On their new Is Survived By, LA post-hardcore outfit Touché Amoré emphasizes a studied recklessness, cranking out one anthemic riff after another, providing a familiar melodic framework that just skirts total recall.

Is Survived By

After a bracing EP and two genre-revitalizing LPs, nothing was the same for Los Angeles post-hardcore band Touché Amoré going into Is Survived By. Lead singer Jeremy Bolm’s got a lot on his mind-- He’s concerned about what his third album will mean for his legacy as an artist and whether he’s focused too much on what he does rather than who he is. He sees the replication of his father’s shortcomings in his current relationships, but realizes his old man did the best he could. Fake friends are forgiven and then quickly forgotten as Bolm starts to like who he’s becoming. Or, in short, Touché Amoré started from the bottom and the whole team’s fuckin’ here on the superlative Is Survived By, including Balance & Composure’s Jon Simmons, Andy Hull of Manchester Orchestra and revered indie producer Brad Wood.
Granted, it’s unlikely that Is Survived By will divert the attention of Drake listeners this week even if they’d find plenty of thematic similarities. But it’s not impossible and Touché Amoré appear keenly aware that Is Survived By has them poised to reach beyond a fanbase that can be described as “hardcore” one way or the other. For the most part, Bolm is trying to maintain some sort of grace while kinda freaking out about the situation-- “you can call this coming clean or a repeat of what you know/ about the struggles I once had as I’m learning to let go”, goes the frantic introduction of “To Write Content.” He tips his hand with the mere title of “Social Caterpillar” and assures the listener, “don’t worry I still get dizzy in the usual situations.” Sure, he was still pulling hours at a Burbank record shop this year, but as the frontman for an intensely loved and meaningful punk band, he gets put in a lot of unusual situations for the typical guy.
For example, the one he encounters on opener “Just Exist”, where someone inquires how he’d “like to be remembered”, the sort of question typically asked of, say, Drake. His answer becomes the sole joke on an album of almost superhuman sobriety-- “I simply smiled and said ‘I’d rather stay forever.’” By the song’s end, he figures out the trick is in the title (“you’ll never know much of the truth/so I’ll just exist”) and as insular as Bolm’s concerns may be, Touché Amoré veer towards accessibility in all aspects on Is Survived By.
Bolm still maintains the same jagged wail that got Touché Amoré (not wrongfully) tagged as “screamo” at the outset-- all grit and serration, no affectation-- and the band provides plenty of max-chaos-per-second supercolliders in the form of “DNA” and “Blue Angel". Only this time, they’re placed in the context of these funny things called “songs.” Some of them run up to three whole minutes and beyond, some are slow and even pretty in a twinkly emo kind of way (“To Write Content”, “Non Fiction”), some are love songs and all of them are produced with clarity and precision by a guy whose big credits are for Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins and Sunny Day Real Estate records that are older than a lot of the kids I see at Touché Amoré shows.
Is Survived By is about 50% longer than any other Touché Amoré album and the quintet wisely instruct the listener how to pace themselves. The near a cappella “Praise/Love” and near post-rock instrumental “Non Fiction” would be remarkable for introducing variety alone; in the scheme of Is Survived By, they’re plot devices, introducing lyrical and musical motifs repeated immediately thereafter in “Anyone/Anything” and “Steps". These tracks jolt the listener right back with choruses that go outside the scope of “melodic hardcore” into a bruised and spittle-flecked pop-punk that comes awfully close to radio-friendly, even if you’ll never hear it at Warped Tour.
In essence, it’s an excellent band continuing to be excellent with more people paying attention. They haven’t lost sight of what got them here, however the band downplays their own virtuosity by emphasizing a studied recklessness, cranking out one anthemic riff after another, providing a familiar melodic framework that just skirts total recall. They serve as a setting for a frontman who barks out words that take the shape of narratives and conversations rather than poetry. In particular, “Harbor” and “To Write Content” are story-songs as well as cerebral exercises based upon the multiple (mis)readings of their titles. On the latter, Bolm meets Hull for the first time through mutual friends in New York and communes over a common concern shared by an LA punk band and a southern, grungy emo act-- can your personal happiness be an artistic liability?
There is a lot of “I” and “me” on Is Survived By, but it focuses on the social utility of the self, that a content person is more likely to make a positive difference. On the closing title track, Bolm implores the listener to “write a song that everyone can sing along to/ so when you’re gone, you can live on/they won’t forget you.” It’s easy to meet that statement with cynicism: surely, our society would be better off if fewer people believed they were a special little snowflake with a song that needs to be heard, right? But if you haven’t seen Touché Amoré live, you should, in part because it provides the proper visual-- the raw-throated, stone-faced man you hear on Is Survived By is liable to appear cleancut, constantly smiling even and he knows his band would be nothing without you. “Is Survived By” is pretty much an audio thank you note. The physicality of Is Survived By is more like a bear hug than an ass-kicking, wherein the passion can be scary at first, but it’s disarming, done out of love. They take this stuff seriously because this, right here, matters. You matter. And within these songs is the struggle in realizing that self-esteem comes more from estimable acts than outside validation. Is Survived By should receive plenty praise anyway, but Touché Amoré lead by example.


This 2xCD collection, which draws from four albums and other material the Velvet Underground drummer recorded over two decades, includes guest spots from her VU bandmates as well as Daniel Johnston and members of Half Japanese, the Violent Femmes, and Sonic Youth.

Moe Tucker: I Feel So Far Away: Anthology 1974-1998

I Feel So Far Away: Anthology 1974-1998

One of the most indelible moments in PBS's 1995 "Rock & Roll" documentary comes when we see the Velvet Underground's drummer, Maureen "Moe" Tucker, slapping her thighs-- bang bang bang bang bang, no variation, no emphasis-- and then half-grinning at the camera and explaining "That's 'I'm Waiting for the Man'." Tucker was the Thing of the Velvets' Fantastic Four, the B.A. Baracus of their A-Team, a hedgehog in a band of foxes: They were avant-gardists and songcrafters and texturalists, but she was an unstoppable brute-force musician who grounded and drove their first three albums and their live shows.
Her singular gift (and game-amateur singing voice) also made her the least likely member of the Velvet Underground to have a solo career, and after briefly rejoining the Doug Yule-led lineup, she drifted away from music for nearly a decade. Aside from a remake of the Velvets' then-unreleased "I'm Sticking With You" recorded in 1974 with the band's disciples Jonathan Richman and Willie Alexander, I Feel So Far Away picks up the story in 1980, picking over the four studio albums and other material she recorded over the next two decades.
For the most part, she stuck to comfortable territory: low-polish, uncomplicated rock'n'roll, with the occasional heart-on-sleeve slow one. Six of the songs on these two discs are Velvets remakes; two more are by Bo Diddley, and a third is named after him. There are covers of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", "To Know Him Is to Love Him", "Then He Kissed Me", and "Danny Boy". Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison all turn up in Tucker's groups here-- all three of them on "I'm Not". (Other guest stars include Daniel Johnston, Half Japanese, two Violent Femmes, and three Sonic Youth.)
Two discs of solo Moe is probably a surplus for anyone but Velvet Underground aficionados, although there are a lot of those. The only original song that really stands up alongside their canon is "Hey Mersh!", from Tucker's headlong 1989 album Life in Exile After Abdication, with Reed's lead guitar carving his initials all over it. There's also something to be said for 1982's Playin' Possum, a bunch of home-recorded oldies (plus "Heroin") on which Tucker played everything herself: It's loose, out of tune, and clearly done purely for the fun of flexing the old muscles. And if anybody's got the right to write a ripoff of the Velvets' "I Can't Stand It" (1991's "Too Shy"), it's the inventor of that cavewoman beat.
Tucker apparently quit making music about 10 years ago; she was most recently in the public eye about a year and a half ago, when she appeared on TV news as a Tea Party supporter. Her strongest political statements, though, appear here: "That's B.A.D." and "Spam Again", both of which concern the economic trap Tucker found herself in as one of the working poor. That a member of one of America's most important rock bands could have to struggle to support her kids with a low-wage job at Wal-Mart is an embarrassment for both the country and the music business.


Gaussian Curve is a multi-generational ensemble focusing on beautiful slow-burn ambience. Clouds unfolds like a dream, and to call it "atmospheric" would be an extreme understatement. It probably bears as much in common with watercolor as it does most electronic music.

Clouds

One of last year's most warmly received archival discoveries was Talk to the Sea, a collection of unreleased recordings by the Italian musician Gigi Masin. His debut album, Wind, self-released in 1986, is an understated gem that falls somewhere between Balearic ambient music and secular new age, with echoes of Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, and Arthur Russell's World of Echo. It's not terribly well known, but those who have heard it tend to be passionate about it. A former radio DJ, Masin has done other things over the years, including a 1989 split LP with This Heat's Charles Hayward, on Sub Rosa, and, in the '00s, a handful of recordings for small Italian labels. But he's remained largely under the radar. I had never heard of Masin until I encountered Talk to the Sea, released by the fledgling Amsterdam label Music From Memory, but its impact was immediate—if "impact" is quite the right word for a sound so warmly, woozily amniotic, a sound entirely without hard surfaces or sharp edges.
Masin returns here as one-third of Gaussian Curve, a multi-generational ensemble that also includes the Scottish musician Jonny Nash, a founder of the ESP Institute label and member of the synth-besotted softronica act Land of Light, and Amsterdam's Marco Sterk, better known for his woozy house productions under the Young Marco alias. Nash and Sterk first met Masin in the fall of 2013, and they wound up briefly jamming together in the house of a friend. The three musicians reconvened in Amsterdam in early 2014, and they ended up completing eight tracks in a single weekend. Clouds is the result of those sessions, and it's every bit as dreamlike as the musicians make the weekend sound. "It was almost like we weren't involved," Nash told Juno Plus. "It just slipped out."
The eight songs here, all instrumentals, feel less like standalone pieces than variations on a common theme. They share similar instrumentation, and they're all uniformly limpid and languid. Masin sets the tone, and the pace, with slow-moving chords on acoustic piano or Rhodes keyboard, while Nash and Sterk flesh out the songs with gently meandering electric guitar, wispy synthesizer pads, and, occasionally, trumpet and melodica. Given the trumpet, the music often brings to mind Jon Hassell's Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street. A few songs feature rudimentary drum-machine programming, mostly just tuned toms and woodblocks, that might be mistaken for dripping faucets. To call it "atmospheric" would be an extreme understatement. (On the closing "Red Light", they hold a microphone out the studio window and record the voices and footfalls of the alley outside.) It probably bears as much in common with watercolor as it does most electronic music.
While the music unfolds with about as much drama as a smoke ring wafting towards the ceiling—about as much consequence, too—these are masterfully crafted mood pieces. In the opening "Talk to the Church", Masin mimics the chimes of a bell tower that loomed over the trio's studio, his chords gently bouncing and swaying, enlivened by millisecond-long syncopations and subtle shifts in volume. And despite the limited palette and the uniform tempos, they wisely change keys for virtually every song. So while the view remains the same, the light shifts, ever so subtly. True to the title, the experience of this short album, just 38 minutes long, feels a little like a time-lapse film of clouds crossing the sky—of day turning to night, and back again. With the closing "Red Light", the music returns to its original key, and it feels like things have come full circle. The logical response—my response, anyway—is to resume the cycle, and launch into the daybreak bells of "Talk to the Church" all over again.


