Chelsea Faith Dolan perished in Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire in 2016; this EP of left-field dance music made with her 100% Silk labelmate Maria Minerva is a moving testament to her talents and legacy.

Cherushii / Maria Minerva: Cherushii & Maria Minerva

Cherushii & Maria Minerva

In 2013, the Estonian songwriter and producer Maria Minerva (née Juur) toured the U.S. with Chelsea Faith Dolan, aka Cherushii. Both were signed to DIY dance imprint 100% Silk; label co-founder Britt Brown had set them up on a cross-country “blind date” of sorts, knowing that Dolan had a car and suspecting that the two might get along. Sure enough, the experience of spending hours together on the road between San Diego and Chicago, sleeping on air mattresses in strangers’ homes and reveling in each other’s dazzling live performances, night after sparsely attended night, brought them closer together.
But their artistic partnership was barely realized before Cherushii perished in the 2016 Ghost Ship fire, a three-alarm blaze that ripped through an Oakland warehouse and claimed 36 lives. Following her friend’s death, Minerva became a steward of her legacy, taking responsibility for posting on her Facebook page (along with Dolan’s sister and audiovisual artist David Last) and penning a thoughtful tribute that doubled as an introduction to Cherushii’s life and music. She also shepherded to completion six tracks that the two of them recorded and mixed with help from West Coast audio wizards Last, Adam Gunther, and Brian Foote, another 100% Silk labelmate.
Long after the initial rush of fundraisers and compilations to commemorate the dead and rebuild the community, the tragedy’s ache still lingers. “When the madness dissipates and you’re just left with the sad reality of what happened,” Minerva said in a recent interview. Cherushii & Maria Minerva is a testament to Dolan’s vibrant spirit and formidable talent, providing a glimpse of sunlight—and what would likely have been a fruitful collaborative relationship—through the residual smog of grief and loss. Most of the lyrics seem to be directed towards a male partner (perhaps the previous owner of the “Boyfriend Shirt” in one of the tracks) but post-Ghost Ship it’s not a huge stretch to read subtler, heavier meanings into some of them. Album centerpiece “This Must Be the Place” drifts along in a state of Friday-night ennui before the eerily prescient line “Greater than the fear of unexpected violence is the fear of everlasting silence” lands like a punch to the gut.
The EP’s robust basslines and glittering melodies are good foils for Minerva’s vocal stylings, a cross between Blossom Dearie, Brigitte Bardot, and the Estonian pop singers she grew up listening to. Despite the mournful connotations of the title, “A Day Without You” sets a bright tone as Cherushii buoys Minerva’s featherweight (and at times ever so slightly off-key) croon with cowbells, bongos, and a brisk beat. A strong showing from both musicians, “Out by Myself” is a strobing peak-time ode to hitting the club alone. Cherushii & Maria Minerva also repurposes a couple of tracks from previous Cherushii releases that fit in easily with their more recent counterparts: “Thin Line” is a Balearic-tinged highlight from 2015’s ambient dreamscape Memory of Water, while “Nobody’s Fool (Vocal Version)” originally appeared as an instrumental on a three-tracker of the same name, also in 2015. Each artist consistently brought out the best in the other over the years, and the process of listening to these tracks leaves behind a sense of longing for the full-length Minerva has said they were planning to work on next.
Foote’s haunting edit of “A Day Without You,” under his Leech alias, closes Cherushii & Maria Minerva on a sobering note: the comedown for a party that never should have ended the way that it did. Like most dubs, the track is built around absence, and Cherushii’s departure from this world can be felt the strongest here. It’s a reminder that she will be remembered not just by the music she made, but by the impressions she left on everyone around her.


For a band that built its name on ripping up the rule book, what do Public Image Ltd. sound like 20 years since their last album, and over 30 since their first?

This Is PiL

It's almost as if history is repeating itself: a royal jubilee, a limply received Sex Pistols reunion, and now John Lydon has gone and reunited his post-Pistols band Public Image Ltd. PiL (as they're now known in abbreviated form) are best known for pioneering the post-punk sound with their meandering, dub-influenced music that seemed to creak and creep rather than bang out conventional riff-rock; but for all their supposed influence, how many classic albums of theirs could you name? I'd wager three: First Issue, Metal Box, and The Flowers of Romance, but only Metal Box is an airtight case for canonization. Following that strong three-album run, the band embarked on a turbulent course marked by slipshod albums and regrettable production choices, epitomizing themselves as a sort of tragic case of potential gone unfulfilled. But for a band that built its name on ripping up the rule book, what do Public Image Ltd. sound like 20 years since their last album, and over 30 since their first?
It's hard to decide if This Is PiL is a surprise or merely par for the course. Surprising, because it's not terrible-- it's arguably the band's best effort since 1984's maligned but salvageable This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get, and is slightly marred by similar issues of production and questionable songwriting. Which makes it exactly what we should have expected, right? Mixed in with the self-conscious imageering, down to the album title and opening track, which determinedly declares "This! Is! PiL!" over sluggish backing, it's also hard to tell whether or not they're taking the piss-- as on 1985's marketing send-up Album-- or if Lydon is ill-advisedly trying to re-establish himself. Either way, once that intro is out of the way, his band suddenly sounds hungry, alive, and passionate.
There's a lot of fury on This Is PiL, though some of it rings hollow; "The Room I Am In" takes ham-fisted potshots at UK council housing but comes off confused and rambling, with one of Lydon's more ridiculous vocal performances. Meanwhile, the venom on "Fool" seems general and misdirected, and "It Said That" is an incomprehensible mess. All that aside, the album's opening run is enough to remind you what you might have loved about the band in the past. "One Drop" and "Deeper Water" both feature sterling performances from Lydon, and it's eerie how his voice appears to have escaped the ravages of time. He's as shrill and as powerfully bleating as ever. His lyrics are still nothing to write home about, but they sound formidable all the same delivered in that familiar, angry froth of saliva and bile, all harsh stutters and long, drawn-out notes.
After that clunky start, the rest of the band sounds impressively together given that Lydon is the only founding member present, knocking out Joy Division-dark fretwork on "Deeper Water" and taut, squiggly funk on "Human". Part of that rigorousness comes with the no-frills production, which leaves the band in a clean antiseptic room, trading personality or idiosyncrasy for pure functionality. There's no Jah Wobble here, nor even a Keith Levene-- the band works as a faceless vehicle for the songs, so when the writing falters, the whole thing collapses (the annoying "Lollipop Opera"). Otherwise it's the sound of a particularly competent rock band with a deranged singer, replacing the strung-out, mentally damaged echo chambers of yore with mechanical grooves.
This Is PiL's final two songs hint at the experimental dubby glory of the band's heyday, particularly the nine-minute closer "Out of the Woods", which approximates' Metal Box's uneasy stagger for the only truly menacing, challenging moment on This Is PiL. It's an album that doesn't add anything to a cult legend band's legacy, but it does the unexpected duty of salvaging that legacy, showing a savvy mastermind in John Lydon, who's apparently capable of at least mimicking old glories. It would have been a shame if the band's swan song was left as That What Is Not, released 20 years ago now. This Is PiL isn't a magical solution per se, but for now, it'll do-- a reminder of the band's former genius and a treat for longtime fans who should appreciate at least half the album as solid PiL work. Historical importance aside, they're a band built on unreliability and inconsistency, and This Is PiL maintains that reputation.


With their entry in the long-running mix series Late Night Tales, the Canadian band BADBADNOTGOOD offer an eclectic, uncompromising, and delightful “soundtrack for reflection and meditation.”

Late Night Tales

Since 2001, the Late Night Tales mix series has been producing turn-down compilations for night owls. Artists from across the spectrum are commissioned to create their ultimate after hours listening experience, and they’re given license to decide just what that means for themselves. There are as many ways to spend a night as there are to soundtrack one, and each host is tasked with bringing the sound of nighttime to life. Jamiroquai, Four Tet, the Flaming Lips, Arctic Monkeys, MGMT, Röyksopp, and Nils Frahm are just a handful of the artists who have assembled these mixes.
In an era of playlists, where any novice with a Spotify account can curate their own mix (or have algorithms and “experts” curate one for them), there’s reason to wonder if mixes like Late Night Tales are still necessary, and how long they’ll survive. But there’s a reason Late Night Tales has managed to hold out this long: The care with which its subjects assemble their selections, along with the rarities and exclusives they share. The mixes have often included covers by the hosts and original spoken word pieces. Ólafur Arnalds turned Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” into a sleepy, sad-eyed plea. Groove Armada interpreted “Fly Me to the Moon” by warping the Sinatra standard into a deconstructed transmission from outer space. Benedict Cumberbatch told a literal late night tale across two installments in the series. A mix is only limited by the curator’s imagination, and the hosts are music-obsessives, auteurs, and visionaries. In turn, Late Night Tales presents resourceful artists with an opportunity to really say something about themselves.
Canadian band BADBADNOTGOOD are quite resourceful—they got their break transposing rap songs by Gucci Mane and Odd Future into jazz—so it makes sense that their Late Night Tales entry is eclectic and uncompromising, yet delightful. They selected songs for their mix based on the music they've interacted with while touring the globe, whether introduced to them by collectors on the road or made by one of their friends. They’ve called the mix a “soundtrack for reflection and meditation,” designed to soothe and stimulate.
Most entries into the Late Night Tales series are geared for an evening come-down or as a guide through a sleepless dawn, a lullaby cutting into the silence of night. But the idea here is that there are many directions a late night can take someone—out somewhere to share quality time with close friends, crammed into a cabin on a red-eye, into the warm and familiar embrace of a lover, deep into the recesses of one’s own mind—and BBNG are simply looking to facilitate the process (a mix for “a quiet night by yourself or with friends,” as they put it). Their mix is intimate and pacifying; their tranquil cover of Andy Shauf’s “To You” feels like a personal dedication.
BBNG’s Late Night Tales certainly unwinds as it goes on, getting more and more hushed with each passing moment, but it never settles into any single sonic space, constantly shifting and advancing. The mix’s middle section, which blends disco, bassy funk, and contemporary R&B, builds leisurely to the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)” and Donnie & Joe Emerson’s softly cooing “Baby.” Songs across genres and generations all find their place, contributing to the whole. Young Canadian R&B crooners River Tiber and Charlotte Day Wilson fit in snugly with the American R&B old guard, Grady Tate and Esther Phillips. This is a mix filled with treasures that never loses sight of its primary objective: to enable a low-key vibe.
Mixes are about music discovery; since the days of cassette tapes, people have carefully crafted comps for friends and sweethearts hoping to share new sounds, often sending profound and personal messages with their choices. On some level, BBNG understand that layer of connectivity with this audience. Their Late Night Tales entry is packed with little surprises and new discoveries, relics of American soul and obscure funk and jazz artifacts from France and Cameroon. The mix slowly unwraps oddity after oddity: Ghanaian disco, groovy, keyboard-driven Ethiopian electronica, a feathery Estonian take on Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin Love,” Erasmo Carlos’ música popular brasileira. These are gems you might not find anywhere, much less together. The sincerity can be felt in each pick; BADBADNOTGOOD introduce the sounds and musicians that have brought them solace with hopes that listeners might find the same comfort and inspiration that they have.


