small moments—like the drum machine on “Radio,” or the xylophone that wanders through “Time Machine”—remove the feeling that Price is recreating for recreation’s sake. She still has her pet musical fixations, and they sometimes feel a little familiar, even within the context of her own catalog: On “County Road” she slips into a chugging, wistful groove that evokes Fleetwood Mac, and the Lucius collaboration “Anytime You Call” splits the difference between her beloved Tom Petty and the soul influences of her past two albums.
That’s not to say Strays doesn’t find new territory for Price as a songwriter. On “County Road,” she sings to someone who died in a car crash. But the lives of both narrator and subject are watery and dreamlike; most of their shared memories are flashes of “listening to Warren Zevon” and playing dice. Across the track, Price writes twinned narratives of one life cut short and another stuck in a loop of the same roads, the same bars, and the same drinks. It’s one of two character studies on the album; the other, “Lydia,” is a grizzled and grueling ballad about a woman seeking an abortion, unable to raise a baby without health insurance. “Just make a decision, Lydia,” Price sings, her voice raw and papery, a sobering contrast to the rest of Strays. These two highlights typify Price’s new outlook: While she’s writing less about the details of her own experience, her music still speaks to life’s murky specifics.


Madonna, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and a bizarre remix of the Who are all part of a soundtrack that speaks to the usual critiques of the frothy, summertime sci-fi tale.

Various Artists: Stranger Things: Soundtrack From the Netflix Original Series, Season 3

Late in the third season of “Stranger Things,” two minor characters attend a Fourth of July fair. One of them, an American, tells the other that all the games are rigged, a way for the rich to line their pockets. His companion decides to try his luck anyway. With a crowd watching, he wins the grand prize in a dart throwing competition. See, the game wasn’t rigged after all! Then, he’s shot in the abdomen.
It’s a confused parable that speaks to the Duffer Brothers’ usual sledgehammer-approach to symbolism. Like their viewers, the show's creators are keen to celebrate an America they know isn’t real, and never was. Every so often, it behooves them to pretend they’re jaded. The soundtrack to this season, too, plants itself firmly between veneration and cynicism, allowing the show to celebrate the blockbuster era of Spielberg, Hughes, and Heckerling while winking at their viewers: We know you’ve seen this before.
The opening song here is a remix of the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” from Confidential Music, a Los Angeles based duo that churns out music for movie trailers. (The mix appeared in the preview for this season). It’s a chop-job, Pete Townshend’s strained teenage angst cut with the show’s signature synthesizers and molded into a conventional trailer score with a climax big enough to push you straight into an all-night binge. Americana, but a little uneasy. Get it?
Other music choices echo the half-steppin’ the show is fond of. There’s something charming about the obviousness of “Material Girl” as the backdrop to a mall montage early in the season in which Millie Bobbie Brown and Sadie Sink bond through shopping and the male teens of the cast bond through fear of women’s sexuality. It’s a perfect fit: the Madonna song is another undeniable piece of pop art that implies a critique without exactly getting there.
Another scene from the same episode finds “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “My Bologna,” which came out in 1979, standing in for actual character development. The boys’ science teacher has played a purely instrumental role; he’s Velma, but he never gets to tag along in the Mystery Machine. Because he’s a depthless weirdo, he does random science stuff while listening to “Weird Al” in the background (instead of the Knack’s original.) In a scene featuring Joe Keery (Steve) or Dacre Montgomery (Billy), the Knack would otherwise fit in perfectly well with other classic rock chestnuts like Foreigner's “Cold As Ice,” John Mellencamp’s “R.O.C.K. In the U.S.A.” and REO Speedwagon “Can’t Fight This Feeling.”
It’s a tell that the best episodes from this season—four, five and six—lean less on radio hits of the ’80s and more on the assured work of Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of S U R V I V E, who have conveyed the mood of the show since the beginning. The two pop songs from these episodes are some of the best on the album: The Pointer Sisters classic “Neutron Dance,” which of course has memorably showed up onscreen before and Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” the old-timey camp artificiality of which is perfectly suited to one of the show’s patented cliffhangers.
There are great musical moments in this season that didn’t appear on this soundtrack. Yello, the Swiss duo who found their way into Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, have a cameo in the finale in the form of their great “Goldrush II.” That doesn’t make the cut. Neither does any of Dixon and Stein’s typically excellent synth work, which has previously been featured on the show’s official “soundtracks.” (This time it appears on a separate score.) The Danny Elfman and Philip Glass compositions that lend drama to the show are also absent. These missing tracks make this soundtrack less substantive than the show, which, despite its familiar plot points, distinguishes itself through smart pacing, nice action set pieces, strong performances from most of its core cast, and yes, its instrumental score.
It’s a shame that a shallow collection of songs like this exposes the otherwise moving and enjoyable “Stranger Things” to the most obvious critiques. This soundtrack makes it clear what we’re all doing when we indulge in this cutting-edge summer escapism. I can’t even pretend to be thinking too hard when I watch this lightly remixed tale of good and evil where the evil isn’t all that threatening. Sure, things are bad, a monster lurks, and an army of people has been possessed by an inexplicable and evil energy. But the good guys will win. They always do. Right? Right?

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)