The Chicago composer and clarinetist’s latest album interrogates the supposed “death” of jazz. Structured as an Afrofuturist requiem, it offers an impassioned look at the genre’s role in Black history.

Requiem for Jazz

Rumors of jazz’s demise have hung over the genre for decades. In 1960, composer and filmmaker Edward Bland asked, “What, then, is the future of jazz? None. Jazz is dead!” His 1959 film The Cry of Jazz had argued that the structural elements of the genre—its recurring forms and chord changes—could not evolve. Whereas Ornette Coleman simply abandoned these restraints on the same year’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, Bland saw the exhaustion of jazz’s fundamental musical materials as its end.
“If jazz is dead, why wasn’t there a funeral?” asks Angel Bat Dawid. Requiem for Jazz, the Chicago composer, clarinetist, and educator’s latest album, is a requiem mass for jazz recorded 60 years after Bland’s film. The service was held at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in 2019 and featured Tha ArkeStarzz, a 15-piece instrumental ensemble, and Tha Choruzz, a four-person choir, along with dancers and visual artists. The 12 parts of Dawid’s Requiem, from the Introit to the Lux Aeterna, are adapted from the Roman Catholic Liturgical Requiem Missal and paired with dialogue from The Cry of Jazz. Later, Dawid created interludes that sampled the performance and added her own Auto-Tuned vocals, clarinet, and drum machines to create a sprawling, 24-track opus designed to, finally, lay the genre to rest.
The death of jazz was not necessarily a tragedy. For Bland, the death of its body was necessary for its spirit to survive. Jazz’s endlessly repeating choruses represented a “futureless future,” the cyclical daily oppression of Black Americans, while the elaboration of the melody by the soloist reaffirmed an “eternal present,” the constant improvisational creativity needed for survival. The Cry of Jazz intercuts images of poverty in Black Chicago neighborhoods with footage of joyful church gatherings. “Jazz is dead because the restraints and suffering of the Negro have to die,” the narrator says. “Jazz is alive because the Negro spirit must endure.” Dawid leads her ensemble like a minister who has taken Bland’s film as her text. “Let me preach,” she proclaims in the interlude to “LACRIMOSA- Weeping Our Lady of Sorrow.” “In the movie, he said, ‘We made a memory of our past and a promise of all to come.’ Guess what, I wasn’t born in 1959! I am the promise! Everyone on this stage is the promise!”
Dawid’s ensemble grieves for jazz’s memory and exalts in its promise on songs that range from melancholy ballads to angry martial chants to rollicking improvisations. Throughout, they recount jazz’s role as a momentary stay against systemic oppression, what Bland calls “the Negro’s answer to America’s ceaseless attempts to obliterate him.” “KYRIE ELEISON- Lawd Hav’ Merci” is a slow dirge, a cappella except for subtle percussion, that builds from a dense choral harmony into a wild lament for the “stolen children of Africa,” while “OFFERTURIUM-HOSTIAS- Humility” celebrates the genre’s apotheosis as “the one element in American life where whites must be humble to the Negro” with a jaunty tune centered around a freewheeling piano solo by Dr. Charles Joseph Smith. The album’s climax, “AGNUS DEI- Jazz is Dead!” is a dramatic number in which the strings and horns trade swirling melodies over plodding percussion while the choir sings that “The jazz body is dead/But the spirit is alive.”
Requiem for Jazz borrows from spirituals, the blues, rap, and Mozart, but Dawid’s most direct influence is Sun Ra, a fellow Southern migrant who moved to Chicago to enlighten audiences with cosmic jazz. An early iteration of Ra’s Arkestra was featured in The Cry of Jazz demonstrating the forms and changes that Bland said doomed the genre. In the following decades, Ra’s interplanetary ethos shaped the Afrofuturist movement that informs the work of Dawid and other artists, like Moor Mother and Matana Roberts, who are invested in notions of Black temporality. Bland’s film posed similar questions by positing that jazz’s “eternal present” guards against the “futureless future” imposed upon Black Americans by white America. It is doubly appropriate, then, that the current leader of the Arkestra, Marshall Allen, appears at the end of the concert playing a blazing sax solo to help Tha ArkeStarzz mourn the loss of jazz.
Requiem for Jazz is a complex record, requiring sustained attention and careful thought. Though it lacks the fiery rage and visceral immediacy of 2020’s LIVE, its nuanced critique of jazz’s role in Black history is an important and necessary continuation of the conversation that Bland began over six decades ago. The concert is as much an exorcism as a funeral rite, an attempt to free the participants from the ugly ghosts of America’s racist past in order to make a different future possible. Dawid believes in the power of jazz—not its restraining elements, but its creative potential—with the evangelical fervor of a preacher, and expects to see the results of her faith enacted in the world. She concludes her Requiem with a “long tone,” a collective hum generated by the band and the audience. She brings a child onstage to dedicate the performance to: “I don’t want this to be what she has to look forward to, OK?” Dawid pleads, enunciating each word carefully. “I don’t want that for her! So let’s take this deep breath, and let’s let out this tone, so that our future can be bright.”


The seven albums after Bruce Springsteen’s commercial peak tell a story of lost faith and self-doubt. It’s a darker, messier portrait that still includes one of his essential records.

Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: The Album Collection Vol. 2, 1987-1996