Following his release from jail, the Michigan rapper expands the aperture of his street tales with cinematic storytelling and post-prison clarity.

Only Built 4 Diamond Links

Michigan rapper Peezy first caught ears as a solo artist in 2014 with Mud Muzik, the first in a series of lean-inspired albums showcasing his villainous wit and natural gift for storytelling. But in 2019, that momentum was halted when he was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison on racketeering charges. Since his release in February 2021, Peezy’s life has looked different; he says he’s given up opiates and crime in lieu of running his own independent label, #Boyz Entertainment. His latest offering, the 21-song ONLY BUILT 4 DIAMOND LINKS, shows a veteran artist doubling down on the persona he’s cultivated since his early days, expanding the aperture of his street tales with post-prison clarity.
On “Hustler Vs. Scammer,” Peezy fondly remembers what it was like to be 17 with his own trap house, making fast money and having casual sex, as he recalls minute details like the precise amounts of cocaine he used to buy or the brand of soda he mixed with codeine cough syrup to avoid withdrawls. But treachery was never far. “Bro stabbed me in the back, felt like it was Jason/I’ve endured so much pain, I can hardly take it,” Peezy says over gloomy, piano-driven production that builds in intensity with his rapping. Even while telling war stories, he stays grounded, reminding the listener that he’s happily married now and no longer living in squalor. That song’s title comments on the widening gap between the Detroit where Peezy spent 11 years building a music career and the more recent wave of Michigan scam rappers like BabyTron and Teejayx6. Peezy wisely avoids trend-chasing adaptation by doubling down on the rambling flow that’s more stylistically similar to current L.A. street rap like BlueBucksClan or Ralfy the Plug.
Peezy’s storytelling has only grown more cinematic since transitioning into a full-time rapper and label boss. There’s a newfound sentimentality to his perspective that reflects his understanding of how precarious this new life is. The soulful “Married to Da Game” and the boastful “Murder 4 Hire” are straight bars, with Peezy doling out life advice like a boss who’s annoyed about having to explain how things work again. The effortless cool of “Cruise” and the darkly humorous “Don’t Call Me Twin” reflect the irreverent fun of Rio Da Yung OG and RMC Mike, who Peezy once mentored; while the two rising artists from neighboring Flint, Michigan don’t appear on the album, their influence can be found in Peezy’s deadpan taunts and quick-witted humor. No song better distills Peezy's new outlook than the Mozzy-assisted “Can’t Explain,” where Peezy raps, “It don’t make no sense to have them M’s and still be in the trap/It don’t make sense to make it out and keep on coming back.” The beat is softer and more melodic than we’re used to hearing from Peezy, reflecting a slight dissolution of the no-frills, cutthroat attitude of earlier records.
While Peezy’s past few solo records have felt more like mixtapes, DIAMOND LINKS somewhat clumsily takes album form through varied production clearly aimed at pleasing more than just fans of piano-heavy, regional Detroit rap. On “Shopping Spree,” Peezy joins the wave of rappers remaking 2000s hits, hopping on a flip of Twista’s X-rated 2009 song “Wetter.” In the past, Peezy’s crude sexual innuendos functioned as absurdist humor, but here, lyrics like “I want some head/I’m trying to bust all in your new braces” feel tactless in the context of a love song. Similarly, “Wedding Ring” is ostensibly about a marriage proposal, but Peezy instead spends half the song lamenting what he doesn’t want in a partner in generic Auto-Tune.
These are small gripes when a majority of DIAMOND LINKS evokes the formless fun of past Peezy albums like No Hooks and No Hooks II. But now there’s also a seriousness that grapples with his urge to revert back to old habits, even while the stakes of staying legitimate have never been higher. Toward the end of “Interlude,” Peezy bemoans having “one foot in, one foot out.” His voice is chopped and screwed; the effect is dissociative, underlining the nervousness and paranoia of someone only halfway removed from the streets. ONLY BUILT proves that Peezy doesn’t need to keep risking his life to make compelling music.


In his work as Six Organs of Admittance, Ben Chasny refuses to stay in one place for long, darting between folk, rock, psych, and noise from album to album and song to song. His new record Hexadic is his first that sounds unsettling.

Hexadic

Ben Chasny has always been an unsettled artist. In his work as Six Organs of Admittance, he refuses to stay in one place for long, darting between folk, rock, psych, and noise from album to album and song to song. But Hexadic is his first record that actually sounds unsettling. His guitar playing is desperate and cutting—a fiery, jagged rip that recalls Japanese air-piercers like Keiji Haino and KK Null. On the more hectic tracks, Chasny and his band approach the aggressive howl of drowned-in-the-red acts like Sightings and Harry Pussy. But even when they swing slower and sparser, the music remains harrowing, more bent on disturbing than soothing.
The constantly-disruptive feel of Hexadic makes it perhaps the most consistent Six Organs albums to date. There’s a real sense of aesthetic purpose here; though none of Chasny’s work has ever sounded non-commital, his dedication to one guitar approach creates thorough cohesion, gluing all nine tracks together under one communal vibe. That effect was likely enhanced by Chasny’s self-devised songwriting system, one that even inspired him to create his own set of Six Organs playing cards. But this method seems more about creating a frame of mind than hewing to specific rules, as the resulting music sounds ready and willing to go anywhere.
That openness allows Chasny and his colleagues—including his Comets on Fire bandmate Noel Von Harmonson on drums—to play patiently and thoughtfully. Even when they’re smashing into a crescendo, it feels like a natural, well-worn state rather than a rushed attempt to force frenzy. In a way they come off like an athlete who’s so calm under pressure her heartbeat hardly varies whether she’s winning easily or taken down to the wire. So even though Hexadic bears an ominous, sometimes even disorienting tone, there’s a placidity to the proceedings that keeps the music more welcoming than confrontational. It reminds me of how Neil Young’s noisiest songs sway rather than crash, more reflective than assaultive, despite all the sonic debris.
In Hexadic’s best songs, the reflective and the assaultive are two sides of a coin. The heavy march of "Hollow River" is both turgid in Chasny’s dense distortion and spacious in its elongated beat. "Guild" creates a similar atmosphere before retreating subtly into dry, open spaces, while "Future Verbs" is almost all open spaces, like a spaghetti Western theme stretched into suspense-movie tension. Other tunes are more blunt, terrorizing attacks—take the pummeling grind of "Sphere Path Code C" or the aptly-titled "Maximum Hexadic"—yet still somehow feel measured, perhaps just by association.
Whether those destructive sides of Hexadic will appeal to anyone not already initiated into the Six Organs circle is hard to guess. You could even imagine some fans of Chasny’s folkier side balking at the relentlessness of his dark-lensed vision here. But such concerns seem beside the point; if Chasny was worried about maintaining or growing an audience, he wouldn’t have made so many unpredictable choices and opposing moves while crafting one of the most unique discographies of the past 15 years. And besides, you might not have guessed Hexadic would sound like this, but you won’t be surprised that it sounds this good.


On her self-produced seventh solo LP, Neko Case brings on a bunch of collaborators for a dense album that searches for connection amid human cruelty and chaos.

Hell-On

For all of Neko Case’s masterfully delivered tales of killer animals and sentient weather patterns, her decades of work have revealed an increasingly human worldview where mercy is shown only to those who deserve it. She sings of bloodshed and mystery and revenge, but in her albums there are also pleas for basic compassion that are intimate and deeply felt. “I’m a man,” she sang in a definitive lyric from her strikingly personal album from 2013, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight. “It’s what kind of animal I am.”
Five years later, Case returns with Hell-On, her most collaborative release to date, featuring pop producer Björn Yttling (of Peter, Bjorn and John), gruff-voiced alt-rock veterans Mark Lanegan and Eric Bachmann, and bandmates from the New Pornographers and case/lang/veirs (k.d. Lang and Laura Veirs). The added company is felt throughout: No other album in her catalog is so musically rich and orchestrated. Its eclectic nature sometimes takes the spotlight from Case’s inimitable alto—usually the central force of her records—but it also highlights the unmistakable identity of her writing. As the scenery shifts, Case spends these songs siphoning wisdom from horror and searching for connection amid human cruelty and chaos. “Be careful of the natural world,” she cautions in the opening title track. You’d be wise to take her advice.
If there’s a theme running through the record’s dense, disparate tracks, it’s confronting primal fears head-on. In a deceptively upbeat song called “My Uncle’s Navy,” she includes a trigger warning: “If you’re tender-hearted, you should stop the tape.” Then, she recounts an early trauma about a relative mutilating animals to scare young girls. Case revisits the scene from various angles, questioning the adults who could have stopped him and analyzing the way sadism evolves when left unchecked. “Bullies are not born, they are pressed into a form,” she reflects. What remains so disturbing to her isn’t the violence so much as the way it can be imposed upon us, without consent or explanation, at a formative age.
Hell-On doesn’t carry the autobiographical precision of The Worse Things Get. Its songs are knottier and more elliptical. While more uptempo tracks like the righteous “Last Lion of Albion” and the loping dust storm of “Dirty Diamond” lack the effortless drive of her old power-pop numbers, they make up for it in texture. Hell-On’s many moving parts invoke a wide palette of fragmented follow-up albums: the arrangements on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk that sounded like three different bands playing (and breaking up) at once; the moments on Destroyer’s Poison Season that seemed pieced together from shattered remains of pop standards. Hell-On is a record that can feel equally fragile and impenetrable, its songs like complex universes connected only by proximity.
Case’s gift as a songwriter has long been her ability to burrow small moments into your consciousness: She finds resonance in simple, ambiguous phrases—“I’m free to covet all I please,” “You never held it at the right angle”—where other artists build hooks out of their most universal insights. Here, these mystifying lines come packed together more tightly in songs that rarely cover the same ground twice. At some point during the nautical waltz of “Winnie,” Beth Ditto comes center stage to sing the most triumphant chorus to ever appear on a Neko Case record—the aural equivalent of a celebratory group hug after a decathlon. “We were warriors,” she belts with just the right amount of ceremony. But that melody never recurs, and by the end of the song, Case is back alone at the microphone singing in a quiet, mournful coo. Stories are more exciting, she discovers, when every part is not treated like its climax.
During the recording of Hell-On, Case endured a series of calamities. First, her house burned down. (Thankfully, no one—including the myriad animals she cares for—was injured.) Next, a journalist included her name and address in a news report about the fire: a terrifying prospect, considering Case was dealing with a stalker at the time. These events are never addressed directly in the lyrics, but the ongoing struggle darkens the record. Feelings of fear and exhaustion seep through nearly every song. On a previous album, the karmic apocalypse in “Bad Luck,” with its punchline, “So I died and went to work,” might be a moment of levity. Here, it sprawls uneasily and cycles through peppy, crowded verses that start to feel like a compulsion. In other tracks, she gives the microphone over entirely to her accompanists, retreating momentarily in their presence. “You are beautiful and you are alone,” went a borrowed mantra on her last album. Hell-On takes the opposite angle: As ugly as things get, at least we have each other.
With this outlook, Case is empowered. In the dazzling ballad “Halls of Sarah,” she sings, “Our poets do an odious business loving womankind/As lions love Christians.” Through these songs, she attempts to correct the poets, scavenging for what she refers to as “the warmth of your species,” some common kindness uniting us. While writing this record, Case took inspiration from Adrienne Mayor’s The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, a thoroughly researched book that offers proof of a long-ignored civilization. Hell-On, with its embattled stories and restless spirit, comforts by offering a similar affirmation: The myth is all the more beautiful and strange if it’s real.


