New York’s most anxious punk delivers hook after hook on an album that deals with evergreen sociopolitical concerns yet sounds like it could’ve been written 30 minutes ago.

NO DREAM

Does Jeff Rosenstock ever get tired of seeing the future? Basically every musical and ethical component that his previous band Bomb the Music Industry! stood for in 2005 still remain. Bigger labels have allowed him to maintain a pay-what-you-want model that predated Radiohead’s famous method of sale for their 2007 album In Rainbows and predicted the current outright reliance on tip jars and shareware. Rosenstock’s side projects variously embrace ska, folk-punk, and Long Island pop-punk, long before these profoundly uncool offshoots were finally given their due as gateways to deeper DIY engagement.
But his mainstream breakthrough didn’t arrive until 2016’s WORRY., when the election of Donald Trump accelerated America’s degradation to the point where the country started to look exactly like the worst fears of New York’s most anxious punk. After 2018’s POST- emerged to audit year one of the #Resistance, NO DREAM asks: When retail therapy, mindfulness apps, and pyrrhic political engagement all fail to provide anything more than a distraction, how do we live with ourselves? It’s quintessential Jeff Rosenstock—an album formulated around evergreen sociopolitical concerns yet sounds like it could’ve been written 30 minutes ago.
Once again releasing an album with no advance warning, Rosenstock gets to the point in less than a minute with “NO TIME,” a welcome reacclimation to his hardcore roots delivered with frothing intensity. It’s a different kind of urgency than the one lent to POST-, which began with a chant of “we’re tired and bored” and ended with “we’re not gonna let them win,” less an expression of defiance than exhaustion. With meaningful, large-scale political change seeming further out of reach, the only conceivable path to serenity is having the wisdom to know what internal changes are possible. “Did you turn into a person that you really want to be?” Rosenstock yells throughout “NO TIME,” at you, at the mirror, rhetorically. Perhaps other artists have expressed more high-minded or effective anger at late capitalism’s human cost, but no one is more adept at validating the helplessness that comes from being constantly activated and totally powerless.
Rosenstock’s solo career almost functions as a treatise about the lie of American industrialization. Once machines relieved humans of backbreaking physical and mental labor, surely we’d have more time to dedicate to personal improvement, community organizing, arts, and culture. Instead, the distractions just became shinier and more inescapable, the ostensible freedom of working from home revealed as being your own browbeating boss 24/7. And now that the economy has cratered and many people have nothing but time for all those New Year’s resolutions and long-shelved self-improvement projects, there’s even less incentive to take them on.
The righteous aims of NO DREAM are true, even if they’re at broad targets—consumerism rebranded as morality; toxic online forums; one side of the political spectrum offering increasingly emboldened cruelty while the other is “weaponizing what’s left of your empathy.” “I’ve been told most my life, ‘Try and see the other side’/By people who have never tried to see the other side,” Rosenstock mocks during “Scram!,” giving them the half-a-bar they deserve. A few months ago, “Scram!”’s central hook (“Don’t you wanna go away?”) might’ve meant signing out of Twitter or Facebook, getting more involved in a local election, or finding solace in a marathon Death Rosenstock gig. The shoutalongs of NO DREAM are potent enough for individual use, but their communal impact is now sadly theoretical. Where does anyone go now when going off the grid means almost total disconnection from society?
Two years ago, Rosenstock simply bemoaned the existence of “All This Useless Energy,” and NO DREAM tries to figure out where it eventually ends up. Fittingly, it’s far more spiteful and aggressive than his recent endeavors into power-pop, Billy Joel piano balladry, and Neil Young covers would’ve predicted. Pretty much every song on NO DREAM ends up veering towards the raw materials of Rosenstock’s less critically revered days. “Scram!” takes a midsong trip to the House of Blues for a metalcore breakdown, while the actual skramz pop up on the title track, which spends its first two minutes lost in the dual drones of college rock jangle and an endless scroll of atrocity. In the past, this kind of genre flipping could be used as a flex; on NO DREAM, it’s the sound of the walls closing in.
The second half of NO DREAM narrows its scope to Rosenstock’s life as a musician and the self-doubt, heightened expectations, and precarity that results from spending decades dedicating one’s life to something that, at most, might provide enough success to justify carrying on. Yet, it also features some of the most expansive, rich writing of his career. “Be an aging tourist/Hustle like a tortoise,” he half-jokes during “f a m e,” a jerky dance-punk throwback to a time when it was a lot easier for acts at the upper echelons of indie rock to make ends meet. From that point forward, Rosenstock can only remember the good old days in the most unromantic terms: “Pictures of toilets across the planet,” increasingly short phone calls back home, a pyramid of beer cans in a flophouse that he’s embarrassed to have made and too proud to knock down.
These would be worthwhile even just as bitterly funny snapshots of a band successful enough to play to arms-crossed crowds in Germany. But as he did with WORRY.’s “Festival Song,” Rosenstock can zoom out just enough to see the bigger picture, specifically, his complicity in the compromises everyone needs to make in order to make late capitalism work. The verses of “***BNB” would be hilarious Airbnb host reviews if they weren’t so heartbreaking—the first is dedicated to a stranger named Sam, stuck in a dead-end job and a terrible marriage, her house secretly being rented out by her mother so guys like Rosenstock can save a few bucks on tour. Delivered in a sing-song cadence, “I used the shower sponge when you went to Spain alone” should live on as the most devastating encapsulation of the pathetic intimacy generated by platform business.
Rosenstock’s previous two albums ended on notes of bleak solidarity: Perfection doesn’t exist, so let’s enjoy each other’s humanity; they’re probably going to win but we won’t just let them. NO DREAM closer “Ohio Tpke” is dedicated to “the only person I ever wanted to like me,” and it starts out like so many other love letters from the road—counting the dashes in the median on the ride home, songs shared on a summer night, a simple connection on FaceTime easing loneliness better than a room full of fans. “Ohio Tpke” morphs to embody any number of quintessentially American rock bands—Bruce Springsteen, Against Me!, Wilco, Built to Spill—and the mood shifts just as quickly, as Rosenstock recognizes how everything required to make a life on the road work at his age gets less resilient. The phone calls get shorter, the reunions get more awkward, agitated, more desperate, more definitive: “I hate coming home/I hate leaving home.” If it was written by someone who showed even the slightest bit less commitment to their craft and cause than Jeff Rosenstock, I’d take “Ohio Tpke” as a retirement announcement.
NO DREAM is about what really goes on when you take enough time to think about whether you’ve turned into the person that you really wanted to be. Maybe there will be freedom from having to repeat the same cycle of releasing an album and trying to find just enough income away from home to do the same thing over again, two years older than you were before. Maybe Rosenstock writes a batch of songs about slowing down just enough to find glimmers of inner peace, or the collective disbelief when someone else is president, or the disorientating euphoria of being able to leave our houses again. But if history’s any indication, even if all of that happens, Jeff Rosenstock will write about how nothing really changed on the most prophetic album of 2022.


Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg teams up with the duo Cross Record on a slowcore-influenced album enlivened by a surprising musical chemistry.

Loma

On paper, the creative marriage of Shearwater and Cross Record doesn’t necessarily sound like the most productive union. Shearwater, the indie-rock band led by Jonathan Meiburg over the last two decades, favor big moments and dramatic sweeps where Meiburg’s expressive voice can leap and pirouette from chord to chord. Cross Record prefer subtler execution, letting singer Emily Cross’ voice glide along minimal melodies while multi-instrumentalist Dan Duszynski cooks up an eerie instrumental miasma. But when the two bands toured together in 2016, something clicked. Impressed by the duo’s performances, Meiburg pitched a collaboration, and the three musicians convened as Loma, a joint project that heightens each member’s individual strengths and shows off their surprising musical chemistry.
Together, Loma play with space and momentum in a way that recalls the glacial patience of slowcore trio Low, only shrouded in Grouper’s earthy grain. Their self-titled debut marks the first time Meiburg has ever written lyrics for a voice other than his own, a practice he’s called a “relief” after spending years in a more traditional singer-songwriter role. And while Cross has usually applied her voice to simple, staggered melodies with Cross Record, here she gets to dance along Meiburg’s dynamic compositions. The lengths they go to meet in the middle, aided by Duszynski’s skillful engineering, lead them up some disarmingly emotional alleys. What could have been just an experiment in form becomes an exercise in getting under another person’s skin: Meiburg pens lyrics he wouldn’t sing himself and Cross adopts a persona slightly divergent from her own.
Much of the album lingers in a dreamlike, reflective space. Even its most excitable numbers, “Dark Oscillations” and “Relay Runner,” seem to be sung from a liminal place, on the border between one state of being and the next. Over driving percussion, Cross strives to crawl out of stagnation by looking deep into herself, her voice swelling behind her like a chorus of past selves. The album’s chilling centerpiece “I Don’t Want Children,” powered by the kind of melody you’d hear lilting from a music box, looks to future potentials that are just as lost. Cross ruminates on absent figures as powerfully as if they were standing in front of her. She’s “wondering what could be—who could be,” her voice heavy with the kind of melancholy that only surfaces when you’re staring down a path not taken. That song’s slow tension builds throughout the album, rippling through the rich, acoustic tones of “Sundogs” and “Shadow Relief,” only to break with the pummeling closer “Black Willow,” a lurching, gorgeous, and terrifying song that finds Loma at the peak of their powers. Cross’ voice is multi-tracked to the point where it sounds like every possible incarnation of herself is singing at once. It’s overwhelming, that simultaneity, like coming unstuck in time, like understanding the totality of your choices as you’re making them.
Duszynski and Cross were married when they began making Loma. At some point during the recording process, they decided to divorce. The album isn’t about their breakup
(Meiburg wrote all but one song, “Shadow Relief,” before he even knew the couple intended to split), but it can be read in part as a cross-section of the states of mind that might lead to such a schism. Despite the collaboration behind its making, it’s rife with loneliness; Cross tends to sing as though she’s in an infinitely empty room, and Duszynski’s production amplifies the effect. But from that alienation arises a way forward. If she’s alone, she’s not stuck there. She finds a way to move.


The British producer’s bubbly, refreshing latest record is a celebration writ small, music for a barnburner in a dollhouse.

Cape Cira

There’s something undeniably entrancing about the little donk that happens when you smack a xylophone. Same with the rubbery thwack of the conga. They are instant little dopamine-release mechanisms, and thus the bar is low for pleasing instrumental percussion records: Record yourself with moderate skill for a half an hour and, chances are, you’ve got something hypnotic enough to find an audience. In some ways, this describes K-Lone’s Cape Cira. It’s a record of small and bubbly percussion, featuring an added array of digital embellishments. But Cape Cira is a lush piece of music, one that uses familiar tools to create something fresh and vibrant.
K-Lone, a young British producer named Josiah Gladwell, brings a kitchen-sink approach to the instrumentation. Yes, he relies on the lovely resonance of the marimba, but there’s also what sounds like pots and pans, Coke bottles, timpani, bells, castanets, and toy pianos. Gladwell claims to use both digital and analog sounds, but it’s impossible to tell what’s what. Listen closely and you’ll hear some bird chirps that are clearly digitized. Listen not so closely and you’ll swear you heard a nightingale out your window. Put it on in the background and you’ll experience bliss by association; pay close attention and you’ll likely be genuinely touched by its depth.
Cape Cira is equally sprawling in its tone. The underlying drums on “In the Pines” are accompanied by a wordless chorus, and something that sounds like a guitar solo played underwater at half speed. “Honey” uses an almost hip-hop backbeat; through K-Lone’s lens, though, it sounds like a more zen version of the bouncy rhythms you often hear bucket drummers pounding out on subway platforms. The main rhythm of “Palmas” is undergirded with the sound of someone hammering tin. “Bluefin” is perhaps the album’s loveliest moment, with slowly building pan drums undergirded by Eno-esque long tones. Shards of noise jump in and out. At one point, a raygun noise shoots across the landscape. The song is not greater than the sum of its parts; it just uses its parts very innovatively. The whole album is a celebration writ small, music for a barnburner in a dollhouse.
This is the first time K-Lone’s made music anywhere near this sumptuous. His 2017 song “Old Fashioned” hinted in this direction, beginning with a spare synth line and some bird calls (it seems he really likes birds) before breaking into heavy dub, like it couldn’t quite sustain its subdued ambitions. With Cape Cira, he’s largely dropped any desire for propulsion in favor of an outward creep, like a stain slowly spreading in all directions at once.
In discussing this album, K-Lone has cited the Fourth World movement, which takes its name from a 1980 album by Brian Eno and trumpeter Jon Hassell. Hassell has emerged as a key influence on today’s composers and electronic producers, each with their own way of blending percussive music with digital effects. K-Lone’s one-time collaborator, producer Don’t DJ, has been tongue-in-cheek with his liberal use of Balinese gamelan music, even releasing an EP called Authentic Exoticism. Another K-Lone touchstone, Visible Cloaks, have been more than upfront about their love of Japanese New Age and ’80s ambient music. Cape Cira touches on all these styles and more. If he wasn’t so skilled at blending everything seamlessly, it might come off as naive. If anything, that’s Cape Cira’s major fault; it’s almost too meticulous. If you found it cloying, I wouldn’t blame you. But there is something sweet about K-Lone’s wholesale embrace of sound, like he couldn’t choose an allegiance to any one idea, so he had to find a way to make them all work.