The Album Collection Vol. 2, 1987-1996

A man works his whole adult life and finds himself exhausted, disillusioned. He looks for comfort in his community and feels trapped. He changes his clothes, his hair, his face—it only makes him feel more lost. Marriage isn’t what he thought it’d be, and neither is the money or stability he’d always dreamed about. The things that seemed so important, well, now he’s not so sure. In 1987, a sharp-dressed man stands beside a Cadillac Coupe De Ville on the side of the road. Eight years later, he wanders the deserts of California wearing a large brimmed hat.
Bruce Springsteen’s output between 1987 and 1996—remastered and collected in this new vinyl box set—tells a story of lost faith and self-doubt. If Springsteen were simply the one telling the story and not also the flailing protagonist tangled up in it, there’d be some catharsis, or at the very least a saxophone solo. While the previous box set in this series chronicled his steady rise to fame through 1984’s commercial peak Born in the U.S.A., the tension throughout the music here stems from his abstinence of those things that had endeared him to the public. It’s a darker, messier portrait.
For many fans, this period can be categorized as a time of “Others.” There was the “Other Band”: the cutting if inevitable name given to the group of Los Angeles studio musicians Springsteen assembled after breaking up his beloved E Street Band in 1988. This “Other Band,” who aspired to harden his sound and add a more soulful sensibility, can be heard on three of these seven records: 1992’s dual studio releases Human Touch and Lucky Town and the following year’s sprightly but inessential In Concert/MTV Plugged. With this band, Springsteen played some excellent shows and added a few new classics to his repertoire (“Living Proof,” “If I Should Fall Behind,” “My Beautiful Reward”), but they never quite inspired him like his most trusted collaborators. There’s a reason why they never outgrew their nickname.
Beyond his accompanists, Springsteen spent this era in search of other characters, other places. With his forties on the horizon, he left New Jersey to settle in New York City and later L.A. He recorded his most understated music (on 1995’s solo album The Ghost of Tom Joad) and his most straightforward rock songs (in the murky barroom fog of Human Touch). In the lyrics, he went as deep into character as he’d ever allow himself (in Tom Joad’s thoroughly researched immigrant ballads) and the closest to autobiography he’d ever come. On some of these records, he even sings from the perspective of a wealthy, aging rockstar, one who draws analogies about “eating caviar and dirt” and finds humor in the garish caricatures of himself he finds hanging in North Jersey pawn shops. Sometimes he dresses like a cowboy; sometimes he dresses like a pirate cowboy. If you weren’t specifically looking for him, you might pass him by.
Accordingly, these are often remembered as Springsteen’s other albums. As in, there’s the Bruce we all know and love, and then there’s this stuff. Some of this music is so tangential to his career that it feels almost like parody: 1996’s Blood Brothers EP, now on vinyl for the first time, is a collection of outtakes from the bonus tracks on his Greatest Hits set. Human Touch is an album cobbled together over several languid years during which Springsteen aimed to compose admittedly “generic” music to pad his upcoming live shows. In 1992, a Rolling Stone journalist asked if he considered scrapping that record once he wrote its more inspired companion release, Lucky Town—a fair question for an artist who famously left some of his finest songs on the cutting room floor, who considered shelving even Born to Run because it didn’t measure up to his standards.
“Yeah,” Springsteen responded. “Except that every time I listened to it, I liked it.”
If there’s a revelation to be found during this era, that’s it. There’s a calmness to this music, a breeziness that counters the intensive self-inquiry in the lyrics. “These days I’m feeling alright/Except I can’t tell my courage from my desperation,” he sings in Lucky Town’s “Local Hero,” a distinction that would have hardly been worth mentioning on previous records. For so much of Springsteen's career, desperation and courage came packaged together: That’s precisely what placed so many of his characters on the road, hurtling toward whatever promised land they dreamed up on the other side. Now, everything seemed to have a price. In an era of so much abandonment, the thing that’s really missing on these records is that sense of blinding, reckless optimism, of transcendence somehow within his grasp. In its place is acceptance, hard-won and subdued, the kind of remove that comes when you find something more important in your life than work. The victory is costlier; the wisdom is quieter.
Take, for example, “Straight Time,” a gorgeous, fingerpicked folk song from The Ghost of Tom Joad. Here, Springsteen gives us a quintessential character in his songbook: a factory worker returning to his family after serving an extended prison sentence. On Nebraska, we might have heard the gritty rundown of his crimes. On Born to Run, we’d witness the epic homecoming celebration. In “Straight Time,” Springsteen barely rises above a ghostly, defeated grumble, narrating the unspoken anxiety guiding his character’s every move. “Seems you can’t get any more than half free,” he sighs.
It’s a lesson that Springsteen learned throughout the ’90s. In retrospect, it’s easy to hear this music as a brief detour before he returned to the past he’d been avoiding: moving his bandmate and wife Patti Scialfa and their children back to New Jersey; relaunching the E Street Band; finding new inspiration in their “a-one-two-three-four” rock’n’roll momentum. The band’s reunion, kickstarted in 1999 and more-or-less chuggin’ along to this day, leaves these records in a peculiar place. The remasters are welcome, even if sound quality is rarely the issue on Springsteen LPs. Not to mention, a compilation of this era isn’t quite definitive without his 1990 solo shows, or non-album cuts like the Oscar-winning “Streets of Philadelphia,” or the mini E Street reunion included at the end of 1995’s Greatest Hits. Instead, this collection provides a fascinating if incomplete dive into an uncelebrated era: a map of the places Bruce Springsteen burrowed away while he was presumed to be lost.
The set kicks off with 1987’s Tunnel of Love, his high point as a writer and one of his truly essential releases. Springsteen has said he designed the album to be like a well, something people can return to “for fun, or sustenance, or some faith, or some companionship.” Like Nebraska, it seems designed for solitary listening. Some of Springsteen’s records build and explode; Tunnel of Love sighs and soothes and, even in its darkness, brings a sense of peace.
The ghost of country music glides through Tunnel of Love, as if it came in through the open window in the garage studio where he recorded the album between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. over the span of three weeks. Exploring a genre that often inspired him thematically more than formally, Springsteen is rumored to have considered making an old-school country record to follow-up the arena rock blockbuster Born in the U.S.A., enlisting virtuoso harmonica and fiddle players in place of his E Street bandmates. Somewhere along the way, he decided to work by himself, mostly on acoustic guitar and a new state-of-the-art synthesizer. The result is a haunted solo collection with a few notable appearances—Nils Lofgren’s slithering, metallic guitar solo in the title track, Patti Scialfa’s affirming vocal accompaniment in “One Step Up.” The mood throughout is isolation, working through the same questions and hoping to summon new wisdom.
In the video for first single “Brilliant Disguise,” Springsteen lets us in on a convincing recreation of that process. Performing alone at the kitchen table, he stares into the camera as it zooms deeper and deeper into his eyes, increasingly focused and intense. “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of,” he sings before it fades to black. Those words, and the ensuing fade, form the emotional core of Tunnel of Love: an album that lingers and gleams like the moment ahead of a revelation. “Usually right before I put a record out, I have a lot of conflict,” he said calmly around the time of its release. “This record, it was like… Stuff came very naturally.”
He continued following his intuition. After tossing around the idea of supporting the album with his first-ever solo tour, Springsteen invited the E Street Band along for a brief run of dates with a horn section. Four highlights from those shows, including an acoustic take on “Born to Run” that sounds like some old lullaby unearthed, were released on 1988’s Chimes of Freedom EP. Once the tour wrapped up, Bruce sent the band their pink slips. Around that time, he also divorced his wife of four years, actress Julianne Phillips. In the liner notes of Tunnel of Love—his album obsessed with what happens at the end of our adult relationships—he included a small shout-out to her: “Thanks Juli.”
For a collection of songs about love, there is very little actual intimacy on Tunnel of Love. Its couples are illustrated instead by the spaces between them. “The lights go out and it’s just the three of us,” Springsteen sings in the title track: “You, me, and all that stuff we’re so scared of.” In “Walk Like a Man,” he thinks back to his wedding day but can only seem to remember that troubling look in his father’s eyes when he gazed at him from the altar. The music is lush and warm, but the things that are missing dominate the frame.
Tunnel of Love—and with it, Bruce Springsteen’s imperial run in the ’80s—closes with “Valentine’s Day,” a ballad so slow and serene that it’s almost dirge-like. To a droning waltz, he narrates from the driver’s seat, with “one hand steady on the wheel, one hand trembling over my heart.” A rush of images flashes before him: the dreary, familiar highways of New Jersey; his own mortality; a friend’s new baby; a partner he’s leaving behind, maybe for good this time. In some Springsteen songs, the journey is the point. At any moment on Tunnel of Love, it’s difficult to imagine what lies ahead. How far do you have to travel before you feel free of yourself? What do you expect to find? Where do you even go?


Produced mostly by Southside and Lex Luger, the collaboration between Waka Flocka Flame and French Montana sounds more well-grounded in the streets of Atlanta than the East Coast rap scene.

Waka Flocka Flame / French Montana: Lock Out

Lock Out

Last year was a weird one for albums by rap duos. We had Jay-Z and Kanye, Eminem and Royce Da 5'9", and of course Gucci Mane, who released two major label duo albums-- the disappointing Ferrari Boyz with Waka Flocka Flame and the bizarre BAYTL with Kreayshawn associate V-Nasty. This time out, Waka pairs with French Montana, who has worked extensively with the currently imprisoned Max B, formally of the Harlem based Byrdgang.
Coming from Atlanta by way of New York City, Waka's energetic and aggressive style has endured longer than most probably would have suspected. When he released his first single, "O Let's Do It", he was mostly known as the guy standing in the shadows of old Gucci Mane and OJ Da Juiceman videos. French Montana has been around for a few more years than Waka in the New York mixtape circuit, but last year's "Choppa Choppa Down" and his most recent single, "Shot Caller", got him signed to Bad Boy Records and got his name out there nationwide.
Given the players, you might expect Lock Out to be an East Coast rap affair, but with a couple of exceptions (the bouncy seriousness of "Dat All" and the triumphant finale of "Promise"), the tape sounds well-grounded in the streets of Atlanta. The production on Lock Out is handled mostly by two producers with whom Waka has worked extensively (Southside and Lex Luger), alongside other lesser-knowns who share an appreciation for dark, brooding beats that are, ultimately, pretty hard to distinguish from one another. The first half of the tape finds French Montana struggling to find his footing as his flow reduces songs to a slow creak, while Waka affirms his ability to rip any rap instrumental he comes across. "1230" has a great opening verse by Waka, and he delivers one of the strongest hooks on the mixtape, but the momentum that track builds is lost as soon as French appears, as he just cannot keep up with Waka's pace.
French Montana does have a few moments like "Call It Dat", a rare track where they display an equal amount of intensity. The same goes for "We Mobb" featuring Prodigy, where French sounds right at home and Waka shows going back to his New York roots can work, as they rap over the beat from Mobb Deep's vintage "Hell on Earth". But the more you hear the mixtape, the more you wish they'd found a better middle ground. The first single from Waka's upcoming album, "Round of Applause", produced by Lex Luger, is a great slice of Atlanta strip club music in the vein of Travis Porter, and it's a good match for French's style, since it would allow him to relax his flow a bit. French's recent hit single "Shot Caller" is a jazzy New York cut that could use a regional expanding verse energy ball verse from Waka to give it more radio and club appeal. On these songs, you get a better sense of why they'd want to work together, but Lock Out never comes close to that promise.


Returning to his long-running solo act, the Japanese producer Keigo Oyamada aims for the glowing emotional core of his playful, retro-futuristic aesthetic.

Mellow Waves

On his first proper album in over a decade, the meticulous pop experimenter known as Cornelius arrives floating on the promised Mellow Waves of its title. Gentle guitars and soft-hued synths sustain a mood of a familiar but far-flung locale: a veneer of artistic maturity that camouflages the brilliant and ambitious playfulness of the 48-year-old former guitarist Keigo Oyamada’s music. Known for the wild, kaleidoscopic pastiche of 1997’s Fantasma, Oyamada’s Cornelius continues to specialize in creating moments of startling fun, even if his sonic palette isn’t always as show-offy and sugar-coated as it once was.
It’s as subdued an album as Oyamada has made. The jazzy exotica of the opening “If You’re Here” sounds so much like pop that Oyamada’s deconstructed arrangement flits by almost unnoticed. But it is music no one else could make. Oyamada’s hyperactive early albums, representative of Tokyo’s cut-and-paste Shibuya-kei scene of the mid-’90s, led to a career defined not by novelty but an evolving compositional voice. While bloops skittered across a vast bleep grid on 2002’s Point and bright grooves dominated 2006’s Sensuous, Mellow Waves aims itself at the glowing emotional core of Oyamada’s retro-futuristic soundworld; it even contains, in both Japanese and English, some fairly straightforward love songs. Though he’s still drawing from the same kitschy waters from which he pulled his Planet of the Apes-referencing name, the easy pop feels of songs like “In a Dream” are its least interesting moments, despite being a tonal element that holds the album together.
But thankfully “subdued,” by Cornelius’s standards, still entails unceasing rhythmic invention, perhaps the central musical theme of his career. Filling the stereo horizon with flickering instrumental flashes that often careen off each other in intricately syncopated arrangements, even the album’s most lulling moments have non-mellow currents churning beneath the surface. Live, Cornelius and his band have been known to transmogrify his constructions into surprisingly fluid Stop Making Sense-like grooves, all miraculously synced to the songs’ dizzyingly rhythmic videos. Mellow Waves’ lead clip, for the dreamy “If You’re Here,” continues this trend with a strikingly complementary pairing of sound and image.
Which isn’t to say Cornelius doesn’t still get lit and set off fireworks. Keyboards and acoustic guitars and synth dabs politely pop into view during the verse of “Sometime / Someplace,” culminating in an ecstatic chorus filled with slashing, dizzyingly panned guitar and, by the song’s end, a toy noise break. It’s classic Oyamada, perhaps as close to Fantasma as he’s gotten since that album. “Mellow Yellow Feel” goes equally ape, with a stacked Cornelius chorus and stereo-panned interlocking guitar patterns in the manner of Point. But in general, he keeps it under his wig, musically speaking. On the archetypal Cornelius groove “Helix / Spiral,” a repeated vocal mantra almost completely distracts from the digital snares, synth patterns, robo-voices, and other rhythmic events, all making coordinated entrances as if high-stepping into a Busby Berkeley Hollywood dance spectacular one soundstage over.
Releasing his American debut on mega-indie Matador near the late-‘90s peak of the pre-Napster CD era, Oyamada was futuristic beyond his sound, setting the stage for the more global scene of the 21st century. While “Shibuya-kei” may not make for trend pieces anymore, its eclectic and playful coordinates can be heard in a range of contemporary projects like Are Euphoria, the most recent collection of hyper-real dream-paths by ex-Ponytail guitarist Dustin Wong and producer Takako Minekawa, Oyamada’s ex-wife. Former Yura Yura Teikoku leader Shintaro Sakamoto (who contributes lyrics on Mellow Waves), has lately taken his own exotica interests to Hawaiian lap-steel-dappled climes. Cornelius continues on, too. Though Mellow Waves follows Sensuous by 11 years, Oyamada has spent his time on video game and anime soundtracks and productions for other artists (Salyu x Salyu’s S(o)un(d)beams is a must for serious Cornelius heads).
Concluding with a trio of electro-acoustic reveries, including the English-language “The Spell of a Vanishing Loveliness” (sung by Lush’s Miki Berenyi), Mellow Waves arrives at a grace heard only fleetingly on previous Cornelius releases. Nominally an acoustic piece, “The Rain Song” turns individually struck guitar notes into rhythmic starlight ripples and layered vocals. The concluding “Crépuscule” takes it further, gradually opening up into infinite space while Oyamada’s guitar grows even more intricate. A quarter-century since disbanding Flipper’s Guitar and arriving on his own private Planet of the Apes, Keigo Oyamada continues to be some kind of genius, though happily still undecided about which kind.