The Mexican American electro-pop artist’s debut EP, produced with Panda Bear collaborator Rusty Santos, is a restless patchwork of genre-smashing sounds.

LuvHz

Jackie Mendoza has packed a lot of life into 26 years. She’s been a resident of Mexico, California, and New York. She’s created two minor pop hits with “Islands” and “La Luz.” And now, with the release of her debut EP LuvHz, she’s worked with one of avant-indie’s oddest producers, Rusty Santos (who worked on Panda Bear’s latest, Buoys). That collective experience could have fed into a pop project defined by a strong sensibility and pointed perspective on the world. Instead, LuvHz is aimless.
That aimlessness may be the result of Mendoza’s effort to make music more distinct than those aforementioned hits, which in hindsight seem calculated to take advantage of the market’s hunger for bilingual, dancehall-adjacent pop. The EP’s opening track, “Mucho Más,” signals an intentional shift. It begins with the glitchy sounds of crickets and a hazy summer night as Mendoza chants the EP’s only earworm, “Mucho más, más allá.” Eventually, a swollen reggaetón beat thuds into the forefront and Mendoza rides it out until it dissolves along with her voice, a harbinger of what’s to come.
It’s thrilling to hear a Latinx artist manipulating the sounds of reggaetón into something less conventional, but nothing so clever is found elsewhere on the EP. Like much of LuvHz, “Mucho Más” is a vibe, not a bop. Co-produced by Mendoza and Santos, LuvHz’s anti-pop is in its own abrasive way quintessentially 2019: a restless patchwork of genre-smashing sounds, all layered atop one another and then smothered in clouds of reverb. The signature here is not mutated beats but Santos’ beloved underwater percussion, and no track conveys drowning more than “Seahorse.” It’s a dirge of a song, floating along on samples of babbling water and Mendoza’s pleading vocals but never managing to go anywhere.
Brevity hinders almost all of the songs on LuvHz. Mendoza is great at building tension in her work, but the tension barely breaks; when it does, the relief is too fleeting to enjoy. Even the EP’s best song, “Loco Flow,” isn’t given the space to establish its titular flow. It’s a beautiful collage of gurgling harps cut through by a satisfyingly sharp My Bloody Valentine guitar line, and it features Mendoza’s most biting lyrics. Taking aim at the status quo and the complacency of her peers, she sings, “Not enough going against the grain, they’re launching missiles at crossed purposes again/Crossing the same paths, denting the same ground.”
LuvHz is, if nothing else, an argument against complacency. Mendoza’s tenacious versatility is her most interesting strength, but this scattered six-track EP makes clear that it’s also her biggest weakness. Is she trying to make Grimes-esque nü-metal revival, as on the exhilarating “Puppet Angels,” or is she aiming for a singer-songwriter take on the complications of internet romance and obsession (“Your Attention”)? Is she trying to make artful pop, or just art? Does it have to be one or the other?
There’s no need to pin down an artist with such evident curiosity. But Mendoza’s songs are frustratingly caught in-between, unable to commit to loud or quiet, personal or political, while trying to be all of the above. Her résumé and talent—her bright voice resonates throughout, cutting through the production sludge—prove that Mendoza is capable of making whatever music she wants to make. Judging by LuvHz, though, it’s not clear she knows what kind of music that is.


The South Florida rapper sounds like a hip-hop Hades on a menacing, underworldly mixtape leavened by cracked psychedelia, surreal humor, and straight-up weirdness.

Ski Mask the Slump God: Beware the Book of Eli

Beware the Book of Eli

On “Lost Souls,” from his new mixtape, Beware the Book of Eli, the South Florida rapper Ski Mask the Slump God draws from the sinister side of Greek mythology. “I’mma drown a nigga in a river of lost souls,” he spits over the track’s foreboding beat, threatening to extinguish his enemies in the fabled tributary of the afterlife. Call Ski Mask the hip-hop Hades—king of the underworld and the dead, god of wealth, making songs that could soundtrack the valley of directionless spirits. This is murderous, netherworld music that you can throw up your jewels and smoke a blunt to.
Beware the Book of Eli is the finest showcase so far for Ski Mask’s significant strengths. Of the 13 songs here on the leaked version (an official version, with only ten songs, was later released), only one, “The Bees Knees,” reaches the three-minute mark. This might suggest a scattershot approach, but it’s the lack of wasted motions that make the tape such a savage trip into cracked psychedelia, surreal humor, and straight-up weirdness. There’s desolation in its DNA, yet Ski Mask—an MC who in his best Raoul Duke bucket hat traverses the twisted universe ruled by God Emperor MF DOOM—dilutes that darkness with stoner absurdity. On “Ski Meets World,” he references “Bob the Builder” and Froot Loops mascot Toucan Sam, then vividly describes a sex act, veering in and out of a wacky voice that could’ve come straight out of an Adult Swim cartoon. On a track with the lurid title “Bukakke,” he envisions himself as a vampire who’s invincible to the sun’s rays. Each image is shrouded in the purple haze of weed smoke.
Ski Mask’s consistently off-kilter rap style adds to the tape’s malevolent vibe. His flow is like a butterfly sword, swooping in from a dozen directions at once and slicing from seemingly impossible angles. The frequency with which he changes up his voice might be dizzying or tiresome from a lesser rapper, but Ski Mask never loses control of his gravelly larynx. There are occasional shades of Migos’ rapid-fire couplets on Beware the Book of Eli, underlined by how easily Ski Mask’s style meshes with Offset’s on “With Vengeance.” He negotiates the skyscraper-sized bassline of “Dapper Dan” by speeding up his flow. On the warbling “Suicide Season,” his voice is melodic but bugged out, as though he’s the last conscious person at the party as the sun comes up and the smoke starts to clear.
Key to Ski Mask’s artistry is his identity as a student of hip-hop history. He repurposed Missy Elliott’s “She’s a Bitch” in last year’s “Catch Me Outside,” a number that united 1990s rap with modern street sounds. On the new tape, “Worldwide” boasts the kind of explosive beat Missy could easily have turned into an MTV smash two decades ago, underpinned by fizzing electro production that recalls early rap classics such as Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock.” Meanwhile, the cold production on “Throwaway” would easily fit into the 36 Chambers.
Despite most tracks’ brevity, Ski Mask finds room to toss in some choruses. The catchy hooks of songs like “Throwaway” reveal another facet of his artistry and imbue the release with enough good vibes to soundtrack a nighttime drive in a car packed with friends. But even when the music is at its liveliest, the mixtape feels cracked and decayed like a cassette left behind by a lost civilization. A brutal odyssey that nonetheless provides plenty of kicks, Beware the Book of Eli stands as a new monument on the off-mainstream rap landscape.


After a string of promising mixtapes, rapper J. Cole was signed by Jay-Z and now returns with his major-label debut. Jay guests here and inadvertently highlights exactly where Cole comes up short.

Cole World: The Sideline Story

J. Cole is the kind of rapper who worries aloud, and frequently, if he's getting too deep for his own songs. A St. John's University magna cum laude graduate raised in poverty by a single mother, Cole distinguished himself in his early career as much through effort as talent. Over a string of fiercely earnest, frequently impressive mixtapes, he rapped in writerly thickets in which the semicolons and embedded clauses were audible, and he produced all his own tracks. He became a leading light of the conscious-rap crowd, who, always eager for a viable mainstream entrant in rap's ongoing culture wars, fervently embraced him. And then, perhaps inevitably, Jay-Z swooped down and signed him.
The resulting major-label debut, Cole World: The Sideline Story, which finally saw release this week, is shaping up to be an actual Big Moment for Cole: Despite a tepid radio presence, it is projected to sell nearly 250,000 copies. Those are startling first-week numbers for a new rapper these days, and they assure that J. Cole will get at least a partial promenade through the spotlight. People appear to care deeply about this guy. But it's difficult to imagine why from the evidence of this studiously bland and compromise-riddled record, which seems to be searching for the meeting point of every conceivable middle.
About half the album bears Cole's production signature: a glimmering update on 1990s jazz-rap, spiked with live-sounding boom-bap drums. As a rap aesthetic, it's about as rigidly conservative as they come. But Cole is admirably committed to it, and he fleshes it out with surprising musical detail-- backup vocals, comping jazz guitars, lots and lots of grand piano. The songs that stick to this template feel warm, pleasant, and Cole-ish. The rest of Cole World is a 2011-era pop-rap project with a varying success rate: the madcap, syncopated single "Can't Get Enough" feels like a lost transmission from 2002-era rap radio, and it succeeds only insofar as it compels you to imagine how much better an '03-era T.I., or even N.O.R.E., would have finessed the beat than does Cole, who deflates the track's bounce.
It doesn't help that Cole brings the least-flavorful bars of his career to his debut, aiming, most likely, for something more universal than his diaristic mixtapes. The few glints we get of his personal life are intriguing: "Lost Ones" is a slippery and well-conceived, two-sided argument between Cole and his baby mother over whether they will keep the child. "Breakdown" affectingly recounts his late-in-life reunion with his father. But otherwise he seems to be playing by implied, major-label debut rules: keep it simple, slow it down, don't lose anyone. The result is like glutinous paste that results from mashing together Drake, Kanye, and Big K.R.I.T. and straining out what makes them interesting.
Jay himself, the benefactor figure, pops up twice, and both times his presence subtly undermines the marquee star. On his guest verse for "Mr. Nice Watch," he flexes his double -time flow and coolly blows Cole out of the water. He's heard again on the intro to "Rise and Shine," musing in a sampled snippet from his 2000 concert film Backstage on his ideal signee: rapping over his breakfast cereal, gunning for Jay's own spot. "I'mma find him, though, and sign him; I don't want no problems," he says and there is a startlingly predatory ring to his laugh. J. Cole certainly posed no threat to Jay-Z's crown; he's too humble and lacks charisma. But maybe the next up-and-coming rapper to successfully forge and remain in his own lane is the one who refuses Jay's help.