Fascinated by the psychology behind human connection, the Swedish pop singer celebrates all varieties of romantic vulnerability on her exuberant third album.

Sway

It’s been nearly a decade since Tove Styrke planted her feet firmly on planet Pop, graduating from “Swedish Idol” in 2009 to release her self-titled debut album the next year, at just 17 years old. Now 25, the singer and songwriter brings the confidence of a seasoned pro to her third album, Sway. Released on the heels of her stint with Lorde’s Melodrama tour and just weeks in advance of her opening slot on Katy Perry’s Witness tour, Sway is a half-hour romantic romp that positions Styrke at the forefront of contemporary pop.
For the past year and a half, the Umeå, Sweden native has been crafting what she calls “a little collection of love stories.” Sticky and sweet, these new songs revel in intense emotions like desire, tenderness, anxiety, and lust. From the thrill of a secret crush to the shame of alcohol-stained temptation, Styrke embraces all varieties of romantic vulnerability.
That boldness is evident in Sway’s expanded range of vocal styles, from the shredded whispers of “On the Low” to the warped Auto-Tune taunts of “I Lied.” (The vocal effects on the album are used for fun rather than deception; Styrke’s voice is the clearest and strongest it’s ever been.) More importantly, her newfound audacity gives the songs a sense of playfulness. The title track is a woozy, seductive overture, with Styrke pausing to catch her breath between vowels as her voice maneuvers around come-ons like an ice cube melting through hot fingers. But “Sway” is a nervous stream of consciousness more than a mating call, capturing the anxiety of being forced to read a vibe: “So if you’re into me I got the energy/Why are you on your phone?” Amid pounding drums and hand-claps, she imagines a variety of possible outcomes.
Styrke defines a successful pop song as one that is a “shortcut to your heart. It triggers emotion just like that.” Working mainly with Katy Perry and Icona Pop collaborator Elof Loelv, as well as Joe Janiak, a co-writer of Britney Spears’ “Make Me…,” she satisfies that requirement with bangers that are sure to provoke a wide range of strong feelings. During the bridge of Tilt-a-Whirling dancehall gem “Changed My Mind,” vocoder makes her voice bleed and blur like she’s wiggling her tongue as she coos, “Pull me closer.” Styrke even reinvents Lorde’s “Liability,” with an album-closing cover that transforms the bruised ballad into a scoffing, eye-rolling assault on the haters.
The pleasure of Sway is in the witty, unexpected details. Beneath the layers of rubber-band bass and cinematic drum rolls, a sample of a zipper illustrates lyrics about dropping trow on “Mistakes.” Paired with the line, “Can’t deny we got a real vibe,” on the same track, the sound of a vibrating phone becomes an aural joke. The subtle echo toward the end of “On the Low” gives way to bird calls, transforming Styrke’s lonely cave into her very own Garden of Eden, where temptation isn’t taboo. Each sound is a metaphor for a different type of desire.
Sway is a pure Top 40 pop album, jammed with breathy whispers, earth-shaking sex anthems, and bedazzled, Charli XCX-style melodies. But no matter how loud they get, the songs play like inner monologues. They’re not confessional, but they are intimate in the sense that they find Styrke asking herself (and often her friends) highly personal questions: Why do we love or hate or want to sleep with this one particular person? How are my brain and my body reacting to this touch? This joie de vivre and curiosity about the psychology behind human connection make Sway Tove Styrke’s most cohesive work to date—and one of the most exuberant albums in recent memory.


Three years into their return from the majors, the Orrall brothers have finally blossomed into a proper rock band—on an album that deconstructs the idea of what a proper rock band should sound like.