The Philadelphia band’s new record often veers towards an alluring ugliness. But when they let some light in and it hits just right, *Pleasure Suck *emanates a psych-folk warmth.

Pleasure Suck

If it were up to fellow indie rock musicians, Pleasure Suck would be one of the most hyped albums of 2017. But the Spirit of the Beehive exist to confound. Their new LP elevates purity of vision over clarity from a band whose desire to be easily understood is far down on their list of priorities. The Bandcamp genre tags on their self-titled 2014 debut said it best: “benzos,” “klonopin,” “poppers,” “weed,” “weird beer,” “whiskey,” and “xanax.” While the Spirit of the Beehive’s earliest work could pass for shoegaze, it was defined by an unusually squalorous ambience, fueled by cheap highs and bad vibes. This is one of the few things that has remained constant about the band. “I just ate three grams of magic mushrooms,” a voice mutters halfway through “Future Looks Bright (It’s Blinding),” the only time the Spirit of the Beehive are ever direct about anything on Pleasure Suck.
The band simply tags itself as “alternative” this time out, a nebulous term that’s actually an accurate way to describe TSOTB’s counterintuitive lo-fi songcraft. Think Elephant 6 by way of Ween, whimsical and scatalogical, held together by Scotch tape and Scotchgard. “I start my walk, I step in shit,” Zack Schwartz sings on the album’s first lyric, setting in motion a kaleidoscope of only shades of yellow, orange, and brown.
When the Spirit of the Beehive lose focus, they veer into ugliness for its own sake, and the effect is oddly alluring. But when they let some light in and it hits just right, Pleasure Suck emanates an autumnal, psych-folk warmth. The brilliant single “Ricky (Caught Me Tryin’)” fashions a memorable chorus (“You don't need an education...you don't need to go to college”) by linking two bands who once traded in similarly feral bursts of noise. At points, Pleasure Suck recalls the urban-paganism of Animal Collective before Sung Tongs, though it’s the misanthropy of later Pink Floyd that becomes an unexpected through line.
“Future Looks Bright (It’s Blinding)” and “Ricky (Caught Me Tryin’)” are lovely songs about how ambition can make you look ugly: “Just tell us where to sign/Maybe the money will save us all,” Schwartz sings. Otherwise, it’s hard to identify the band’s primary concerns. “Pianos, Heavy Instrument” and “Snow on the Moon” are upfront about their inscrutability, though Schwartz does shrug at roadkill (“check the windshield/could be human/could be rodent”), police raids, “sports talk shows and a seasonal hellhole,” and a headspace that could double for the dingiest basement apartment in Kensington.
“Pleasure sucks the life out of everyone,” goes the album’s opening track. It serves as TSOTB’s thesis statement, a cynicism that can certainly have its own narcotic effect. It’s also their songwriting principle, as every potential moment of instant gratification is defaced by pitch warping, reverb, and distortion. Spend enough time scraping away the caked-on resin, though, and the asymmetrical melodies that typified TSOTB’s earlier work emerge. And so we arrive at the familiar, pleasurable debate with zonked-out, lo-fi pop tinkerers: Are the Spirit of the Beehive self-saboteurs blessed and cursed with too many ideas or is this approach just a cop out for a lack of ideas? Either way, Pleasure Suck is an equally compelling and impenetrable album most bands are either too square, too scared, or too savvy to make themselves.


New York City is a laser light show. It is everything you could conjure, juvenile and immediate, like the overblown ...

Beaches and Canyons

New York City is a laser light show. It is everything you could conjure, juvenile and immediate, like the overblown store-bought psychedelia of Pink Floyd: mall and science museum culture. Like a proudly brandished tie-dyed t-shirt, Black Dice dances and hums its way from a Phish concert crowd straight to the Knitting Factory by avoiding the funk, amping the jams, and turning up the volume.
Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons is full of spaced-out planetarium moments, drenched in high-pitched squeals and thunderous low end. "Seabird" is a tone poem: the repeated sound/image of flight and wings is warped until only creaks remain. Repetitive knob-turning seems to conjure animals who appear to be fighting. The frogs always win.
The album generally tends to eschew pounding hardcore rhythms, employing beats in unique and clever ways throughout the compositions to keep them vital. The drums are very effective throughout in their ability to add presence to the ongoing loops, adding a pounding heart to the web of tortured sounds and affected melodies. While the violence seems to be almost entirely washed away from their previous efforts, the impressive aspect of this LP is its ability to translate the live show for which the Black Dice is primarily known into a private show-- an ideal recording. These songs seem more like juxtapositions, blueprints, instructions.
With Beaches and Canyons, Black Dice fully embrace the chanting, pounding and moaning of the Grateful Dead: lovin' the jam. These songs, all of which I've heard played live in the past six or so months, are imminently changeable, fluid, and interesting. The songs reveal themselves in subtle ways, hiding their identities for minutes at a time, then briefly reappearing as themselves throughout the song, as a slightly repeating pattern or token sound. The songs go out of and back into themselves in a manner similar to John Coltrane's late-era renditions of "My Favorite Things": the crowd in Japan, stunned by an hour-long take on Rodgers & Hammerstein, suddenly remember what they're enjoying when the theme returns as a slurred parade of squeaked notes.
"The Dream is Going Down" is Black Dice at its evocative best. At the end, the song breaks down, like any good trip, into its most primal elements: Hisham pounds away on the drums, Aaron hums and half-sings through thick delay while Bjorn and Eric shriek and wail on guitar, voice, and effects. "Big Drop" points to Black Dice's most violent impulses, spreading seven or eight grindcore melodies over the course of nearly 17 minutes. It seems to be all beach here, too-- ebbing, flowing, and following the water. The screams are balanced with falsetto moaning, which falls into itself, collapsing, canyoning, ending.
"Endless Happiness" is a mess of recorder sounds and chiming, ring-modulated guitar, as well as the heavy bass swells for which Aaron is known. The percussion kicks in halfway through the track, and the recorder begins to sound Ayler-esque while the modulations and bass swells stay constant. The loops reach a frantic pace before dying, leaving a bed of static dry air. Air is overcome by water, and the end of the track is a thorough brain-cleaning, a nice and clear literal representation of the 'beaches' component. The collage of water samples lasts for several minutes-- a lucid translation from thought into music of a serenity Black Dice rarely acheive.
Black Dice have managed to create an album that properly illustrates the changing nature of their sound. Many groups have found this extremely difficult to achieve on tape, often sticking to formulas in the studio while limiting their experiments to live shows. Beaches and Canyons is an intense document of Black Dice's evolution-- cycling through styles and equipment like they're simple and meaningless tools, eyes on the goal of reorganizing sound and transforming it through sheer volume.


Like everyone else, Sleigh Bells are feeling the weight of the world in 2017. Their lean new mini-album has more thematic cohesion than their previous releases and also a surprising tenderness.

Kid Kruschev

Sleigh Bells are in a dark place these days, and who can blame them? The electroclash mélange of their first two records—2010’s Treats and 2012’s Reign of Terror—emerged during a period of comparatively little ambient stress, but in 2017, like everyone, the New York duo is feeling the weight of the world around them. While their early work tended to use lyrics as texturing tools, splicing in the words that sounded the best and brashest, they have since adopted a narrative thrust in their songs. The band’s newest release, the mini-album Kid Kruschev, offers perhaps the most thematic cohesion of any of their albums so far. After last year’s scattershot Jessica Rabbit, it feels like Sleigh Bells have narrowed in on the stories they want to tell and the leanest way to tell them.
They still write lyrics with the winking flair that made early tracks like “Infinity Guitars” and “Rill Rill” addictive. Singer Alexis Krauss rhymes “gasoline” with “trampoline” within the first two minutes of opener “Blue Trash Mattress Fire,” but her vocals do more here than counterbalance guitarist and producer Derek Miller’s thrashing power chords and overdriven drum machines. She elongates her phrases throughout Kid Kruschev, letting the instrumentation follow the push of her voice rather than trailing Miller’s jarring tempo changes. Sleigh Bells have slowly cultivated that change in dynamic over the past few years, as Krauss began to belt more instead of lingering in her head, but by now it’s fully bloomed. She directs this show, and the space she occupies helps the lyrics stick.
Kid Kruschev takes its name from the post-Stalin Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which is only the most superficial indication of what’s stirring inside this seven-track collection. After all, it’s hard not to hear the word “Russia” on a daily basis even if you only absorb the news peripherally, and the Cuban Missile Crisis lurks as an oblique historical precedent to the nuclear tensions of our own era. Sleigh Bells don’t delve into the specifics of their record’s sociopolitical contexts, but they allude to them: Krauss works the colors red, white, and blue into the agitated “Blue Trash Mattress Fire,” and on the more grounded, tuneful “Panic Drills,” she sings, “At the end of the war/What’s mine is yours.” The couplet could describe a nasty fight with a loved one, or it could point to a couple sharing resources in the post-nuclear hellscape—there’s a narrative thread running through the song, but it’s loose enough to wrap around fear on either an interpersonal or a global scale.
Most of the songs on the record appear to operate on both scales at once. On “Show Me the Door,” Krauss sings, “You made it this far/Just a little bit more/Before we show you the door,” simultaneously as an encouragement and a threat. Her voice is high and clear at the chorus, but during the verses she’s echoed by a copy of her voice pitched down into a demonic range. Miller, for his part, reins in the guitars in favor of reverbed bass, synthesized vocal syllables, and incongruously cheery disco keys, playing up the song’s internal contradictions. Sleigh Bells rode for a while on the contrast between Miller’s hardcore-trained guitar playing and Krauss’s clean soprano, but by this point they have to dig up more subtle incongruities, scraping together sounds that don’t quite fit and leveraging them toward a broader sense of disquiet.
The song that lingers the longest off Kid Kruschev, though, is also its most internally cohesive. “And Saints” punctuates the record with a more or less straight narrative: Everyone is worried about Krauss; even the delivery guy who comes to her door wants to know if she’s OK. She’s not, for the record. “I swear I’m the shell of a man,” she sings at the chorus, but at least she’s got someone in there with her to contradict her: “You said, ‘Nah, you’re a hell of a man.’” She cruises on a vocal melody that’s lovely in its simplicity while Miller accompanies her with little more than a single strobing synth. The frenetic pulses and tantrums that made Sleigh Bells songs instantly recognizable ebb away, leaving a surprising tenderness in their wake. When they push aside their usual bag of tricks, Krauss and Miller have it in them to write direct and disarming pop songs, the kind that reach out to comfort you in your helplessness. These longtime adherents to the school of “everything louder” have finally found their quiet place.