Far from the knotty time signatures and intricate textures of their later work, Stereolab’s debut album captures a shoegaze-besotted indie-pop band figuring out exactly who it wants to be.

Peng!

Stereolab could never have imagined how experimental, or influential, they would become. When Lætitia Sadier joined her then-boyfriend Tim Gane in his British jangle-pop band McCarthy, the two melted insoluble genres, like 1950s jazz and 1970s krautrock, into a singular style. In McCarthy’s wake, they formed Stereolab—the name taken from a Vanguard Records sub-label—with Sadier on synthesizer and lead vocals, alternating between French and English; Gane on guitar, organ, and synth; Martin Kean on bass; Joe Dilworth on drums. A year later, Stereolab released two 10" EPs and a 7"—Super 45, Super-Electric, and Stunning Debut Album—primarily on Duophonic, a boutique label they co-created with their manager. In 1992, after attention-grabbing Peel Sessions and in-store performances at Rough Trade, Stereolab released their debut full-length, Peng!, through Too Pure, an independent London label that was about to get its own big break the same year with PJ Harvey’s Dry.
Peng! is a blueprint of what Stereolab would become: a band experimenting with 1960s pop harmonies, teethy guitars, and the borderless world of analog electronics. It’s an incomplete picture of the band—two key members, singer-guitarist Mary Hansen and drummer Andy Ramsay, had yet to join—but it has an immediate magic to it, like being there in the studio beside them before their career kicks off. It’s also the closest Stereolab come to being an indie-rock band. Their songwriting chops are there, but they haven’t yet discovered all the instruments and techniques that could, and would, eventually make their music so dazzling. It’s a guessing game of empty spaces as the Groop lay the foundation for what would come.
With an eerie synth fade-in, Sadier beings her monotone singing. When the song, “Super Falling Star,” reaches its chorus, twinkling guitar cushions the two parts, establishing a moody, dreamlike first impression fit for a sci-fi film. Stereolab introduce their futuristic sound only to follow it with a string of more traditional indie-rock songs: “Orgiastic,” “Peng! 33,” and later “The Seeming and the Meaning.” All three chase a driving tempo with strummed guitar and peppy one-woman vocals. The songs are charming, straightforward, and just lo-fi enough to feel like gems waiting to be polished. (Perhaps it’s no surprise that Iron & Wine covered “Peng! 33.”)
Over this indie-rock foundation stretches an unexpected shoegaze veneer. Fuzzy guitars take priority over sharp electronics, giving listeners a chance to imagine who Stereolab could have been if they followed in the footsteps of My Bloody Valentine or Swirlies. “Enivrez-vous” opens with an anthemic drum roll and buzzing guitar reverb. From afar, Sadier reads a Charles Baudelaire poem about getting drunk, creating a blurry airport-announcement effect. A similar blanket of warm guitar drives closer “Surrealchemist,” while field recordings and a thundering Farfisa organ storm its sprawling ending. Shoegaze’s blend of hooks and noise feeds directly into the group’s evolution as a self-described “high-concept pop group.”
For a band that would eventually define itself as the cross-section of analog indie rock and experimental ’60s pop, Stereolab were, for a long period, tied to rigid beats and tight-knit motorik. On Peng!, they diverge from that metronomic timing to embrace flashes of imperfection. Gane breaks out a metallic, quickly strummed guitar solo on “You Little Shits” that misses several notes in its hurried movement. With the jazzy pop of “Perversion,” a Moog solo slowly wanders off beat, humming its way down its own path. In true Stereolab fashion, these moments just make their technological world sound more human. Stereolab claimed never to play live in the studio, yet Peng!’s strongest moments evoke jam sessions, whether it’s the slapdash blues rhythm on “Mellotron” or the manic guitar solo turned group noise session of “Stomach Worm.”
The band had yet to discover the knack for sequencing that would make later albums feel like such cohesive statements. The mood shifts abruptly and frequently, forgoing segues or fadeouts. The gentle hypnosis of synth lullaby “K-stars” is awkwardly sandwiched between the record’s eponymous pop hit and a similarly exultant rock number. These jumps in mood and tone are ironic, given how often the band was criticized for its “one-note” sound. And while with Peng! they began sinking their teeth into the staples of their songwriting—minimalism and repetition—the album’s tendency to move in fits and starts undercuts the power those techniques would assume on later albums.
Two years after its release, the band would release two studio albums, a mini-album, an anthology, four EPs, six 7" singles, and six splits with bands like Unrest and Nurse With Wound. Vinyl obsessives, Stereolab refused to let songs to go to waste. “From the very beginning of Stereolab, the idea has been to release as many records as possible,” Gane once said. “I want it to be hit and run.” Peng! was a floodgate bursting open, revealing a range of subgenres and influences—organ-driven krautrock, low-key lounge pop, cinematic noise—they could build upon moving forward.
Despite this spirit of limitless creativity, Stereolab didn’t feel comfortable promoting themselves unless asked. In early interviews, Sadier and Gane shuffle around as though unsure how to control the narrative of the band on camera. But on paper, they confidently toyed with expectations, choosing a 1969 Swiss political cartoon for their record sleeves and provocative song titles. Stereolab were still figuring out who and what they wanted to be. Peng! was a trial run for a decade of subverting expectations. They didn’t need promotion, their work said it all.

Buy: Rough Trade
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UK cult band Clinic continue to make dependably good music, here continuing their ongoing exploration of vintage psychedelia.

Bubblegum

The last time we reviewed a new Clinic album, Nate Patrin suggested that you wouldn't get much more of a sense of the band's evolution by listening to their albums in chronological order than by putting their tracks in alphabetical order. I disagree. While it is true that Clinic have always sounded more or less the same, they have made a point of introducing new textures and affects with each new record. The group changes in gradual, largely superficial ways that may not be entirely perceptible unless you've been paying close attention all along. Take, for example, the way they have embraced the aesthetics of late-1960s psychedelia. Those elements are hardly present on their debut, Internal Wrangler, but have become central to their style since 2006's Visitations.
Bubblegum, the band's sixth proper album, goes a few steps further in their ongoing exploration of vintage psychedelia. "I'm Aware", the opening track and lead single, signals a substantial change in approach, if not a drastic stylistic departure. The track begins with gently strummed acoustic guitar, and progresses to include lush strings, mellow coos, and an unusually clear and direct vocal performance by singer Ade Blackburn. Still, despite all these un-Clinic creative decisions, it still sounds exactly like the Clinic we've known for years. The melodies, the cadences, the rhythms, that distinct and vaguely creepy voice-- if you've heard a Clinic album, any Clinic album, you have heard this before. Though the group has consistently modified its approach to arranging its material, their songwriting has barely budged since 2002's Walking With Thee.
This doesn't mean they haven't written a great deal of excellent songs. Bubblegum, like the five albums and slew of singles that came before it, delivers several strong tunes. Blackburn and his bandmates have a way of getting the most out of the limited parameters they have set for themselves. The mellow, acoustic psychedelia and relatively hi-fi production values of Bubblegum lends its tracks a touch of novelty [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| , but the songs that work best succeed on the same terms as anything else they've done over the past decade. Clinic are always going to excel when they go for hypnotic, swooning ballads like "Baby" and menacing garage rockers like "Orangutan", but they stumble a bit when they wander slightly beyond their comfort zone. The record's second half has too many soft, drifting acoustic numbers with pleasing textures but forgettable melodies. These slight missteps aren't enough to derail the album or distract from its high points, but they certainly drag on the momentum. The most exciting cuts revel in their newfound lushness. "I'm Aware" and "Milk & Honey" are sweet and airy; the title track sounds as though it is being presented in full saturated color in comparison to the stark black and white tonality implied by the band's earliest work.
Clinic are a tricky band to judge, if just because their consistency can seem so much like artistic stagnancy. They've never made a bad album; they always deliver at least a few undeniable gems per record. Nevertheless, as much as Bubblegum evidences a lot of thought and effort on the part of the band, it still has the sound of musicians going through the motions and sticking too close to their formulae. Their craft is impeccable, and they still sound like no one else despite lifting from all sorts of obvious and obscure source influences, but there isn't enough spark to this material. It may be time for Clinic to begin experimenting with song forms rather than textures. At this point, a song that sounded like "classic" Clinic but had surprising melodic and rhythmic twists and turns would be much more exciting than the familiar Clinic moves dolled up in fancy clothing.


The Berlin-based American deep house producer follows a string of well received 12"s with his full-length debut.