Magick Songs

For most indie-rock bands, signing to a major label hardly presents the moral quandary it did, say, 25 years ago. In fact, these days, you barely even notice when it happens. (“I’m so bummed the War on Drugs signed to Atlantic,” said no one ever.) However, the destabilizing effects of getting dropped by a major label are as acute as they ever were. Back in the 1990s, even the most hardened and savvy indie-rock insurrectionists—be it the Jesus Lizard or Archers of Loaf—were never really the same after they got demoted from the big leagues. And in the more recent case of JEFF the Brotherhood, even an act that openly celebrated its dismissal from a major label can’t help but emerge from the experience a changed band.
For brothers-in-rock Jake and Jamin Orrall, signing to Warner Bros. in 2012 seemed like the natural next-level move after a prolific decade-long run that saw them harness their distortion-caked racket into radio-ready power pop. Alas, their warm ‘n’ fuzzy Warner debut, Hypnotic Nights, barely cracked the Billboard Top 200, proving that a Dan Auerbach production credit isn’t enough to turn your band into the next Black Keys. With 2015’s Wasted on the Dream, JEFF the Brotherhood took another crack at selling themselves as the world’s most sanguine stoner-rock band, but Warner opted to drop the Bros mere weeks before the album was set to be released. (The band’s own Infinity Cat imprint stepped in to rush-release it.) Since then, JEFF the Brotherhood have seemingly been torn between going back to garage-greased brass tacks (2016’s Zone) or stepping more forcefully on the motorik gas pedal (2015’s Global Chakra Rhythms). But with Magick Songs, we feel the true aftershocks of their ill-fated Warner experience. Having made a concerted effort to court the mainstream only to have their advances rebuffed, the Orralls have come to the conclusion that there’s really no reason for JEFF the Brotherhood to sound anything like JEFF the Brotherhood anymore.
It’s a rare thing for a rock band to genuinely surprise you on its 13th album, so credit the group—a two-piece outfit that once limited itself to three-string guitars—for completely blowing up any pre-existing notions you may have had of their band or their music. On Magick Songs, the Brotherhood function more like an extended family, thanks to the official recruitment of Raconteurs/Dead Weather bassist Jack Lawrence and multi-instrumentalist Kunal Prakash, along with guest vocals from Jenna Moynihan (of Nashville indie-pop trio Daddy Issues) and crucial contributions from Bully bassist Reece Lazarus—on clarinet. Ironically, JEFF the Brotherhood have finally blossomed into a proper rock band on an album that thoroughly deconstructs the idea of what a proper rock band should sound like.
At the height of their commercial aspirations, JEFF the Brotherhood effectively retooled krautrock for Camaros, rendering classic-rock chug with Autobahn precision. But on Magick Songs, krautrock is merely the jumping-off point: On the album’s spell-casting introduction, “Focus on the Magick,” the band rides a gentle Jaki Liebezeit beat through an oceanic fog, with Moynihan’s angelic vocals serving as the siren’s call luring them into the murkier depths. From there, JEFF the Brotherhood only become further untethered from their roots. Magick Songs is reportedly a dystopian sci-fi concept album inspired by everything from Isaac Asimov novels to the apocalyptic visions Jamin experienced in his dreams, and while the narrative thread can be difficult to parse through the omnipresent haze, the album effectively functions as a soundtrack to JEFF the Brotherhood’s own atomization. As they drift through Japanese new-age instrumentals (“Singing Garden”) and gamelan oscillations (“Locator”)—with Lazarus’ dissonant clarinet serving as their fog-horn guide—the band manages to suppress all traces of its old identity while reinforcing Magick Songs’ ominous, claustrophobic vibe. To that end, the album’s greatest act of debasement—and thus, greatest triumph—is “Relish,” which sounds like Jamie xx’s “Gosh” stripped of its clattering rhythm track and left to stew in its weightless, brown-note synth drones.
Many of these tracks are actually edits of extended jams, but Magick Songs is more than just a series of experiments in globe-trotting psychedelia. With the Pavementine rumble of “Camel Swallowed Whole” and the misty, cymbal-tapped post-rock surges of “Parachute,” JEFF the Brotherhood successfully indulge their growing fetish for off-kilter sonics while producing effortlessly tuneful, emotionally resonant songs. So it’s a bit disappointing that, in the album’s home stretch, Magick Songs’ amorphous, unpredictable aesthetic hardens into the lumbering doom-metal of “The Mother” and “Magick Man,” as if the band were overcompensating for the deficit of brawny rock elsewhere on the record. But even as they momentarily revert back to delivering slabs of sludge, it’s clear that JEFF the Brotherhood are not the band they once were. The closing “Farewell to the Sun” may lurch forth on a bong-bubbling groove, but the song’s queasy, string-swept breakdown and creepy subliminal voices soundly reassert Magick Songs’ rejuvenating mission: For JEFF the Brotherhood, a bitchin’ riff is no longer the end goal, but a bulldozer that allows them to bust open new worlds to explore.


Across the South African rap duo's fourth album, their iconoclastic rave-rap fades into shallow humor and belabored production.

Die Antwoord: Mount Ninji and Da Nice Time Kid

Mount Ninji and Da Nice Time Kid

From their inception, Die Antwoord have taken an audacious stance against political correctness. The fact that Die Antwoord are two South African satirists who’ve gone all-in to fabricate their campy street personas made the whole idea rather rich. In the past, frontman Ninja has asserted, however ironically, that we can’t expect hip-hop in other parts of the world to fall in line with American PC fervor. But much how Sasha Baron Cohen lost the thread somewhere between Borat and Brüno, on Mount Ninji and Da Nice Time Kid, Die Antwoord’s sharp satire has gone from a bit messy to making dick jokes at a middle school level—literally.
When child rapper Lil Tommy Terror guests on two back-to-back tunes early on, he doesn’t even make you laugh as much as your seventh-grade class clown once did. “Will I ever stop drawing penises?” Terror squeaks. “Never!” The next song he guests on is titled “U Like Boobies?” Likewise, “Banana Brain” is pretty much a euphemism for “Dick Brain,” while modern burlesque icon Dita Von Teese and Die Antwoord frontwoman Yolandi take the lead on “Gucci Coochie,” a song that may as well have been titled “Expensive Pussy.”
What does it mean that two women at Yolandi and Von Teese’s level of fame succumb to rap’s materialist-maneater trope in an intensifying gender-conscious climate? Or when Yolandi appeals to salacious father-daughter sex fantasies on “Daddy?” It's hard to say if it means something transgressive—or if it means anything at all—but by this point, it’s getting less and less credible to give Die Antwoord the benefit of the doubt. “She bounce around da club like a psycho little cartoon,” raps Yolandi—an unintended irony given that Die Antwoord are on the verge of turning into cartoons themselves.
Like most of the tunes on Mount Ninji, “Gucci Coochie” is most engaging when you turn your brain off. Like a more aggressive answer to ’90s electro outfit Prodigy, Die Antwoord manage to get as far as they do on sheer attitude and energy alone. Now under the mentorship of Cypress Hill/Soul Assassins anchor DJ Muggs (credited here as the Black Goat), Die Antwoord have grown more focused when it comes to crafting whole albums.
But even with Muggs and Chicago rapper God on hand as producers, Die Antwoord haven’t quite become the legit hip-hop they believe they’ve become. On the press release for this album—typically entertaining but tellingly devoid of actual information—Ninja declares that Muggs taught Die Antwoord to “unlock their hidden powers and rip the rap game a new asshole.” If that was the goal, there was really no way to prevent Mount Ninji from falling short.
Viewed through more modest expectations, though, Mount Ninji is not without its charms. The rapid-fire wordplay is crammed with tongue-in-cheek moments where Yolandi and Ninja switch on a dime between absurd braggadocio and clever self-deprecation. But even if you think that they’re getting better at their delivery, cleverness is not new territory for the pair who proved their mettle as performance artists well before they invented the characters they now play for a living.
Some of the album’s more out-there moments veer towards a demented form of cabaret where hip-hop serves more as a means to an end. It makes you wonder whether Die Antwoord would do better to market themselves as art-rap rather than the “real gangsta shit” that Cypress Hill’s Sen Dog rhymes about on “Shit Just Got Real.” In fact, almost the entire second half of *Mount Ninji—*eight tracks in a row—simply plods along in a downtempo void that barely raises a pulse. Jack Black’s hammy presence, for example, does nothing to add spice to the circus organ-driven “Rats Rule,” and the skeletal “Stoopid Rich” and “Fat Faded Fuck Face” could’ve benefited from more layering. As Die Antwoord's energy level putters out, so too does Mount Ninji, an album too faded and immature to make a lasting dent on the face of hip-hop, much less rip the rap game a new asshole. If nothing else, though, Die Antwoord still have a fair amount of entertainment value left in the tank, even if that tank is starting to dip below half-empty.