Brooklyn-based songwriter Kyle Wall (aka Wharfer) makes his influences immediately clear—Bill Callahan, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, later Bob Dylan—but he doesn't really sound like anyone else.

Scenes of the Tourist

Kyle Wall, the Brooklyn-based songwriter who records under the name Wharfer, doesn’t exactly sing his melodies. He swirls them around in his mouth, chewing on his words as he describes how they taste. And while his influences are all immediately clear (Bill Callahan, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, later Bob Dylan), Wall doesn’t really sound like anyone else. His voice is the first thing you’ll notice about his music: his folksy drawl, his odd pronunciation, a phlegmy grumble like he’s fighting a cold. And while some singers might sand down their idiosyncrasies as their songwriting progresses, Wall has doubled down on them with Scenes of the Tourist. Over 12 songs, he has refined his music to mostly piano and vocals, relegating his backing band to more atmospheric duties while his strange and weary voice does the heavy lifting.
On the whole, it’s a risk that pays off. These are the finest songs of Wall’s career, and he treats them like he knows it. The arrangements are stately but sparse, centered on simple melodies that recur like gloomy dreams. The slow, lapping “Lilacs” sounds a little like Darkness-era Springsteen with all the energy siphoned out and replaced with seasonal affective disorder. “You’re a thing of the past,” Wall sings in his lowest register, “And I love you like that.” “Somewhere a Meteor Calls Me,” meanwhile, is the album’s catchiest moment and its most expensive. Here, Wall is backed by a dark-hued storm that effectively pulls in some of Ultraviolence’s shades of cool. It’s a song that hints at work to come that might build on this album’s starkness with a more dynamic palette.
That isn’t to say that Scenes is monotonous. Wall varies his songwriting enough to make room for a multitude of styles, from the barroom balladry of “Blue Lewis” to the heady slow-build of “The Suitcase.” Some of Wall’s attempts to diversify his sound lead him directly into other songwriters’ territory: “Marigold” takes major melodic cues from Sufjan Stevens’ “Fourth of July,” while “St. Helena” is basically Mark Kozelek’s “Ceiling Gazing” without the happy ending. Still, thanks to Wall’s distinctive vocals, he makes each song his own, and, especially if you’re in the right mood for it, Scenes of the Tourist is a powerful and engaging record. But it also feels like a step toward more distinctive work—Wall’s attempt to strip back to discover his core identity. He’s found his voice, and now he’s a lot closer to finding what he has to say.


The news is hardly any less grim since 2019’s Civilisation I, but the UK pop trio’s second entry considers the emotional toll of disaster with ingenuity, wit, and a warm, bright sound.

Civilisation II EP

Though they came up in the same scene that produced A.G. Cook, GFOTY, and Hannah Diamond, Kero Kero Bonito’s hyperpop always had a more personal touch. On 2013’s Intro Bonito and 2016’s Bonito Generation, the London trio synthesised a nostalgic and unruly palette of influences ranging from J-pop to post-punk, creating a modern sound that paid tribute to the trio’s hometowns—the London suburbs for producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, and Otaru, Japan, for vocalist Sarah Midori Perry. This implicit fondness for cycles of reference—for the way that culture compounds over time, accruing layers of influence—meant that KKB never affected the same tongue-in-cheek tone as their peers: For Lobban, Bulled, and Perry, music is an earnest way to celebrate and interrogate the idiosyncrasies of history.
Since Bonito Generation, KKB have strayed further from hyperpop conventions. In 2018, Time ‘n’ Place took its cues from suburban shoegaze, the indie rock of Phil Elverum, and pop-punk, a musical Venn diagram connected by noise and vivid vignettes. Concurrently, the band’s writing became more precise, less reliant on the deadpan catchphrases that structured early favorites like “Flamingo.” As hyperpop has become more interested in replicating the memeish terror of the internet—see the abrasive non-sequiturs of 100 gecs—KKB traveled in the other direction, evoking the pathos and bathos of everyday life. Time ‘n’ Place’s “Visiting Hours,” a verité-style account of Lobban’s trip to see his father in the hospital, is typical KKB 2.0: poignant, emotionally aware, and anxious about modern life.
If Time ‘n’ Place was colored by personal loss, Civilisation I, the band’s 2019 EP, shifted its gaze to the collective loss engendered by colonialism, capitalism, and global heating. Though only three tracks long, it hit hard, evoking nightmarish visions of perpetual war and wildfire smoke. On centerpiece “When the Fires Come,” Perry sang about global decline with prophetic economy: “Everybody takes their time making work to do, do, do, do/But no one will be left here to remember us/When the fires come.”
Civilisation II, a second three-song EP, arrives over a year later. In the intervening months, grotesque catastrophe has only become more commonplace: Violent wildfires dominated headlines at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic—and the ways in which it exposed the seemingly bottomless depths of corporate greed and governmental incompetence—took over. The conditions of its creation would seem to inspire another EP of soothsaying, but Civilisation II takes a different tack, focusing on the emotional toll of disaster with ingenuity, wit, and a warm, bright sound scrubbed of Time ‘n’ Place’s grit.
KKB describe the songs on Civilisation II as representing past, present, and future, respectively, a concept that feels unnecessary when the music is as intellectually salient and catchy as ever. Opening with a racing hi-hat rhythm and amiable analog synth, lead single and opener “The Princess and the Clock” feels warm in a way that KKB singles haven’t always; straightforward verses give way to a swelling chorus that cuts up and resamples Perry’s voice into a new vocal melody, à la Porter Robinson. The lyrics recount a fable about a princess trapped in a tower, “painting pictures of the land that made her” as a form of remembrance. In the context of Civilisation I, the image of the solitary princess suggests a message about the creation—and, by extension, the degradation—of history, bringing to mind the ways in which Indiginous peoples the world over have seen colonial and capitalist forces degrade and destroy their cultural histories, and, by extension, ancient resources on caring for and protecting the Earth.
On “present” track “21/04/20,” the spectre of disaster is felt without the need to spell it out. Rather than attempt to capture the stress or anxiety of pandemic isolation, Perry writes about its mundanity. The lyrics are ambling and diaristic, like a sequel to “Visiting Hours”; were you not paying attention, you might not realize it’s a song about lockdown at all. But around the corners of the frame, things are upset in a casual, resigned sort of way:

As I sit down to eat, I hear a song riding the breeze
“Happy birthday to Eloise”
Their mum and dad both let out a cheer
They’re gonna throw a party another year
And I should take a walk for a bit
As I head up the road, a private ambulance zooms off into the distance
In silence

Like all of Civilisation II, “21/04/20” was produced entirely with vintage hardware, a choice that scans as both aesthetic and conceptual. Scientists have warned of more pandemics arising with greater frequency in the coming years, and aside from its title, “21/04/20” is written and produced without distinct markers of time and place. KKB’s smart, subtly meta approach allows the song’s power to stem not from what it is, but what it isn’t: If this present is to be our new future, why write a polemic or a tragedy?
On “Well Rested,” Civilisation II’s swollen final track, KKB blow up the mythmaking to dizzying proportions. Over a beat that strikes somewhere between vaporwave and acid house, Perry delivers a spoken-word sermon on humanity’s stubborn persistence. “False prophets proclaim that the end is nigh, and that humanity is not worth existence,” she yells. “This is a trap laid to ensnare the living.” The language is uncanny and cold: She sounds like a cult leader or a con artist, perhaps not even convinced of her own words. That feels entirely the point: “Well Rested,” like the rest of Civilisation II, meditates not on human decline as much as the fables and myths we create in order to adjust to it. KKB are as inquiring and self-aware as ever—only now, their eyes are trained on the future.

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September's Black Dollar showed Rick Ross refocused, proving that he’s more interesting with his back against the wall. His new album, which has no MMG features, continues the motivated, slightly weary feeling of that mixtape, scrapping his cartoon supervillain persona.