Glass Eights

John Roberts isn't mysterious so much as inconspicuous. The Berlin-based, Ohio-born producer would be the great young hope of any scene that didn't chew through great young hopes like goldfish crackers. So instead, after four 12"'s and on the heels of his first full-length album, he's the kid with the no-name name who's really good at deep house.
"Good at deep house" and not "techno wunderkind" because, well, Roberts' skills often seem less like those of a musician than those of an athlete-- a disciplined participant playing a varying but finite game. What was notable about Roberts' early 12"'s was not their singularity or adherence to a breaking style, but their studied execution. Roberts wasn't just dropping house music layups like piano chords and dubby textures; he was performing all manner of subtle and difficult moves, like budding noir atmosphere, pitch-shifted vocals-as-percussion, tension-massing tweaks. Roberts' productions are spellbindingly clear, crystal in their intent and focus.
There is something, then, almost inevitable about Glass Eights, Roberts' debut album for his Dial records. It opens with a shattered piano note and a pattering drum; one minute later, when a tiny vocal sample and electric keyboards drop "Lesser" into a well-paced groove, Roberts provides that rare moment in which both bobbing your head and shrugging your shoulders are appropriate reactions. Simultaneously: "This is excellent," and, "We knew he could do this." Roberts chose to emphasize his compositional skills on Glass Eights. Pianos, violins, and lithe beats rule the tracks, which never seem to stir with overeager rhythms or combust into white noise. There are times when the whole can seem less than the sum of its parts. "Porcelain" features bright, ordered drum patterns, a funny little modular synth melody, and an out-of-nowhere steel drum interlude; the total is passable techno. Six minutes of it.
Still, there are only a handful of producers capable of Glass Eights. Sometimes Roberts seems like he's trying to stimulate his tracks solely via the overtones of his chords; call it harmonic house. On cuts like "Pruned" and "Ever or Not" he searches for the midway point between Carl Craig and Philip Glass, the variety provided by listening to determine on which side he errs. Elsewhere he delights in dispensing with one of deep house's go-to signifers-- "warm"-- and sends his tracks out to shiver until they seem austere ("Interlude [Telephone]" and "Navy Blue").
Dance music enthusiasts are really good at asking one question ("Can [hot artist X] possibly keep this up?!") but predictably poor at asking another: "What will it mean if he does?" Glass Eights shyly defers by focusing on a slightly more musically nuanced type of electronic music than Roberts' previous work. It is impossible to call a failure and equally difficult to pinpoint its vigor.


L.A. space-rock hopefuls Autolux sign to the Coen Brothers' DMZ label and enlist producer T-Bone Burnett to ground their galactic ambitions.

Future Perfect

Los Angeles, as we all know and love it, is a fucking cesspool. It's seething with pretty little coke-fed nihilists with shards of hair and vintage fabrics jutting from their dancing skeletons. Skid row after parties are 10 times more populated than the actual shows, and the hordes toast caffeinated vodkas to a vacuous neo-dancepunk set by a B-list celebrity DJ. It's enough to make one want to get the hell out of town, but of course it's difficult to even afford a full tank of gas these days. So instead hitch a ride with fellow Angelenos, Autolux, on their debut Future Perfect. Their optimism is reassuring.
In the first 10 seconds of album opener "Turnstile Blues", Carla Azar shames most every beatmaker with her ridiculous Leibezeit-cum-Bonham percussion. Azar's sturdy and creative drumming provides the thrust of Greg Edwards' heavily reverbed and distorted riffs. Meanwhile, Eugene Goreshter sings whispery lullabies of escape and alienation, and his rumbling bass rattles the brain. "So what/ It's alright," he sighs, "They're waiting for you to go."
It's not until "Sugarless"-- 15 minutes into Future Perfect-- that Autolux veer slightly and strangely away from relentless noise-pop. Like a super-cute HAL9000, Azar's soothing monotone says she's "over it." Over what? All of a sudden, Goreshter starts "whoo-hoo"-ing and we realize we're hurtling toward infinity with a bunch of goddamn lunatics. The middle passage seesaws between swaggering glam and ethereal anxiety. "Capital Kind Of Strain" is the ship out of fuel, tumbling aimlessly through the void; "Asleep at the Trigger" shuts down the boosters altogether.
Surprisingly, the record's production is handled by T-Bone Burnett, soundtrack producer of the Coen Brothers' rustic comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Burnett's laissez-faire style somehow matches as well with Autolux's intense dynamic as it does with Appalachian folk songs. He allows the musicians to speak for themselves-- the only evidence of his existence being the sound of his grumpy ass bumping around the studio in between a few songs.
The obvious talking points here are Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, but the history of the Autolux's band members cannot be overlooked. All three survived late-90s "alternative rock", most notably Edwards, who was a member of Failure. That band's Fantastic Planet-- along with the twin moons of Cobain and Corgan-- orbits off in the distance on much of Future Perfect.
That said, the album sounds like the work of a band that has been in suspended animation for the past five years, hidden away from the torrent of the new wave revival and the reutn of disco as a viable rock touchstone. Azar, Edwards, and Goreshter now emerge from their slumber, preserved and prepared, ready to scorch the earth with their afterburn.


A new instrumental project from Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C. Taylor and Cameron Ralston drifts between moments of tranquility and cosmic dissonance.

Revelators

M.C. Taylor doesn’t shy away from the big questions. As the bandleader of the soul-tinged Americana group Hiss Golden Messenger, he’s spent the past decade ruminating on existential mysteries with increasingly open-ended, inconclusive results. As he put it on 2021’s Quietly Blowing It, “When it all feels strange, do the words have no meaning?” Revelators Sound System, his new instrumental project with producer/bassist Cameron Ralston, searches for clarity where language falls short.
Their debut LP, Revelators, uses the hypnotic modal grooves of early 1970s jazz—particularly Pharoah Sanders’ meditative atmosphere and Miles Davis’ multilayered funk fusion—as a point of reference for its four lengthy jams. Opening track “Grieving” pulls specifically from Davis’ work, laying down a frenetic bassline as a springboard for a battalion of woodwinds. Saxophone riffs spiral in all directions as melodic phrases materialize and quickly taper, dissolving into the whole. While it may structurally resemble the spliced electric-jazz of Live-Evil and On the Corner, the timbre is more aligned with the dreamy post-minimalism of the band’s 37d03d labelmates like Big Red Machine and James McAlister. Cloaked in reverb and atmospheric keys, it doesn’t quite bite, but it does gnaw.
Even in his new role as free-jazz bandleader, Taylor’s work is strongest when left unresolved. The hushed minor chords and rambling melodies that characterize his folk material carry over into Revelators in charming ways. Intro track “Grieving,” which Ralston described as being “about what it feels like to be American today,” is gripping in its opening half, contorting as if trying to determine the ideal sitting position in an uncomfortable chair. Six minutes in, the band drifts into a drumless, keyboard-driven lull that sets a tone for the rest of the album. The ambience is soothing, spiced with heaving sax and bluesy piano, but it interrupts the improvisational flow, fading into the next track before they’ve had the chance to fully explore its potential.
The two tracks comprising Revelators’ middle section venture deeper into ambient-jazz territory. “Collected Water” is sumptuous yet stagnant, with JC Kuhl’s wailing saxophone swirling in a pool of delayed keys and heavily affected guitar. “Bury the Bell” is a more interesting variation on the sound. Backed by a string section, Stuart Bogie’s clarinet investigates its alien surroundings, leaving swaths of warmth against the eerie orchestral haze. These songs form a quiet retreat from the tumultuous introduction, letting the band process its dense web of rhythm. If “Grieving” conjures the sustained bleakness of its political climate, the following tracks are a prescribed dose of optimism.
In a 2021 interview with Holler, Taylor discussed his inclination toward “leaving space for hope, or leaving space for the possibility of hopefulness, which is kind of different than protest music.” That sense of space plays a crucial role in determining which moments pack the greatest emotional punch. The cascading keys in “Collected Water” make it occasionally feel like wallpaper music, imposing tranquility instead of offering a path to find it for ourselves. Closer “George the Revelator” revisits the opening track’s dubby krautrock percussion, albeit in a more subdued form. The string section takes the lead, swelling with Morricone-esque flourishes as JT Bates’ snare fills echo and roll. It’s Revelators Sound System’s most confident and conclusive performance, offering a tidy ending to a complicated record.  Even as they smooth out the cosmic dissonance that makes this project’s most memorable moments feel greater than the sum of their influences, you can sense Taylor veering closer than ever to the transcendence he’s been seeking.


The first-ever proper side project from a Metallica member indulges the guitarist’s cinematic aspirations over sweeping compositions that could accompany zombie westerns or apocalyptic sci-fi.

Portals

“When someone does a side project, it takes away from the strength of Metallica,” frontman James Hetfield once told Playboy. But a lot has changed since the fractious days that birthed 2003’s St. Anger and Some Kind of Monster, one of the most revealing and intimate rock documentaries ever made about a band that seemingly hates each other. Back then, Metallica found itself at a crossroads, struggling with interband tension, sitting through therapy sessions, and even forbidding guitarist Kirk Hammett from playing any of his famously virtuosic solos on their new records. Nowadays, however, Metallica is in the comfortable role of elder statesmen, content to repeat past glories and indulge sprawling mixtape projects, like 2021’s The Metallica Blacklist, an overstuffed tribute to their 1991 breakthrough album that grouped disparate artists like Moses Sumney, Miley Cyrus, and Kamasi Washington.
Portals, Hammett’s debut solo outing and the first-ever proper side project from any member of the long-running thrash band, arrived on Record Store Day with not only the blessing of his bandmates, but via the band’s own Blackened label. Recorded over the course of five years in multiple locations, the four-song instrumental EP reveals Hammett’s aspirations to be a film composer, layering crescendoing horns, flamenco interludes, swelling strings—and, naturally, oversized riffs and unhinged shredding—into compositions that could accompany zombie westerns, gothic giallo thrillers, or apocalyptic sci-fi. Occasionally his cinematic references are explicit—“The Incantation” opens with a theme that reads as pure John Williams, and “High Plains Drifter” shares its title with a 1973 Clint Eastwood western—but Hammett suggests an “audio-cinematic” approach that isn’t tied to any specific narrative, clearing space for his imagination to wander.
While some of these songs began as background music for a Hammett’s It’s Alive exhibition, a touring showcase of memorabilia from his horror and sci-fi collection, he often eschews ambiance and scene setting in favor of fully present rock outs. It doesn’t matter that the territory is more Thin Lizzy than Hans Zimmer; it’s a thrill to hear Hammett playing so unabashed. It conjures a sense of “larger than life” awe, the audio equivalent of the expression on Hammett’s face while gazing at his 13-foot King Kong poster over on the Columbia Museum of Art’s YouTube channel. Opener “The Maiden and the Monster'' fades in with John Carpenter-esque synth swells and tape reversed guitar before settling into “Call of Ktulu”-style fingerpicking. Drums enter in the second half, and by the time the epic reaches its conclusion, it feels like a Load-era Bond theme with Hammett’s Santana-style squeals soaring over a chugging fanfare. The Incantation” follows a similar narrative journey, its intro evoking the magical whimsy of Hogwarts before giving way to a psychedelic sitar break and cascading riffs that feel equally indebted to Danny Elfman and the proggy chug of Mastodon.
With its skittering strings, arch vibe, and harmonized guitars that sound like they could have appeared on Ride the Lightning, “The Jinn” is a blast, a slab of heroic, triumphant metal that soars with or without an imaginary movie marathon playing in your skull. As a lead guitarist, Hammett is often called to bring a sense of abandon to Metallica’s martial grooves. On Portals, he lets loose, allowing for a kind of unfussy bravado that doesn’t always make its way onto Metallica albums, where drummer Lars Ulrich tends to micro-mangages Hammett’s solos. “High Plains Drifter” taps into a Morricone mood similar to Black Album cut “The Unforgiven.” With delicately fingerpicked acoustic guitar and twangy electrics that nod to the song’s early life as a flamenco composition, it’s the shortest track on the album and one that demands immediate replay.
A film composer’s job is to enhance what’s on screen, stirring emotion and sustaining tension. Without any on-screen action to guide it, Portals rarely functions like traditional soundtrack music, but the concept winds up feeling beside the point. Often viewed as the soft spoken counterpoint to Ulrich and Hetfield, Hammett relishes this star turn, and his sense of freedom in exploring beyond the confines of Metallica is palpable. (Along with bassist Robert Trullijo, he’s also been playing in an R&B/classic rock project called the Wedding Band.) These instrumentals smartly devote plenty of real estate to Hammett’s familiar metalhead strengths, but they also reveal compositional breadth and dramatic flair. Stepping away from the colossus of Metallica, Hammett revels in being his own singular kind of monster.
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Olivia Gibb’s messy, experimental garage rock sounds unhinged and strangely human on Warm Bodies’ debut. Come for the unnerving body horror, stay for the fiery guitar solos.