Though an interesting showcase of her powerful and newfound voice, the Canadian pop star’s comeback too often lapses into the rote, the stale, or the uninspired.

Head Above Water

The word “yeah” is a noncommittal affirmation, the preferred response of huffy teens across the English-speaking world. But on the lips of Avril Lavigne, “yeah” is a powerful tool: On 2007’s “When You’re Gone,” it’s a plea for reconciliation; 2011’s “What the Hell” uses them as a makeshift Greek chorus. The “yeahs” from her 2002 track “I’m With You” were so brightly evocative, Rihanna sampled them. Beyond their utility as emotional beacons, Avril Lavigne’s “yeahs” belied her faux-punk affectations. They were a conduit for diva-level high notes and a platform for the voice that got her a record deal with L.A. Reid at 15. Seventeen years after her 2002 debut Let Go defined her as the enfant terrible of the Radio Disney crowd, Head Above Water is the pared-back, serious record that she’s been hinting at in her years of belted affirmations.
It is striking to hear her new album open somewhat maturely with sparse piano and Lavigne’s throaty roar. After all, Lavigne seemed to be on a Peter Pan trajectory: “Here’s to never growing up,” she cheered on her 2013 self-titled record. But her health had other plans. In the middle of a worldwide tour, she began to feel exhausted, so weak she could barely stand. After months of quiet suffering, Lavigne was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2014. She spent the next two years bed-ridden, recovering.
In those intervening years, her voice seemed to grow stronger, and Lavigne saw it as a divine signal: “God was like, ‘Nope, you’re going to keep doing music,” she said in one interview. Head Above Water, then, is an album about resilience, one that explores the range of her vocal chords, with little time for the scream-singing that once defined her sound.
On the title track, her voice cuts above swooning strings, while the lyrics attribute healing qualities to her singing: “And my voice becomes the driving force/I won’t let this pull me overboard.” Then, right before the chorus hits, the background cuts out, and Lavigne’s mezzo bursts into a booming prayer: “God keep my head above water.” The result is a ballad that is larger-than-life, but stops short of maudlin sentimentality. Its plainly religious message also helped Lavigne discover a surprising new audience—the song quickly climbed to the No. 2 spot on the Christian songs chart.
Throughout the record, Lavigne freely explores her past as a choir girl and Canadian folk singer. “Tell Me It’s Over” is a brassy retelling of a swinging-door relationship, complete with a horn section and gospel choir, while “Crush” is a warm ode to the more fluid moments of early love. At its best, Head Above Water is a vehicle for rediscovering Lavigne’s own voice. On “It Was in Me,” she echoes the quiet-loud pattern of “Head Above Water,” letting her voice crack on the verses before breaking out the high notes. She wields her verses and choruses like a Swiss Army knife, at times using them to boldly make a point, at others letting them unspool, like on the sun-drenched love song “Souvenir.”
Unfortunately, many of the statements she makes are, by contrast, stale and uninspired. Even in its strongest moments, there is nothing revelatory in the lyrics, which have a tendency to run out of steam. The worst offender might be “I Fell in Love With the Devil,” which recounts the story of a wayward lover with metaphors that seem plucked from a LiveJournal entry: “Got me playing with fire/Baby hand me the lighter/Tastes just like danger.” Equally mind-numbing and featuring Nicki Minaj is “Dumb Blonde,” which haplessly reinforces the stereotypes it attempts to subvert. Lavigne crafted these songs with a team of at least nine writers, but most seem comfortable writing to the most generic form of an emotion rather than giving it specificity. Musically, Lavigne hits the same notes over and over again; her belting is impressive, but by the final song, her depth-defying wail loses its charm and becomes desperate and exhausting.
Lavigne could be forgiven for producing a conflicted record, one that displays potential but falls short of the statement it hoped to achieve. She said that she felt restricted from making the records she really wanted due to pressures from her record labels; the five years in recovery forced her out of the industry cycle that had gripped her entire adult life. It is unsurprising that when given full access to her own creative desires, she stumbles, lost in her newfound musical freedom and a second lease on a career. Head Above Water marks a new chapter in the singer’s lengthy body of work; it’s a shame that Lavigne thinks her high notes are all she has to give.


The second volume in Rashad Becker’s series is redolent of Smithsonian Folkways’ field recordings, with nods to early musique concrète and intercepted extraterrestrial transmissions.