Black Market

The life of a boss is defined by highs and lows. Five years ago, Rick Ross was voraciously bragging about blowing up like napalm and parking his Caddy in the living room on Ashes to Ashes, a free Christmas gift-slash-Teflon Don victory lap. But since reaching his pinnacle with 2012’s Rich Forever, oversaturation has exhausted much of what made him successful in previous years. It’s not that Ross’s output has been poor, but releasing Mastermind and Hood Billionaire in 2014 made both largely forgettable. Worse, the cracks in the seemingly untouchable Maybach Music Group’s beautiful granite finish have deepened.
If MMG is rap’s luxury car dealership, then Ross is its cigar-smoking general manager; Meek Mill and Wale his top salesmen. At this stage of his career, Ross should be sitting and tallying sales. But after Meek Mill fumbled a winning hand against Drake, Wale and Meek began squabbling, and Ross himself went to jail for assaulting his groundskeeper. Ross was forced to roll up his sleeves and right the course of his imprint. September’s Black Dollar was a step in the right direction, with a refocused Ross proving that he’s more interesting with his back against the wall than when he’s dropping hits like Steph Curry three-pointers. With Black Market, he continues this narrative.
"Bottom of the black market, time to rise again," he announces on the album’s opener, "Free Enterprise". As the first song written for the album (albeit, during Ross’s jail stint earlier this year), it’s a strong tone-setter. Aided once more by John Legend’s soaring vocals, Ross ponders future possibilities. Think of it as the next step after Black Dollar carryover "Foreclosures", where he waxes eloquent about how financial problems can still complicate the lifestyles of the rich and famous: "You reap what you sow, and they speakin’ repossessions/ To the culture itself, these are powerful lessons." Ross excels when given a focal point, and adversity (specifically, the fear of going back to rags from riches) gives him something to dig his teeth into.
Absent from Black Market is the boisterous production heard on previous Rick Ross projects. With the Lex Luger trademark heard on "B.M.F.", "MC Hammer", and "9 Piece" pirated into extinction over the years, Ross has wisely moved on. He's at his most effective when he dials back the Rick Ross character, so the album’s standouts feature him laying bawse insight over slow-burners. The radiance of Jake One’s production and CeeLo Green’s chorus add another layer of warmth to "Smile Mama, Smile", lifting it out of routine homage territory. "Crocodile Python" is as smooth as the title indicates, and "Silk Road" is beautifully minimal. On the latter, he explains that he fixates on ostentatious imagery to create something vivid for the less fortunate: "I entertain niggas under poverty lines/ So I paint these pretty pictures as part of my rhymes." "Black Opium" falls into the same neighborhood, adding scratches from DJ Premier for furnishing and decoration.
But amidst the good, errors loom. "Peace Sign" treads into lazy, "Diced Pineapples" territory. Meanwhile, "Can’t Say No" revives and refurbishes an old Mariah Carey gem. Carey sounds great, but the song’s inclusion is as unnecessary as the resurrection of its source material. It’s the inverse of what Carey previously did to Cam’ron’s "Oh Boy". "Dope Dick" features more stellar production from Jake One, but the laughable title and hook (has "dick" been uttered more over a five-minute period?) makes you wish Ross saved the beat and verses for something more serious.
"Success is a precious jewel," Ross warns on "Foreclosures". It should be cherished, because, like popularity, it can vanish at a moment’s notice. Rick Ross’ has waned in recent years, but the trials have added new shadings to his four-color persona. The motivated, slightly weary Ross heard on *Black Market—*which has no MMG features—is a better fit for the moment than the bulletproof supervillain of old. Ross has proven his resilience in the past; maybe carefully controlled doses of reality are just what he needs to move forward.


The New Jersey duo’s seventh album sacrifices some of the group’s youthful spark, blurring emo nostalgia with contemporary pop polish.

The Front Bottoms: In Sickness & In Flames

In Sickness & In Flames

The Front Bottoms made their name singing anthems for ordinary people: songs for the suburbs, about drinking beer out of coffee mugs and hating your friends. Like much of the New Jersey duo’s fourth-wave emo, pop-punk ilk, their music works when it’s most immediate—a gut punch, not a slow burn. Brian Sella and Mat Uychich are at their best when they’re shouting about the minutiae that make your brain swell and fill your stomach with rocks, like the wine stain on your couch that’s been there since the night she left. Our current period of confinement calls for such intense accounts of mundanity. We’re trapped at home, some of us in our parents’ basements, lonely and out of work, awaiting the next spike in COVID cases. A new Front Bottoms album could’ve complemented our solitude. But In Sickness & In Flames doesn’t really seem fit for any moment.
An air of unfixed nostalgia blurs the past with an approximation of the present. Dusty acoustics and guttural full-band chants harken back to the duo’s early work that captivated college radio during the first half of the 2010s. But that influence is sandwiched between, and subdued by, modern indie-pop flourishes, synth breakdowns, and a chorus of “oohs.” Sella has mostly abandoned his signature Moleskine impressionism and hometown scene-setting. IS&IF deals largely in cliches, gesturing toward broad themes like love and growth without saying much of anything.
Lyrics are the album’s biggest downfall. Solid riffs are tainted by half-baked platitudes: “You are the truth I choose to bend myself around”; “We are all going the hard way”; “Everyone blooms in their own time.” The songs place a lot of weight on these phrases, repeating them until they almost sound profound. “Jerk” could have been a fun MySpace-era ditty, with its tinny Auto-Tuned intro, but it devolves into a refrain that sounds stale by its second round: “Like a jerk, yeah I know that I look like a jerk.” The Front Bottoms’ once charming, choked-up spoken-word interludes feel awkward and stilted.
As made evident by 2017’s ’80s pop-tinged Going Grey, Front Bottoms lose their magnetism when they focus on radio appeal. IS&IF’s hooks are catchy enough to make their way onto, say, the Sirius XM indie channel, but probably won’t inspire a new generation of Front Bottoms fans. A few songs embrace the band’s old style and intimacy, enough to attract day-one listeners, but not enough to make IS&IF an essential album.
After co-producing their last LP with Nicholas “RAS” Furlong, an Avicii collaborator who counts credits with Blink-182 and All Time Low, the Front Bottoms decided to co-produce their new album with Mike Sapone, whose roster includes acts like Sorority Noise, Oso Oso, Brand New, and Taking Back Sunday. On the album’s highlights, he brings the band back to their unpretentious, guitar-driven roots. “Montgomery Forever’’ is a buddy jam about mental illness and self-deprecation. If mosh pits can exist in a post-COVID world, this song will inspire some flailing bodies. “Leaf Pile” blazes forth with fiery guitars and echoed shouts (“I don’t wanna talk/I wanna look out the window”). The lyrics land when you can tell they were transferred directly from brain to paper: Lines like “You’ll always be my girlfriend even after we get married” and “Seemed like a good day to be barely alive” are unfussy and childish in a good way.
The Front Bottoms have consistently avoided labels, falling somewhere between folk-punk, pop-punk, and indie rock. That fluidity was a strength when their music was undergirded by a sense of urgency and earnest DIY sensibilities, when they built a community around angst. In Sickness & In Flames is just noncommittal. The album is twee and punk and neither of those things. It’s understandable that the Front Bottoms, a band whose legacy revolves around post-adolescent growing pains, have lost some of the spark that fueled their first six albums. They’re older now, no longer concerned with the girl that forgot about them during her semester abroad. Sella once stood out for a demeanor that was both wide-eyed and jaded, torn between a yelp and a sigh. In Sickness & In Flames tilts too far toward the former; the Front Bottoms have lost their bite.

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The former Pavement frontman—never someone who seemed interested in making a straightforward acoustic album—releases an unexpectedly deft and learned folk record.

Traditional Techniques

Later this year, Stephen Malkmus will take part in a pair of Pavement reunion shows where, if the band’s reunion tour a decade ago is any predictor, he’ll dutifully play the songs fans expect to hear the way they want to hear them, then move on. Malkmus has never been subtle about his disinterest in nostalgia, but in truth, he’s never seemed especially interested in shaking things up, either. Since unshackling from Pavement, his solo albums with the Jicks have offered only the most minor variations on his wry, guitar-forward indie rock. Sure, one of them was produced by Beck, but could you really tell?
Recently, something changed. With 2018’s beguiling Sparkle Hard, Malkmus delighted in unexpected whims, deploying string sections and digital vocal manipulation so skillfully you could almost forget they weren’t always part of Malkmus’s toolkit. And if that album’s one-and-done stylistic detours felt like a lark, then 2019’s Jicks-less Groove Denied, a laptop-driven tribute to early electronic music and post-punk, proved he could really commit. For Traditional Techniques, Malkmus once again picks a muse and sticks with it. It’s a folk album, an unexpectedly deft and learned one at that.
Recorded with Decemberists multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk, Chavez/Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney, and Afghan musician Qais Essar, among others, the project was devised as an excuse to toy around with all the acoustic instruments Malkmus observed in Portland’s Halfling Studio while recording Sparkle Hard. That’s the official telling, at least, but the final product suggests a long-simmering fascination with the sounds of the Middle East and a deeper reverence for psych-folk than anything hinted at by the stray Pavement folk jam or B-side. Malkmus is just as committed to stringed instruments as he was the bleating electronics of Groove Denied. But on that album, Malkmus was moonlighting; here he’s a devoted student of the craft.
In addition to sounding gorgeous, all these mesmerizing dirges and close-mic’d 12-string guitars are a novel vehicle for Malkmus’s sublime shit talk. Over the balmy raga of opener “ACC Kirtan,” his lyrics defuse any suggestion of New Age mysticism with first-world problems. “The Duraflame’s wet/The ganache won’t set/Where are the rings for my sweet serviettes?” he yowls, alongside accompanist Joy Pearson. “Shadowbanned” lathers its cosmic drones into a heady psych jam, as Malkmus spray-bombs modern lingo inspired by the internet’s deepest, most conspiratorial corners. In the custom of so many of Malkmus’ best songs, it disguises its barbed prose behind an unassuming veneer of aloofness.
Like Groove Denied, Traditional Techniques front-loads its most form-breaking statements. In its second half, the psychedelic edge softens, the woodwinds and sitars fade away, and what’s left is something resembling the straightforward acoustic album Malkmus never seemed interested in making. The songs aren’t flashy, but they’re tender and serene, and they center Malkmus’ voice in a way his previous records rarely did, especially “What Kind of Person,” maybe the most vulnerable song he’s written since “Church on White.” It’s not often Malkmus lets his guard down like this.
Traditional Techniques has been retroactively billed as the third part in a trilogy alongside Sparkle Hard and Groove Denied. On the surface, the three albums have little to do with each other—each was recorded with a different lineup—but collectively they represent a shift in mindset. After years of arch relaxation at the indie rock spa, Malkmus has suddenly started recording like a man with a sprawling bucket list. And while Traditional Techniques easily succeeds as a curiosity, its songs continue to delight after the novelty wears off. The most surprising thing about the album isn’t how far Malkmus has strayed from his comfort zone. It’s how at home he sounds there.

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Cool Uncle is the result of a chance meeting between Grammy-winning producer Jack Splash and underrated smooth jazz kingpin Bobby Caldwell. Their record takes equal parts funk, pop, smooth jazz, and yacht rock, laying it all down on a solid retro-R&B framework. Featuring Jessie Ware, Mayer Hawthorne, and Cee-Lo Green.