Warm Bodies

While some wonder who’s going to make rock’n’roll wild again, Warm Bodies’ Olivia Gibb is barking like a dog out here. The Kansas City, Missouri artist is effortlessly wild. When she sings, she jumps in and out of cartoonish shrieks. Her bug-eyed and immensely expressive live performances would make John Waters proud. If you visit her website, you can buy some ceramic clown nightmares. Punk’s underground has always been flush with fringe characters—Warm Bodies share a label with noxious weirdos Lumpy and the Dumpers, for example—but Gibb stands out from the heap. On Warm Bodies’ messy and muscular debut album, you can find her screaming about her eyes which have fallen out of their sockets.
“My Face Fell Off” is a minute-long blast of surrealist speed punk, so while Gibb screams for help in locating her face, her bandmates come in frenzied. Drummer Gabe Coppage crashes forward at a turbulent clip while Ian Teeple keeps pace, rattling out power chords and guitar solos. This exact sort of noisy punk maelstrom has been the band’s calling card for a couple years now. The song originally appeared on Warm Bodies’ 2016 demo, and while the two versions are similar, you can hear just how much they’ve leveled up. On Warm Bodies, they’re faster, the recording quality is less scuzzy, and most pressingly, Gibb sounds far more unhinged than she did on her relatively more reserved early recordings.
Take “Something Weird Is Eating Me,” a song that addresses the more uncomfortable truths of the human body. After alluding broadly to a “mess” under her clothes, she gets extremely specific: “A burning lump full of yellow gunk/And I’m itchy itchy itchy itchy,” her voice oozing the discomfort that the song’s lyrics so directly imply. Later, when Gibb shouts about her sexual encounter with real-life plane hijacker D.B. Cooper, Teeple sets the stage with a clattering, rapid-fire hook. This is the band’s secret formula: Gibb whips up fever dreams with her singular voice and Teeple grounds everything with earworms and sick guitar solos.
Across its 20 minutes, Warm Bodies isn’t strictly a wall-to-wall shredfest. It’s an album bookended by electronics, opening with the tense swell of warped synths and finishing with the pulse of crackling, ethereal noise. Then there’s “Stinky dUMBOMix,” a song that’s all synthesizers, drum machines, whistles, and handclaps. It’s only a minute long, but it’s a crucial moment that places the music beyond garage punk and into the context of low-key experimentation.
With that handful of left-field sonic tics, Warm Bodies lean fully into the psychedelia that powers Gibb’s lyrics: melted faces, gnarly rashes, dog cosplay, and fucking a never-been-caught skydiving thief. Chaos is an intrinsic part of their DNA, which means more relatable, day-to-day subjects adopt a funhouse-mirror approach. “Psychic Connection” is a love song that’s both surreal and knowable—Gibb breaks down the unspoken “mind control” shorthand you have with the person you love. Then there’s “I Need a Doctor,” where Teeple’s woozy guitar and the call-and-response of “I need a doctor! (She needs a doctor!)” invoke sick-day queasiness. On an album of hysterical vocals and high-speed guitar work, Warm Bodies is riveting because of how human it is—its joy, rage, infatuations, and yes, literal boils.


On its second album, the Portland quartet conjures a sense of ambient horror with shapeshifting, high-velocity death metal.

Deconsecrate

Horizons aren’t what they used to be. Now that we’re surrounded at all times by horror—political, biological, climatological—the idea of something awful lurking in the distance, threatening to put an end to life as we know it, is frankly a little banal. When creeping death becomes everyday reality, it can feel like just another distraction. On Deconsecrate, the second album from Portland death-metal quartet Ænigmatum, that ambient horror slowly begins to take over, clouding the band’s joyful mutations as they careen along the borders of black, death, speed, tech, melodic—basically any high-velocity form of metal.
The gyroscope keeping this wildly spinning machine together is bassist Brian Rush, whose fretless runs fill these songs with a melodic light that, when coupled with hyper-melodic tom fills from drummer Pierce Williams, decants what would otherwise be very claustrophobic music, making it feel spacious and hungry with possibility. His contributions are key to the album’s constant shapeshifting, signaling changes in texture and rhythm that the rest of the band gamely follows.
“Forged in Bedlam” opens the album in a slushy hail of guitars, but within 30 seconds, the bass has re-routed the band into a subdued thunderstorm. With a roar from vocalist and guitarist Kelly McLaughlin, the group heads back into the fray with a relentless grindcore beat, only to be seduced once again as the bass snakes and curves its way around the mix. A similar dynamic plays out in “Larker, Sanguine Phantom,” whose harsh noise intro is filleted by a groove onto which the rest of the band grafts themselves, with Rush’s bass line forming the spine of the re-skinned song. Like Death’s Steve Di Giorgio or Damon Good of Ænigmatum’s 20 Buck Spin labelmates VoidCeremony, Rush’s bass lines work like blushes of pink that underlight a Renaissance cloud, their virtuosity and articulation complementing the music with strange, heartfelt melancholy.
Guitarists McLaughlin and Eli Lundgren frequently stick together, twinning their leads and riffing in tandem. They occasionally break apart for dramatic effect, as in “Larker, Sanguine Phantom,” where they stagger their riffs alongside Rush’s bass in a way that makes them feel like a phalanx armed and ready for the approach. The duo flash coppery sheets of noise across “Disenthralled,” transitioning into a trad-metal duel and raking the song into a peg-legged rhythm pattern that passes through multiple forms. Like a jazz combo holding the one across the changes, they manage to imply the groove even once they’ve stopped playing it. Their constant fluidity turns the album’s thousand little crags into one long, humming vibration, the sound of a truck’s tires speeding over a gravel road.
As Deconsecrate plays out, Ænigmatum introduce subtle changes in the frequency, and the gloom eventually catches up with them. The back half of the album still rages, but the guitars occasionally slow to a prolonged burn. Even when they sprint, it feels like a requiem played at warp speed, and the thrashing and moaning that come off as swashbuckling in the first half of the record begin to feel like a form of pleading. Like the disgraced monarch in Jean-Paul Laurens’ painting The Excommunication of Robert the Pious, they are still in power, but they are stripped of their spirit. It’s a portrait of triumph in reverse.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Hunted

Denver’s Khemmis traffic in longform doom metal, letting their anger spread gradually rather than unleashing it all in one torrent. It’s an unlikely sound to gain wider attention, as it’s resistant to translation and often encourages the depression that’s consistent with its tempos. Where many of their peers double down on Master of Reality worship or tread into more psychedelic or progressive waters (as is the case with Pallbearer, their main contemporary), they elongate the time-worn dual guitar harmonies of Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest, working within a more traditional metal context. Hunted, their second record, sees them making strides in finding their sound, with leads as poignant as their accompanying vocal work.
When your band’s vibe derives mainly from the melody, those leads better be solid, and Khemmis’ core, guitarists and vocalists Phil Pendergast and Ben Hutcherson, make the sorrow in their songs downright joyful. Opener “Above the Water” establishes this rule quickly, with jubilant leads that rival Iron Maiden’s sprightly guitar work. They’re not bogged down by Hunted’s overarching gloom; rather, they justify the songs’ weight, serving as a gliding bridge between lumbering cliffs. The ending of “Candlelight” shows how Pendergast and Hutcherson can be tricksters too, by bending what would be a showstopping riff and burying it in the murk. “Beyond the Door” even features a ZZ Top-esque boogie where they sound like Billy Gibbons wandering through a wasteland, the shuffle acting as a last-ditch flare for any sign of life. (Get a Texan in your band—drummer Zach Coleman, who’s also played in cult black metal duos Vasaeleth and Dagon—and that influence is bound to rub off somehow.)
Pendergast’s somber war cry carries the music as much as his own guitar work. His pealing tone suggests mightiness, but what shines through is what a toll such power can take. “Three Gates” plays around with how death metal and doom influences combat each other. “Gates” is also a nod to the Peaceville Three—Anathema, My Dying Bride, and Paradise Lost—whose earlier works fused death metal vocals, doom pacing, and a bleak outlook. Khemmis have stripped the cobwebs off those bands’ more Gothic moments and revealed the rock’n’roll heart lurking beneath, and “Gates” is a prime example of how their lack of varnish works in their favor.