Rashad Becker: Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II

The phrase “mastered by Rashad Becker” in an album’s liner notes confers a seal of approval that can't be equaled. As engineer at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, Becker’s name can be found on almost any noteworthy techno or experimental release of the past twenty years. His own music came as a pleasant surprise when he released his debut album for PAN with 2013’s Traditional Music of Notional Species, Vol. 1. At that time, he already had 1200 titles with his credit on them. With Vol. 2, a look at his Discogs page reveals that tally is now nearing 1600 releases. That Becker even has time to contemplate his own music seems impossible, like the leader of a country also having spare time to executive produce a television show.
Much like his first album, he breaks the sides (none of which pass the 4:45 mark) into “Themes” and “Dances,” though one would be hard-pressed to determine the concepts underpinning one side, much less figure out just what moves and steps would comprise the latter. As the title suggests, it’s an album redolent of Smithsonian Folkways’ field recordings from Africa and Indonesia, with nods to early musique concrète and intercepted extraterrestrial transmissions. So maybe it’s closest comparison is to the ritualistic sounds of alien tribes as overheard by a curious visitor.
“Themes VII” wheezes and lurches and bumps into things, while “Themes VI” rattles like a china cabinet loaded into a UFO. The near-vocal quality of his sounds and their cartoonish weirdness brings to mind Hans Reichel’s self-made daxophone, a bizarre wooden instrument that you bow to elicit sounds. “Dances V” stretches and purrs like some space-age polymer while Becker gets an especially nougat-y bass tone for “Dances VI.”
Whenever Becker conjures a familiar sound, he quickly husks history, meaning and expectations from it so that it might quiver in space all on its own, like a cell under a microscope. A mental picture that forms at the beginning of a piece will lose its meaning by the end. So yes, “Themes V” has frequencies suggesting struck metal and the rhythms of a gamelan ensemble. But what to make of the worming frequencies, shortwave static and what sounds like a thrummed comb that then intrude upon the track? His tracks bring sounds, descriptors, and language itself into question.
“Notional” becomes the operative word here, as each piece feels conjectural, possible but unreal. There is, again, a folkloric tinge, an echo of music from peoples in other parts of the world never previously encountered by the West. Much like early electronic music and musique concrète anticipated the means that lies behind most modern music-making—even though it seemed to merely be noise and gibberish at the time—there’s an aspect of Becker’s work that sounds like nonsense, yet also hints at what we might deem music in another half-century.


Natasha Khan's latest is a synth-pop love letter to the ’80s sci-fi and fantasy films of her youth.

Lost Girls

Natasha Khan writes songs that sound not quite of this earth. She spun strange fairy tales on 2006’s Fur and Gold, summoned celestial grandeur on 2009’s Two Suns, invoked intimate magic on 2012’s The Haunted Man. And 2016’s The Bride had the candlelit chill of an old M.R. James story, with Khan singing from the perspective of a woman whose fiancé, killed in a car crash on the way to their wedding, would not rest quietly.
Lost Girls is no less fantastical. Loosely centered around a new character (Nikki Pink) and a gang of biker women who roam the sunset streets of an eerie, make-believe vision of LA, it’s essentially a love letter to the ’80s sci-fi and fantasy films of her youth. She wrote the songs while working on a script of her own, and the starry-eyed, big-screen synth-pop of “Kids in the Dark” sounds like the soundtrack to the big romantic clinch in her own coming-of-age flick.
Otherworldly flourishes are everywhere—but they’re also steeped in nostalgia. Familiar scenes flash by like a supercut of worn-out Blockbuster VHS tapes: vampires jumping off of bridges a la The Lost Boys, an ET-inspired nighttime bike ride, a glimpse of the infamous Hollywood Forever Cemetery that hosted the undead frights in One Dark Night. Dark electronics flicker with the mystery of John Carpenter or swell with the euphoria of John Williams. On standout “The Hunger,” Khan lusts for blood over the throb of a haunted church organ, while a creepy saxophone slithers around what sounds like the bones of a lost Cure song on the gothy instrumental “Vampires.”
It’s a vivid world, although less singular or startling than Khan’s previous creations; these touchstones have become so deeply embedded in the cultural fabric that they offer the same comforting glow as an episode of “Stranger Things” rather than the shock of the new. Lost Girls is richest when Khan puts her own devilish spin on those sacred texts, like the beats that boil and bubble under the shimmering disco of “Feel For You” or the mutated and masochistic Giorgio Moroder banger “So Good.” She has a deliciously macabre ball on “Jasmine,” using her incongruously clipped British accent to narrate a very American horror story in the Hollywood hills. “Little girl cracks your heart in two/Sucks the juice,” she whispers, keyboards pulsing eerily as she revels in the spilled guts and grisly details.
“I know it’s the real thing,” sings Khan longingly on “Kids in the Dark.” It’s a reminder that her magically theatrical songs are most powerful when rooted in simple, stark human needs, from the desperate desire that floods “Peach Sky” to the heartbreak that propels “Mountains” into its crushing coda. It’s far from the most explicit homage here, but in those fraught moments when she’s struggling to get to grips with something huge and scary and thrilling, she sounds just like the overwhelmed kids from her beloved ’80s films—the ones who also got in too deep and had to somehow make sense of the inexplicable, however daunting it seemed.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Canadian duo cuts out drums and vocals from long stretches of their first album in six years. That it feels of a piece with their past work is a testament to the solid foundation of their music.