Cool Uncle

After a chance connection via a Facebook message, Grammy-winning producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, John Legend, Jennifer Hudson) has teamed up with none other than Bobby Caldwell - yes, that Bobby Caldwell, the one with the 1978 classic "What You Won't Do For Love" has been sampled on approximately 21.9% of all hip-hop songs ever released—and the result is a smash, taking equal parts funk, pop, smooth jazz, and yacht rock, (!) laying it all down on a solid retro-R&B framework. The group winks at the project's inherent adult-contempo cheese-factor with their moniker, but really, this is is the best freshest, and funkiest adult-contempo cheese imaginable.
The best thing about Cool Uncle is the fact that both participants don't strain to sound new. Instead, they lean into their respective strengths. Given Splash's resume as a producer and arranger of R&B sounds (as well as his frontman work for funk group Plantlife) there's a ton of groove on this album, interspersed with horns (the saxophone on the Mayer Hawthorne-featured "Game Over" is a highlight) and a bassist that does yeoman's work. The project is off-kilter and odd in appealing ways: On "My Beloved" Caldwell executes what has to be the first vampire lovesong by way of a week-long bender in Ibiza and sticks the landing. And his voice hasn't aged a day since the '70s.
The record is bursting with features, and most everyone carries their weight. Jessie Ware (on album standout "Breakaway") and former '80s-pop-star ("Let's Hear It For The Boy")-turned gospel-artist Deniece Williams ("Breaking Up") both contribute passionate performances whereas Cee-Lo (on "Mercy") kind of fades into the background. Mayer Hawthorne, whose blue-eyed soul vocals tend to waver somewhere between "convincing" and "nah", sounds as smooth and appealing as he ever has on "Game Over".
This release, coupled with solid 2015 output from acts like The Foreign Exchange, Dawn Richard, Estelle, Kelela and others, serve as a solid reminder that R&B is big and vital enough right now these days to contain multitudes: Soundcloud divas, alt-R&B weirdos, returning legends like Janet, pubescent lotharios, minimalist bleep-bloop-ass whisper-singers, and beyond. Being an R&B fan right now means never having to settle for one kind of record, or one sound. When one year gives you so many different options, a fun record that doesn't take itself seriously like Cool Uncle feels like icing.


Tom and Ed Russell continue to test various hybrids of techno, UK garage, and for the first time, drum’n’bass, but the EP’s most promising moment looks beyond the dancefloor.

Cash Romantic

Overmono accompanied their early forays into music-making with dips into their parents’ record collection, which a youthful Tom and Ed Russell would raid to create outlandish mashups with the electronic tunes they were buying. The results may have been “a proper mess,” in their own words, but the idea of musical worlds colliding stuck with the fraternal duo as they developed their signature hybrid style of bass music. Those fusions provide even more direct inspiration for their new EP, Cash Romantic, where drum’n’bass, techno, and UK garage meet head on.
This kind of amalgam isn’t exactly a revelation for Overmono, whose modus operandi—as witnessed on a string of excellent EPs as well as their sparkling 2021 fabric presents mix—consists of combining the slinky sounds of garage and rave with the steel-booted production techniques of modern techno, a technique so effective it has taken them to the top of the UK’s dance ranks. So well have Overmono honed this particular skill that it is perhaps inevitable that the best track on this EP is the most typically Overmono. “Gunk” is a tightly coiled charge of industrial energy that—like “So U Kno” or “Bby” before it—swathes a modulated vocal bearing the expensive perfume of Y2K 2-step in rugged electronic cladding, a two-note synth riff bludgeoning the listener into submission as the voice pursues a more cerebral seduction.
“Gfortune” pushes the boat further out, using a vocal dusted in distortion and lightly bent out of shape to trace an exact midpoint between Overmono’s mechanized tech and Burial’s garage scuffle. The song is agreeably haunting, but Overmono’s rather reverent use of their source material—they employ hefty samples from “2am” by North Carolina’s Joe Trufant—feels uninspired compared to Burial’s ingenious cutups and recontextualizations. Burial’s music has influenced legions, but the number of artists to do anything novel with that inspiration remains frustratingly single-digit.
The EP’s title track, Overmono’s most overt excursion into drum’n’bass yet, faces a similar fate. Much as Burial has mastered the art of being Burial, the rigorous standards of drum’n’bass make it hard to dabble in the genre without coming across as dilettantish. “Cash Romantic” has a satisfying snap to the drums and a bassline that clears out the Eustachian tube like a depth charge, but the song has neither the clinical obnoxiousness of classic techstep (à la Ed Rush and Optical’s “Bacteria,” which Overmono included on their Fabric mix), nor the astral grace of vintage LTJ Bukem productions, another apparent reference point, leaving it a little short on purpose.
It falls to the acrid throb of “Bone Mics” to suggest more fruitful new avenues for Overmono to pursue, debuting a sound that could be genuinely theirs. The track has familiar traces of UK garage and techno, to which the brothers add a hint of IDM, but it lands in uncharted territory between all three. The drums are funky, flexed, and light, neither exactly up- nor downbeat; the vocal snippets are catchy but abstruse; and the bass sits between muscular comfort and weaponized dread. The result is like ambient music for the terminally twitchy.
“Bone Mics” aside, Cash Romantic is a little too neat and tidy to match the far reaches of the brothers’ excursions into their parents’ record collection, where Gerry Rafferty mixed with acid techno and Dr. Hook found company with “weirdo trance.” But the EP does suggest life beyond the peak-hour sets that have become the duo’s bread and butter, prepping a canvas where the club can be an afterthought rather than an imperative, and moving away from the monomaniacal focus on the dancefloor.


The Swedish indie pop group Radio Dept.'s third and best LP expands their sound palette with songs that sparkle with a glowing, sun-soaked ambiance.

Clinging to a Scheme

Sweden's Radio Dept. have spent their career to date quietly building up a devoted fanbase by filtering traditional indie and dream-pop sounds through an electronic haze. They've admirably honored their genre's history every step of the way, incorporating elements of vintage Slumberland noise-pop, sadder 80s UK indie sounds, and the kind of romantic, low-key dance-pop typically associated with Saint Etienne, or more recently, the Tough Alliance. The band's relatively low profile is partly due to the infrequency of their output: Up to now, they've released only two LPs throughout their 13-year career, along with a handful of EPs and singles.
As with their last two albums, Clinging to a Scheme stands to further expand the Radio Dept.'s cult. Economy has never been an issue for the band, but here, things are further tightened up: Clocking in at just 34 minutes, this album is their shortest and most finely-tuned yet, moving at a rapid clip while maintaining a sense of balance and even pacing-- a pretty remarkable show of restraint and dedication for a record that has ostensibly been in the works for four years. (Their last full-length, Pet Grief, was released way back in 2006.) The improved fidelity helps, too: These songs sparkle with striking clarity in contrast to past works, while retaining all the glowing, sun-soaked ambiance that's become a signature.
Clinging to a Scheme shows the Radio Dept. working with an extended range of sounds. While the core elements of these songs will be plenty familiar to longtime fans, the band manages to tweak the formula slightly for each track. The sparkly, Balearic "Heaven's on Fire" and the downbeat dub of "Never Follow Suit" are clear highlights, particularly on first spin. But repeat plays reveal this record's almost bottomless depth, as different tracks and subtle elements gradually reveal themselves with each listen: The sugar-rushed urgency of "This Time Around" or the complex "David", which is sunny and bright musically but lyrically wistful, are just two of eight other reasons this album rewards every ounce of attention you give it.
Great songs, higher fidelity: It should be a recipe for contentment, yet frontman Johan Duncanson remains discouraged by life's challenges. "Seemed like a good idea at one time/ But now it's all wrong," he sings on opener "Domestic Scene", and it doesn't get any cheerier from there. Although the Radio Dept. weren't regularly active until 1998, the project was concieved by Duncanson three years earlier along with a few schoolmates; in other words, his lyrics have been rooted in boyhood melancholia since day one. Duncanson doesn't show any signs of leaving that behind on Clinging to a Scheme, uttering lines in "A Token of Gratitude" that evoke pure melodrama: "Do I love you?/ Yes, I love you/ But easy come, easy go."
But that's part of The Radio Dept.'s charm and identity, and the music itself is generally brighter, which makes for an engaging contrast while preventing the tone of the songs from becoming maudlin. The strongest moments on Clinging to a Scheme, such as the aforementioned "Heaven's on Fire" and "Never Follow Suit", are effortlessly catchy and upbeat. Album closer "You Stopped Making Sense" is especially cloud-clearing, as Duncanson hits his upper register among deliciously bent guitar strings, moaning about another love lost. It's a bittersweet ending for Clinging to a Scheme, but for the Radio Dept.'s already decade-plus career, it may be a whole new beginning.


Holly Herndon is an ambitious composer whose work is based on samples and her distinctive voice. Her vision was already clear on her first album, Movement, but her range broadened and deepened across a slow but steady stream of intoxicatingly dense singles; Platform is the most complete representation of her music yet.