Häxan is the first instrumental effort by the psych-rock band Dungen, a scoring of the 1926 animation classic The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

Häxan

Though firmly rooted in ’70s progressive and psychedelic rock, Dungen has never felt like a tribute act, throwback or genre exercise. By offering up honest-to-god great songs with memorable vocals leads, fluid performances, killer arrangements and an unflinching love of the flute, they nail the vibe of their beloved era while always sounding like themselves. On Häxan, the group presents a recent scoring of the 1926 animation classic The Adventures of Prince Achmed, replacing the original’s crackling symphonic score with fourteen interludes, rave-ups and mini-suites that nod knowingly to the past while remaining fresh.
Like most soundtracks, Häxan comes alive in context. Though marketed as a stand-alone album, it reads more as a deep psych mood board than a truly independent work. There’s an abundance of production details to get lost in, and the band sounds as vital as ever—dynamic, tight and assured. The fuzzy guitar and scraped piano strings on the title track give the feel of a genuine Morricone relic, and the gorgeous organ on “Kalifen” nods overtly to “A Whiter Shade of Pale” without feeling cheap. Recorded to and edited on tape, there’s an exquisite warmth to the entire album, with plenty of chunky, vibrant textures. Tiny details, like the trail of a spring reverb or a strikingly loud shaker panned way off in the stereo field give a sense of raw physicality, of players reacting to one another in a room.
One of the best moments comes early on, in “Wak-Wak’s Portar.” Sounding like a live bootleg from 1976, the group blurs into a monolithic, phased out wall of sound… except for the flute. Loud and in charge, it cuts across the whole mix, demanding to be heard. It’s an awesome, and funny, minute and a half, which suddenly gives way to some distant elevator music. Dungen are clearly enjoying themselves.
Once the album is finished, however, the songs stay with you less than these details. To start, at 40 minutes it’s barely more than half the length of Adventures, which means you can’t toss it on alongside the film and have a seamless experience start-to-finish.  Nonetheless, letting the two play simultaneously does have its rewards. Album opener “Peri Banu Vid Sjön” initially sounded like a bland bit of coffee shop fodder. But next to the opening credits, it bloomed, teasing out a melancholy ache behind the tale of adventure about to unfold.
At times, there were moments of startling synchronicity. More importantly, the moods simply matched up often. Dungen’s rollicking, questing rhythm section and flight-of-fancy solos sync up well with the flying horses, shapeshifting spell casters and voyages to faraway lands, and the more eerie, spaced out passages worked great in tenser scenes. Still, an edit that we could match to the film would have been a more-than-welcome addition. As it is, Häxan occupies an odd slot in Dungen’s hard hitting and respectably consistent discography: a labor of love that is less than essential, rewarding but not attention grabbing, remarkably ambitious and yet strangely ephemeral.


Lil Baby and Gunna are one of the best new rap duos and their latest project develops a chemistry and brotherhood few others can lay claim to.

Drip Harder

Drip Harder is the more opulent and flashier spiritual successor to Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan’s classic 2014 Atlanta mixtape, Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1. The influence of the two pumps through the veins of Lil Baby and Gunna, just as it does any rapper who debuted in the city after 2014. The similarities between the two mixtapes are glaring as it’s a duo of Atlanta-bred melody-driven rappers that spit so damn well with each other, aware that if they go hard enough this is their shot at superstardom. But where Lil Baby and Gunna separate themselves is a chemistry and brotherhood that few rap duos can lay claim to.
The chemistry of Lil Baby and Gunna breeds competition as the mixtape becomes a showcase of two rappers at the top of their game attempting to out-flex the other: If Gunna just copped a new coat, Lil Baby got a superior one that cost $6,500, and if Lil Baby has a VLONE hoodie, Gunna has the same one but in every color. They revealed their world of drip earlier this year when “Sold Out Dates” set the blueprint for Lil Baby and Gunna’s rapping style: a string-sampling instrumental from ATL mainstay Turbo, melodic Gunna hymns dedicated to his designer, and the gruffer bars of Lil Baby still acclimating to this life of showboating. This alchemy shapes Drip Harder into the rare major label collaborative mixtape that’s not on cruise control.
From the beginning, Lil Baby and Gunna are all-in, recruiting high-profile guests like Lil Durk and Nav to follow their lead on a track definitely titled in a 2018 hip-hop name-generator, “Off White VLONE.” Gunna ushers everyone into the piano-laden world where not much matters other than if your belt buckle matches your Balenciaga runners. The duo calls on Drake to go in over the Tay Keith drums he loves so much on “Never Recover” and, although Drake’s borrowed flow can’t keep up with Lil Baby and Gunna, none of their guests can, except for Young Thug. As their idol pops in on “My Jeans,” sliding in a chorus between their two short verses and it’s like a dad taking his two sons to the basketball court to play one-on-one.
Drip Harder thrives when Lil Baby and Gunna are alone, in their element, battling while also making sure to fill their quota of VLONE product placement (for instance, VLONE rims?). On “Drip Too Hard,” Lil Baby finds his melodic sweet spot on the hook only for Gunna to attempt to upstage him with smooth vocals that manage to keep his rapid delivery intact, all while tossing in a few boasts that are probably lies, but those are the best ones (“TSA harass me, so I took a private plane”). Their chemistry takes center stage on “Belly,” as Gunna passes his flow onto Baby who at this point is so confident he even celebrates his scent (“Spend thousands on fragrance she fuckin’ my odor”).
The shortcomings come to light every time Baby and Gunna separate. When Turbo doesn’t have both Baby and Gunna flowing their asses off, his monotonous drums patterns grow tiresome. A few of his beats blend into one another, and he’s just not versatile enough to carry a project on his back. And even the bouncy Gunna solo track “Style Stealer” features Gunna comically unaware that dressing like Willy Wonka is not a flex (“Flawless choker round my throat/Icy cane like Willy Wonka”).
Lil Baby and Gunna’s chemistry is a refreshing splash in an Atlanta hip-hop scene that has felt stagnant. It’s the duo establishing themselves, knowing they have some limitations, but capitalizing on what they do well. And even if they break up over some pettiness like Rich Gang, Drip Harder will be remembered as a moment that let hip-hop know it had two new superstars draped in “designer to the floor,” which, as Gunna said, “I can barely spell.”

Quality Control / Young Stoner Life / Capitol / Motown


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1979 debut from the rambunctious and politically charged UK group the Specials, a marquee document of the ska revival.