Waiting Game

Junior Boys open Waiting Game, their first album in six years, on an airless, pristinely recorded drone that only gradually fills out into a chord. A fretless bass murmurs and moans; knowing Jeremy Greenspan, we expect him to slick his hair back and indulge in some David Sylvian suavity. But nope: After almost four minutes of weightless, watery atmosphere, he sings the song’s titular phrase, “Must be all the wrong things,” exactly once. The echo on his voice cuts like a contrail through the otherwise static arrangement, and soon enough, we’re back to silence.
If this seems like a curveball, imagine how shocking it would’ve been in the mid-2000s, after the Canadians dropped their 2004 debut, Last Exit. That record was descended from urbane, rock-averse bands like Pet Shop Boys and the Human League but decked out with all the post-Y2K rhythmic trickery of UK garage, microhouse, drum’n’bass, and the stripped-back productions of Timbaland and the Neptunes. Since then, Greenspan and co-producer Matt Didemus have absorbed more styles from across the dance-music spectrum into their sound, climaxing with the grand disco throb and Prince-ly avant-pop experiments of 2016’s Big Black Coat. Through all this omnivorousness, Greenspan’s voice keeps everything rooted in the exquisite, silk-sheets melancholy that makes their music so absorbing.
Because ambient music often conjures the same sort of wistfulness—particularly the jazzy, neo-Balearic type they seem to be going for here, redolent of Gigi Masin and Suzanne Kraft—the excision of drums from large stretches of Waiting Game doesn’t radically change the experience of listening to their music. It has the Junior Boys feel, but Greenspan needs fewer words to bring it into being. “It Never Occurred to Me” consists mostly of small pops and fizzles of vocoder over a hint of a techno beat, and the lyric sheet reads “lyrics are incomprehensible.” “Dum Audio” is sung in Latin—not that you’d know, given how many effects are slathered on Greenspan’s voice. “Fidget” is just a pearly synth lead and a low-end gurgle; it’s to this album what “Mermaid” was to Sade’s Love Deluxe, an instrumental that proves the band can conjure its trademark vibe even without anyone at the mic.
In creating a Junior Boys album that suggests more than it delivers, Greenspan applies some of the tricks from Oh No, the fantastic album he co-produced with Jessy Lanza not long after the release of Big Black Coat. “Dum Audio” is full of the same playful, spooky synth stabs and dissonant chords he used to bring tension to Lanza’s “It Means I Love You” as it built to the mind-melting drum freakout at its climax. Hollow-sounding vintage drum machines putter in the background, and anyone who’s heard “In the Air Tonight” can tell you how foreboding a Roland CR-78 left unattended can be. The only time the album’s impressionistic palette works against it is on “Thinking About You Calms Me Down,” whose big pop hook would hit a lot harder if the duo had set it to a beat instead of simply hinting at one.
Even in the absence of many of their trademarks, Waiting Game feels of a piece with what Greenspan and Didemus have done before, but it’s hard to shake how small it feels. Junior Boys usually keep their albums around 50 minutes, long enough to let their ideas develop along the x-axis of their beats but short enough to be digestible in one sitting. Waiting Game, meanwhile, sits at 37 minutes. It’s as if Greenspan and Didemus started with a standard Junior Boys album and snipped away at whatever they found worth cutting—a drumbeat here, a lyric here, a song there. The result is an album defined largely by what it lacks compared to the band’s past work: a reduction rather than an expansion. Waiting Game proves the duo can conjure their trademark atmosphere without many of their usual tools, but it’s harder to identify what their music gains from losing them.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this review erroneously stated that Jeremy Greenspan produced Jessy Lanza’s 2016 album Oh No. In fact, Greenspan co-produced the album with Lanza.


When the Texas quartet Explosions in the Sky released their last album, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those ...

Explosions in the Sky: The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place

The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place

When the Texas quartet Explosions in the Sky released their last album, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever, it was unfairly plagued by coincidence. The record was a fragile triumph effectively mixing brooding melodrama and frantic rock bombast, but while the album's music was inspiring, it was no match for the ensuing mythology. Yes, a band named Explosions in the Sky did release a record the day before there were, quite literally, explosions in the sky on September 11th. Yes, the album did have a track called "This Plane Will Crash Tomorrow". However, it also came as a devastating obstacle for Explosion's music, as even music-snob bastards like myself needed something a little more "upbeat" to listen to as the world came apart at its seams.
It's in this gloomy context that Explosions in the Sky's sophomore record, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, comes as quite a revelation. While the album still exhibits the ominous melodrama of Those Who Tell the Truth, The Earth is a much warmer affair. Even the title, with its emphasis on the word "not," seems laced with an intense yearning for optimism in the face of horrific circumstance. The inside sleeve of the outstanding album art depicts a sketch of lifeless autumnal leaf wistfully tumbling in the air, only to transform into the body of a fluttering dove. In other words, this is about as close as indie rock gets to an intentionally "post-9/11" album.
One of the most impressive aspects of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is that it feels constantly in flux, growing and transforming with every note. While this achievement would be notable in any genre, in the ceaselessly masturbatory realm of post/indie/prog-rock (really folks, let's just call it "music"), where bands either take far too long to arrive anywhere (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), or just don't have anyplace special to go (Mogwai), bands that avoid both seem increasingly rare finds.
The record's opening track, the aptly titled "First Breath After Coma", serves as the perfect testament to this art-rock mastery. It begins with a single lilting electric guitar note, miming the incessant nerve-wracking electrical beeps of a hospital heart monitor. As the shimmering guitar note settles into a steady groove, the echoing thump of a bass drum organically rises out of the shadowy mix, playing the pensive "lub-dub" rhythm of a human heart. Each rhythmic line of the guitar and the drums gently coerce one another, cautiously teasing and intertwining until each one explodes into their own new forms; the electric guitar note gives birth to an incessant army of sparkling guitar melodies, while the calming bass drum motif morphs into the rollicking snare attack of a traditional marching beat; and this is all within the first four minutes!
The only disappointing aspect of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is its lack of more diversified instrumentation. While each of the record's five tracks is given its own title, trying to pick one out from another can be difficult. The tumbling meditative guitar melody that opens "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean", for instance, seems so reliant upon the feverish guitar freakout that closes "The Only Moment We Were Alone" that any track separation would spoil the spotless evolutionary vibe. The band themselves had to have realized this fact, as they list the tracks on the back of the album buried within a blurry din of verbiage having their lengthy album title spelled out ad-nauseum. In this context, by its tail end, Explosion's limiting bass, drums, and double guitar line-up becomes an increasing hindrance.
With this album, Explosions in the Sky have constructed a sweetly melodic, inspirationally hopeful album for a genre whose trademark is tragedy. For the astute listener, under the CD tray, amongst the illustrated scattered leaves, lies the answer to the album's desperately optimistic title; it reads "Because You Are Listening." It serves as a poignant parting sentiment from a band whose music is as dramatic as finding hope.


The Toronto death metal band returns with its best album yet: an ambitious and deeply human suite that touches the sublime.