Platform

Holly Herndon’s songs play new tricks on you with each listen. The Bay Area composer and singer’s work percolates in the mind first, unlike the elemental club music that informs its sprightly tempos and ebbing bass. But though Herndon’s music is at its core "cerebral"—all surface details and richly layered textures—it still exhibits warmth and emotion. Herndon’s ambitious vision was already clear on her first album, Movement, but her range broadened and deepened across a slow but steady stream of intoxicatingly dense singles; Platform is the most complete representation of her music yet.
Herndon constructs synth patches from the sound of her voice, whether she’s murmuring, singing tunefully, or on the verge of shrieking. But she also processes and sequences acoustic sounds derived from movement and disorder (what could be shattering glass, a bucket being poured out, the tapping of a keyboard, the swish of a dancer’s legs), molding samples until they no longer reference the action that produced them. Even with the processing, her tracks retain an organic quality, something fleshy that suggests a given sound once existed in space.
Into these complicated soundworlds—all of which are rooted in human action—Herndon mixes noises that emanate from the structure of her computer (hums, fan whirs, "thinking" noises), as well as its internal audio (she records the sound of her Internet activity and uses it as a source material or a point of inspiration). For her, a laptop is a natural extension of her mind and body rather than a place of escape and self-negation. Platform is animated by a constant conversation between these two elements: the embodied vocalist (usually Herndon) and the digital ghosts in the machine.
In interviews, music videos, or on her blog, Herndon spells out her themes and methods. She seems to consider her art as, by design, didactic: In its form and process, it emulates a utopian societal model, one for the next phase of the technological age. Her music offers a vision of a time in which our digital accoutrements might become places for self-expression and improvement, and our relationship with them is less fraught. Herndon doesn’t believe that her work exists in a vacuum; it signifies in all directions, and is tied to and defined by everything around it. By explaining her music, she seeks to set up a more direct relationship with her audience. Clarifying the experiment is, to some extent, part of the whole project.
There’s always the danger that channeling our listening according to an artist’s directives means we’ll miss out on engaging with the music in more personally significant ways. But though Herndon unifies her pieces with clear conceptual frameworks, the moment-to-moment experience stokes our subjective impressions. The best of Herndon’s compositions function something like the age-old visual illusion of the young woman with the big hat, who could just as easily be, on second look, a babushka-wearing grandmother. You might focus on the cold digital debris or the human voice crying out one minute and a melody or a meaningful lyric the next. At transcendent moments—busier, murkier work like "Interference" or "Home"—Herndon offers an unclassifiable combination of the two.
The previously released single "Chorus" provides the album's sonic template. It builds and settles expertly, as if catered toward the energy of a dancefloor in real time, and packs an earwormy wordless chorus. But it breaks through the wall of techno-informed percussion and synth pulsations only sporadically, like a lament filtered through a bad cell connection, or a Fever Ray melody submitted to John Cage-like randomized subtractive processes. Transitional notes fall out like baby teeth and at points the whole thing breaks down into digital chaos—here, Herndon’s Internet chatter is like a primordial ooze the song emerges out of and back into.
Those who loved the pop acuity of "Chorus" won’t find much else on Platform as persuasive in that vein. In fact, the record’s only weak moments come when Herndon adopts pop song structures instead of self-generated ones. "Morning Sun", in particular, is based around low, unembellished melody which doesn’t develop anywhere in particular, accompanied by tittering, Dan Deacon-like arpeggios of vocal phonemes. To liven things up, Herndon lays on threatening sheets of noise atop the mix, but they seem unrelated to the action going on underneath.
The most effective tracks offer something more open and spacious. "Unequal" highlights Herndon’s distinctive sense of harmony, which often has a haunting, irresolute quality recalling Baroque church music or plainchant. "DAO" also highlights her operatic vocalizations, but this time, they play a vicious game of cat-and-mouse with unstable, rough-hewn percussion patches built from everyday sounds (the approach strongly recalls Matthew Herbert’s work sampling household sounds to create elaborate virtual instruments, or Matmos’ surgery-noise drum circles).
Platform’s most unusual track sets aside Herndon's usual generative techniques. "Lonely at the Top" is designed to induce ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), a scientifically unexplained process in which exposure to certain sounds induce a tingling sensation on the necks and scalps of the susceptible. Herndon and her collaborator, ASMR sound artist Claire Tolan, adopt the general M.O. of the vibrant and extensive ASMR YouTube community, which is home to endless webcam videos featuring gentle, stylized whispering and tapping sounds. Behind Tolan’s comforting voice, Herndon contributes small, intimate sounds: extremely closely miked and subtly processed, they give the track—an ode to one online enclave that has succeeded in accessing the corporeal in a virtual environment—an otherworldly quality.
It's hard to craft avant-garde music that feels truly new; inevitably, new languages correct and build off of the old ones, and create accidental resonances with others. Holly Herndon, by her own account, still believes in a music of "now." She eschews the free-associative, playful juxtapositions of fully synthetic sounds preferred by computer-music peers like PC Music's A. G. Cook, Oneohtrix Point Never, and James Ferraro, and insists on building her sound palette from the ground up, or more accurately, outwards from herself. Despite the wide scope of her project, Herndon’s ambitious efforts are appealingly multifaceted and personal, and Platform may turn out to be the most thought-provoking experimental electronic music release of the year. It doesn’t present a solid, replicable blueprint for the future of laptop composition and performance practice, but comes over more like beta of an app, with a lot of room for further development and expansion.


This blessed collection of unreleased demos, recorded by Prince to cassette in a single take, is enthralling. It plays like both omen and artifact of his hit-making power.

Piano & a Microphone 1983

Just before Valentine’s Day in 1983, Prince released “Little Red Corvette,” which eventually peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100, his first single to end up higher on the general chart than the R&B one. Eighteen months later, he would become one of the biggest pop stars in the world, an artist made more mysterious by their fame. During sessions that lasted from December 1983 to April 1984, Prince finished Purple Rain, put together incidental music for the film, laid down the bulk of the Time’s Ice Cream Castle and the Apollonia 6 album, and recorded Sheila E’s The Glamorous Life, somehow without collapsing against the studio console. His songwriting was a glistening machine, animated by inner tensions.
When some musicians die, their record company grasps for whatever material remains, like a medieval saint parceled out into increasingly meager relics. Prince left behind the inverse problem: Thousands of unreleased tracks with no suggestion for how to handle them. So far, his estate has treated that music with care; an expansive reissue of Purple Rain came out last year, but Piano & a Microphone 1983 is the first posthumous album culled entirely from Prince’s vault. Instead of piecing together one of the many projects he envisioned and abandoned, the executors found a session from Prince’s home studio, recorded to cassette in a single take; now and then you can hear him sniffling. Alone with his piano, Prince sounds unusually relaxed, mindful of the contradictions that always seized him yet willing to imagine their reconciliation.
At the beginning of Piano & a Microphone, Prince asks his engineer: “Is that my echo?” Opening track “17 Days” would later become a moody dance number, the B-side of “When Doves Cry,” whose two repeated chords seem to be scraping across the ocean floor. The sketch heard here is much looser, syncopated by a tapping foot; Prince embellishes the notes as if tugging at a frayed thread. It throws the forlorn precision of his lyrics into deeper isolation—the cigarette-counting narrator might only be talking to themselves. Later on, Prince runs through “Strange Relationship,” which wouldn’t surface until 1987’s Sign o’ the Times. The finished version marries a playful melody to alienated emotions: “Baby I just can’t stand to see you happy/More than that, I hate to see you sad.” On Piano & a Microphone, the vocal dissolves entirely, as Prince strangles his own words.
Several tracks from the cassette practice grander gestures still to come. Prince so admired Joni Mitchell that he flew her out to the premiere of his film Under the Cherry Moon on a private jet; covering “A Case of You,” his falsetto swallowed the phrase “holy wine” with reverent despair. The Piano & a Microphone recording is much shorter, barely 90 seconds long, but you can tell he returned to her song over and over again. It makes up a medley of sorts with “Purple Rain,” which is really a miniature, an idea of the “Purple Rain” that Prince would fashion from a live performance with the Revolution months later (their first time playing it in public). Hearing a fragment of that monumental song feels like coming across a sphinx’s head in the desert wastes.
The “new” material on Piano & a Microphone has already circulated as bootlegs, but this album clarifies its details, rescues it from indistinct hiss. The most surprising moment is when Prince begins playing the gospel standard “Mary Don’t You Weep,” a song that must have been absent from all his potential tracklists, even ad-libbing fraught lyrics: “I don’t like no snow, no winter, no cold.” Fingers slinking over his piano with heavy steps, vocals slurring at the edges, he gives the spiritual a physical force. “There has always been a dichotomy in my music,” Prince once said. “I’m searching for a higher plane, but I want the most of being on earth.” Piano & a Microphone is both omen and artifact, a rehearsal for another life.


The Indiana artist’s debut album builds on his hyperpop, digicore, and rage rap roots, but positions him as a pop star in his own right.

E3

In midwxst’s hands, adolescence is less of a roller coaster and more of a drop tower, liable to leave the faint of heart swearing off rides forever. Since breaking out in the world of hyperpop in 2020, the young Indiana producer has adopted different sounds—emo, digicore, rage rap—to convey his big-hearted, turbulent songs about loving, hating, and hating to love. On his debut album E3, Edgar Sarratt III settles into a nimbly eclectic mode of pop-trap he tested on 2022’s better luck next time. The style  suits his inclination for layered harmonies, especially ones that dip, swell, and soar around his warble. Laying his omnivorous tastes over gospel and rock textures, E3 positions midwxst not as a Playboi Carti heir, but a pop star in his own right.
Unlike other SoundCloud-grown artists who’ve blossomed in anonymity, midwxst’s music is fueled by the need to feel seen: by girls who mess with his head, relatives he’s determined to make proud, and a fanbase he wants to commiserate with. On album opener “lost,” a twinkling piano tune that blooms into a full-fledged rock song, he revisits that desire for recognition from a more jaded perspective, singing: “Time has changed me/But I don’t think you cared.” “lost” is indebted to Kanye West, in part because it includes vocals from members of the Sunday Service Choir, but it is still squarely midwxst in its snarling, lovelorn vulnerability. It feels more authentic for Sarratt, a far cry from the imitative, Carti-style flexes on last year’s Back in Action 3.0.
midwxst’s big, uncomplicated hooks—crafted alongside co-executive producer Sophie Gray—feel designed to coax out oceans of iPhone flashlights. He’s skilled at making songs for the mass catharsis of an arena show: the yowled “I know” of “warning,” the repeated titular cry of “lights out,” the juxtaposition of a hopeless chorus over a wistful guitar riff on “like nah.” Even the requisite fuckboy track “s.f.b.” can easily be shouted with the same abandon that Denzel Curry brings to the Lil Jon-style outro.
Despite its studied gloss, E3 is still an introduction, and not every shot lands. Sarratt sometimes relies on well-tread idioms, such as “I’ve been shot by Cupid,” which don’t always match the intimacy of the music. Rhyming “you” with “you” on the penultimate “hate how much” is a bit egregious, especially when there’s five writers in the room. But the best parts of E3 are delicate and unexpected. The centerpiece “heartache blues” is exultant, blending stacked vocoder harmonies à la Imogen Heap, a plucky sung refrain, a radio-ready trap verse, and a pattering dembow riddim punctuated with handclaps into one big production flex. Tellingly, the verse barely stands out.
The frenzied structures of hyperpop and rage rap were valuable templates for Sarratt’s earlier work (after all, this is an artist who fondly recalls throwing punches in the pit at one of Carti’s recent Rolling Loud sets). But the softer melodies that midwxst carries through E3 elevate his high-drama impulses in a new way, lifted by producers like Gray, collaborators like Curry, and a major-label tool kit. Even when his lines lean rudimentary or his flows feel repetitive, the more expansive palette he’s drawing from helps mask some of the lyrical clunkiness. By the closing track “ready for you,” his writing reveals the growth possible with some guiding hands; the internal rhyme and evocative image of “I ride head out the window/playing limbo with the wind” is one of his strongest bars yet. He’s learning to wield his rawness, and maintaining soul even if he sounds more polished.