The Specials

On November 14, 1940, Germany’s months-long air raid better known as the Coventry Blitz reached a brutal climax, razing over 4,000 homes and killing hundreds in the English city. The Luftwaffe struck overnight, using the light of the full moon to sight their targets and cripple the industrial stronghold. Within hours, one-third of Coventry’s factories were leveled. Great chunks of the Daimler plant, birthplace of the first British car, were reduced to heaps of brick and dust. The once-sturdy town, the automotive hub of the West Midlands, was scattered about in smoking piles by morning. The German code word for the raid borrowed a name from one of Beethoven’s most famous works: Mondscheinsonate, or “Moonlight Sonata.”
After the war, recovery was incremental. Estates emerged on the city’s perimeter and apartment towers rose from the ash. As auto factories were rebuilt, Coventry reclaimed its status as “Britain’s motor city.” Car manufacturing boomed, peaking alongside Detroit in the 1950s and ’60s. Shopping centers and multi-tiered parking garages signaled the rise of post-war leisure. It was a boxy, cinder block vision of the future, but a glimpse forward nonetheless.
And then the city was leveled once more—by a much quieter force, lacking shape and purpose. A nationwide recession crept in, stripping Coventry of its core industry; between 1974 and 1982, local jobs in manufacturing were slashed nearly 50 percent, and the resuscitated city center decayed. Youth gangs roamed the streets, which were often lined with shuttered shop windows. Coventry’s second decline couldn’t be measured in rubble mounds. The debris was invisible and ambient—a sour but fertile soil that sprouted one of England’s most vibrant music scenes.
Unlike Motown, which coincided with Detroit’s economic surge, the Specials and 2 Tone burst from Coventry’s crumbling infrastructure. Christened by bandleader and organist Jerry Dammers, the 2 Tone genre was a bubbling concoction of Jamaican ska and snide, stripped-back punk. By the early 1970s, scores of people had relocated from the West Indies to Britain, many settling in the Midlands city. Some Jamaican-born Coventry residents would throw sound system parties, stacking speakers in great towers and blaring roots and rocksteady into the night. The cross-pollination of effervescent ska rhythms and blue-collar malcontent was inevitable.
Dammers was the son of an Anglican minister, but he devoted his life to a different trinity: the Beatles, the Stones, and the Kinks. He devoured records from Motown and Stax, and started writing songs at the age of 10. As a teenager, Dammers got hooked on radio hits like Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” and “Liquidator” by the Harry J All Stars. Cobbling together the Specials was a circuitous, multi-year phenomenon. The group was first known as the Automatics, and then the Coventry Automatics, and then the Special AKA, before their shorter, more sensible moniker was adopted. The lineup came together in pieces. At 15, Dammers played drums in his first band, Gristle, which included future Specials lead guitarist Roddy Radiation (née Byers). He met bassist Horace Panter while studying art at Lanchester Polytechnic. The two students shared a love of reggae and mischief. “We used to wreck the hippie parties, play Prince Buster records,” Panter once said of his early antics with Dammers. After college, Dammers played in a cover band, but longed to record his own music, a souped-up fusion of Jamaican pop and British grit.
In 1977, Dammers formed the Automatics with Panter, Jamaican rhythm guitarist Lynval Golding, drummer Silverton Hutchinson (later replaced by John Bradbury), and vocalist Tim Strickland. Strickland was quickly swapped out for a local 17-year-old named Terry Hall, who’d been plucked from a punk band called Squad. The following year, Roddy Radiation joined the fold, as did singer and toaster Neville Staple, a regular at Coventry’s Locarno Ballroom dance hall. These early details—the name changes and personnel revisions—were like the tiny bubbles creeping up the side of the pot before it boils over.
By 1979, Dammers had formed 2 Tone Records, giving a name and aesthetic to the nascent Coventry style. A 2 Tone single could be identified by a stripe of black and white checks stretching across the disc label, and the slim-suited rude boy logo—a nod to an early photograph of Peter Tosh. The Specials reconstructed the look, copping vintage suits from thrift shops and topping them with trim ties and pork pie hats. The name 2 Tone referred to the fabric of 1960s tonic suits, which was woven from two different colored threads for an iridescent effect. The first 2 Tone release was a split 7" from the Specials (then billed as the Special AKA) and fellow Coventrians the Selector. The Specials stamped Side A with “Gangsters,” their interpretation of Prince Buster’s bluebeat instrumental “Al Capone.” The band’s debut single kicked up the tempo of Buster’s original and curdled the mood just enough. “Why must you record my phone calls?/Are you planning a bootleg LP?” Terry Hall sang, his juvenile sneer toughening Dammers’ jaunty organ pulses.
The song was partly inspired by a fiasco the band endured at a nightclub in France. One evening, the landlady of a nearby hotel barged into the group’s dressing room with a couple of hired goons. Her previous lodgers, rowdy London punks the Damned, had trashed their room, and the proprietor demanded that the Specials cover the damages. At one point, she seized Lynval Golding’s Telecaster, sparking the lyric, “Can’t interrupt while I’m talking/Or they’ll confiscate all your guitars.” After a useless appearance from local police, the club owners restored order backstage. Their revenge on the French innkeeper, immortalized in “Gangsters,” was an early victory; the song climbed to No. 6 on the UK charts, and 2 Tone swept the country.
Meanwhile, Elvis Costello spent the summer of ’79 crisscrossing through England on trains, sustained by, as he once put it, “half a bottle of gin and some little blue pills.” Costello had just released Armed Forces, his terrific third album with the Attractions, but he was preparing for a new role on those hazy railway commutes. As the producer of the Specials’ forthcoming self-titled debut, Costello was devising a strategy to capture the kinetic flash of their performances. He trailed them from one seaside town to the next, catching as many live gigs as possible. “My job was to get the band on tape before some more skilled producer got ahold of them and screwed it up completely, by perfecting things that didn’t need perfecting,” Costello recalled in his 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. “Jerry [Dammers]’s dogged pursuit of his ideals and the improbable chemistry of the lineup did the rest.”
With the addition of horn players Dick Cuthell and Rico Rodriguez, the Specials had almost enough members to fill a baseball team. Costello jammed them all into TW Studios, a cramped space under a laundromat in West London that smelled of detergent and “drying socks,” as Costello remembers. The ensuing sessions were teeming with pranks, jury-rigged sound effects, and the occasional cameo. Costello, by then an elder statesman of New Wave, was a scrappy, madcap producer. He stomped amps with Doc Martens and beat tin trays with a broom handle to enhance the percussion. Everything reverberated off the studio’s concrete floor, lending the album a spacious, metallic quality, as though it’d been recorded in an industrial warehouse rather than a Fulham hovel. He also enlisted Pretenders leader and ultimate cool girl Chrissie Hynde to track the lusty panting on “Stupid Marriage,” and a brief condemnation of “slags” on “Nite Klub.”
Costello fell victim to the band’s drunken hijinks, but he leveraged it to improve the album. Sure, they laughed at the bespectacled singer when a chair collapsed beneath him early into recording. And yes, Neville Staple shut down a mixing session when he strolled into the studio and shot Costello with a .45 pistol that was, fortunately, loaded with blanks. But like a brave substitute teacher, Costello was unruffled; he embraced their buffoonery, perhaps fueling the fire by supplying the band with plenty of liquor. Gearing up to record the scorching, antisocial “Nite Klub,” Costello was hellbent on replicating the sweaty confines of a concert venue. He stocked up on booze, switched off the lights, and stuffed the studio with the band members and their bawdy friends. In the dark, plied with alcohol, human nature did the rest. The backing track is a drunkard’s symphony on its own, rendered with clinking bottles, strident chitchat, and an urgent demand for refreshment: “Pass that beer! Pass that beer! Pass that beer!”
Done and dusted, The Specials was released in October of ’79. Cruising in the wake of “Gangsters,” it scaled the British charts, landing in the Top 20 and priming the group for their first No. 1 single. “Too Much Too Young” was an unlikely hit, a dubby, downbeat shuffle about wasted youth and unplanned pregnancy. Interpolating Lloyd Charmers’ raunchy 1969 song “Birth Control,” the Specials drowned the piece in dishwater and stale tea. Hall took aim at a young woman, who was “married with a kid” and “chained to the cooker” instead of partying with him. “Ain’t he cute?/No he ain’t,” Hall sneered at her baby. “He’s just another burden on the welfare state.” These totems of domesticity—marriage, procreation—might have been pillars of a hit song 25 years prior, but “Too Much Too Young” was built on their wreckage. That the single reached No. 1 was a testament to England’s dispirited youth. Unemployment was on the rise, and the entire country was heading for a recession. It was an unappealing time to hunker down and have a family.
“Too Much Too Young” was also a bit of a sham. For all of its assumed social commentary, Dammers later admitted that he wrote it out of jealousy. His spiteful, sexist lyrics are an occasional blight on the band’s debut. “Little Bitch” is especially cruel. You could argue that it is a working-class rebuke of rich interlopers peacocking through the underground, until Hall twists the knife: “And you think it’s about time that you died/And I agree, so you decide on suicide/You tried but you never quite carried it off/You only wanted to die in order to show off.” Decades later, after his own suicide attempt, Hall expressed regret over the song. “It felt like a horrible personal attack on someone I didn’t know,” he said. The band eventually dropped it from their live set.
Despite the odd lapse into chauvinism, the Specials denied the uglier schools of punk philosophy. They rejected nihilism and fascist iconography, and took an aggressive stance against racism, often marching into the crowd to eject bigots from their live shows. Stray members of the neo-fascist National Front party would find their way to Specials gigs, sieg-heiling and hurling coins at the group. Hall would heckle the skinheads, and anyone else who rejected the positivity of their music: “We’d like to thank you lot up front who’re dancing and the rest back there—shit to you!” Despite the occasional intruder, Specials’ fans were largely a progressive, rambunctious crew. The band supported left-wing causes like Rock Against Racism, the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament, and the Right to Work March.
“Because we are multiracial, we want to see people live together the same way we work on our music,” Lynval Golding told The New York Times in 1981. “Issues like racism and unemployment can’t be pushed aside.” In the early ’80s, Golding was the victim of two separate racist attacks in London and Coventry. The latter left him nearly dead after the assailant slashed his jugular with a smashed bottle. “I only want to live in peace with people,” Golding told a reporter from his hospital bed. “I didn’t attempt to fight back and I don’t intend to start now.” Three years prior, Dammers penned the anti-racist skank “Doesn’t Make It Alright” in direct response to the hate that was putrefying an extreme sect of British youth. “Just because you’re a Black boy/Just because you’re a white,” Hall sings in his most tender register. “It doesn’t mean you've got to hate him/It doesn’t mean you’ve got to fight.” Today, the words read like a nursery rhyme—a bouquet of good intentions masking the complex stench of reality.
Ultimately, the Specials were necessary idealists. They managed to transcend the doldrums of their hometown, not by fleeing to London or the States, but by enriching the community around them. “The whole idea of the Specials and 2 Tone was to do something for Coventry,” Terry Hall told The Guardian in 1997. Hall attended school in the center of town, and his parents worked blue-collar jobs in the city’s once-booming auto industry. As a child, he felt suffocated by the oppressive, endless concrete, the spiking street violence, the stagnant gray Hell. He frequently asked himself: “How do I get away from Coventry?” For a few electrifying years, Hall and the Specials embraced the battered metropolis and built a refuge all their own.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


Armed with advice for the next generation and lots of thank-you notes, Open Mike Eagle’s funny and reflective ninth album seeks a sense of closure within his discography.

Open Mike Eagle: Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering

Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering

Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering should have a familiar ring to it: The title first appeared on a print illustrated by McKay Felt and sold with an exclusive vinyl edition of Open Mike Eagle’s 2022 release Component System With the Auto Reverse. The two records share a similar cast of characters, but where Component System focused on the lasting imprint of hip-hop history, Another Triumph plays like an ode to the music and memories that shaped Eagle’s own character and career. Along for the ride are STILL RIFT and Video Dave, who appear courtesy of his label, Auto Reverse; his longtime producers Child Actor, Quelle Chris, and Illingsworth; and mastering engineer Daddy Kev, founder of the influential former Los Angeles club night Low End Theory, where Open Mike Eagle and his peers first found their artistic footing.
Open Mike Eagle stuffs an abundance of obscure counterculture references and chuckle-worthy ramblings into the album’s brief 25 minutes, while also stepping back to prioritize guest verses and vivid imagery. “Every album is a little collection of pieces of yesterdays,” he admitted on the previous record; here, he pays tribute to memory, delivering a career’s worth of liner notes with the emotional maturity J. Cole strove for on “Note to Self.” Throughout the album Eagle thanks scores of people by name, from Thundercat to Dumbfoundead to Kenny Segal, as if he’s monologuing at the Thanksgiving table.
The other Triumph of Ghetto Engineering might be 2017’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, to which this album plays like an unofficial sequel: In a direct parallel, Open Mike Eagle spends its opening seconds whisper-rapping over a muffled electric guitar solo. His amorphous fusion of singing and rapping has ripened to a more confident resolve, while the beats remain sample-heavy and hypnotically lethargic. “the wire s3 e1” revisits the image of Chicago’s now-demolished Robert Taylor Homes, where those childhood daydreams unfolded. Joined by fellow L.A. poet Blu for their first song together in seven years, Open Mike Eagle winks at the two Brick Body Kids tracks produced by Exile as he grapples with similar themes—isolation, inner conflict—years later. He’s still searching for himself amid the rubble of childhood memory.
As he observes the world through a more mature lens, Eagle’s rapping remains as astute as ever. On “A new rap festival called falling loud,” he provides fatherly advice to those coming of age today, such as his own teenage son, Asa. Playful reminders like “Don’t do the shrooms when it’s Christmas dinner” underscore the humor and humility of Open Mike Eagle’s final wish: “When I die, mix up my ashes into some coffee grounds.” He finds levity in the inevitable, but rap seems bigger than him now that he’s living in a world where his heroes are no longer immortal. Open Mike Eagle’s feature on billy woods’ “Fool’s Gold” marked one of the first times he addressed MF DOOM in his work; on Component System’s “for DOOM,” Eagle paid tribute to the late supervillain. On “a new rap festival called falling loud,” he reminds a new generation that mortality only looms as large as you let it: “You probably drink the ashes of dead people all the time and don’t know it.”
The album ends at its emotional peak, the heaviness in his voice evident throughout closer “mad enough to aim a pyramid at you.” Each time he emphasizes the word “everything,” he pauses ever so slightly to soak in its gravity and totality—the anguish, the love, the nostalgia. After 20 years of making music, Eagle seeks a kind of closure within his own discography. Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering becomes a personal scrapbook and an open letter: tangible evidence of who he’s become through fatherhood, divorce, and nine solo albums.