The Enduring Spirit

The first 10 minutes of Tomb Mold’s triumphant The Enduring Spirit make it obvious why they’re one of the most beloved death metal bands of the past decade. The Toronto trio emerged in 2015 amid the same death metal wave that launched old-school revivalists Gatecreeper and outer-space voyagers Blood Incantation, and their sound fell somewhere in the middle: brutal enough to satisfy the base urges of the death-metal lizard brain, but with a heady virtuosity that gestured toward the cosmos. They were also prolific, releasing three records in three consecutive years, climaxing with 2019’s stellar Planetary Clairvoyance. In the years since, the band has mostly been on ice, so it’s a thrill to press play on The Enduring Spirit and hear them roaring back to life, showing off the same tangled riffs, nimble drums, and inhuman growls they perfected across their first three records.
As great as “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)” and “Angelic Fabrications” are, those first two tracks serve as a canny bit of misdirection. The third track, “Will of Whispers,” kicks off with a drum fill from drummer/vocalist Max Klebanoff then drops into a gentle, open-hearted chord, ringing out over a wordless vocal from Klebanoff that sounds more like a yogic om than his typical growl. For the next 40 seconds, guitarists Derrick Vella and Payson Power exchange flickering jazz licks and clean, echoey progressions, while Vella’s freewheeling bass roams the open spaces. Only after this sunlit reverie does the heavy riff come in, ferrying the song through a whirring fantasia of muscular death metal and dreamy atmospherics. For the rest of the album, Tomb Mold play fast and loose with the boundaries between death metal and their myriad other interests—jazz fusion,’70s prog, 4AD-style dream-pop. But crucially, they never sound bored with death metal. However far afield their explorations take them, they remain enthralled by the genre’s awesome potential.
There are precursors to their approach. Death, by many measures the very first death metal band, quickly made their way from the malformed thrash of Scream Bloody Gore to something far stranger. (With screechier vocals, Spirit highlight “Servants of Possibility” could be a Symbolic outtake.) Atheist’s mutant prog-death looms large here, and the gonzo weirdness of Demilich and the cavernous doom-death of Incantation still lurk in the corners. But the classic band Tomb Mold most resembles at this point is Cynic, whose synth-and-vocoder-heavy sound and fixation on Zen Buddhism made them one of death metal’s most glorious oddities in the early ’90s. Like Cynic, Tomb Mold are seekers, fascinated by metal’s transcendental potential as much as its flesh-and-blood physicality. On The Enduring Spirit, they frequently sound ecstatic, as though they’re a riff away from discovering the music of the spheres. Trollish black metal kids in Scandinavia used to take the piss out of death metal bands by calling their music “life metal.” For Tomb Mold, that epithet would likely come as a compliment.
Klebanoff’s lyrics echo the spiritual bent of the music, shedding the cosmic horror and science fiction of the band’s past work in favor of investigations of philosophy and metaphysics. Many of Klebanoff’s most striking lines take the form of self-interrogation: “Is power for its own sake what we desire?”; “How will I see my life until I have left it behind?”; “Why do we change?” On the late-album scorcher “Flesh as Armour,” he sings, “Let us be gentle when questioning ourselves.” Klebanoff knows that the key to enlightenment lies within, but that it must be nurtured. His deathly groans are still largely indecipherable without following the lyric sheet, but more than ever before, his words make it worth the effort.
It’s not just the lyrics that embody the band’s evolution. Vella and Power’s guitars hum with an almost devotional intensity, whether they’re working through tricky, tech-y riffs or ripping through expressive, lyrical solos. The hooks on The Enduring Spirit aren’t vocal lines—they’re lead guitar parts, powered by Vella and Power’s memorable phrasing and clean articulation. Even when the band whips into a densely layered frenzy, every note has room to breathe. (Metal superproducer Arthur Rizk’s mix has plenty to do with that.) Vella’s bass playing is every bit as impressive. With his bouncy mid-tune solo from “Angelic Fabrications” and the melodic, Geddy Lee-like licks from “Will of Whispers” alone, he’s earned entry to the death-metal bass Hall of Fame alongside pioneers like Tony Choy and Steve DiGiorgio. Not bad for a guitarist.
The closing “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity” is the hard-won culmination of the band’s evolution, and the song that cements The Enduring Spirit as their best album yet. At 11 and a half minutes, it’s also the longest, most ambitious Tomb Mold song to date. Its blistering opening movement returns the band to their death-metal blitz mode, delivering some of the toughest riffs and gnarliest vocals on the album. But it touches the sublime about four minutes in, when the furious riffing dissipates. For the next five minutes, the band builds to a strange crescendo, peaking not in volume or intensity but in sheer beauty. Vella and Power trade soaring solos and languorous chords over a bed of shuffling drums, borrowing from the vocabulary of Vella’s “dream-doom” band Dream Unending. When the death metal finally does kick back in, for a coda as invigorating as anything on the album, it feels less like the end of the journey than the opening of another pathway.


The latest in Springsteen’s vinyl reissue series provides a few lost gems for record collectors and completists. But for these odd years, even for the uninitiated, there’s plenty of gold to discover.

Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: The Rising / Devils & Dust / Live in New York City / Live in Dublin / 18 Tracks

At the end of the ’90s, as he entered his fourth decade as a recording artist, Bruce Springsteen was thinking about resurrections. The first order of business was returning to New Jersey with his wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa, and their three children, after a few years in Los Angeles. He also reunited the E Street Band, the loyal crew he’d disassembled following his commercial peak in the ’80s, which had left him feeling, as he put it, “Bruced out.” His best work as a solo artist in the ’90s (“The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Streets of Philadelphia”) found inspiration in understated outsider stories that he delivered like eulogies, miles away from the arena catharsis that audiences had come to expect from him.
With his most famous band reunited, Springsteen began writing for the masses again. The first new song he premiered during 1999’s reunion tour was “Land of Hope and Dreams.” To a steady, relaxed drumbeat, his bandmates reintroduced themselves—a glorious saxophone solo from Clarence Clemons, a sweeping mandolin refrain by Steve Van Zandt—while Springsteen conducted a spiritual roll call to kickstart this new era. “You’ll need a good companion,” he sang, “For this part of the ride.” Less optimistic but equally pivotal was “American Skin (41 Shots),” a ballad written for Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old who was brutally killed by New York City police officers. In its lyrics, Springsteen juggled feelings of hopelessness, fear, and complicity; in live performances, he requested silence so that you could hear every word.
Although he later attempted both in the studio, the definitive versions of these songs appear on 2001’s Live in New York City, recorded during the final nights of the E Street Band’s reunion tour. (Compiled from various shows, it is a triumphant but inessential collection: for the full experience, hit the bootlegs.) That album is among five new installments in Springsteen’s ongoing vinyl reissue series. This time around, he’s highlighting a series of recent albums that have become nearly impossible to find on vinyl, with one of them (2007’s Live in Dublin) making its first appearance on the format. Compared to the first run of reissues, which highlighted his iconic run from his 1973 debut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. through 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., and a second that collected his mid-career wilderness period, these reissues serve a more functional role. For record collectors and completists, it might be your first opportunity to own any of them. For the uninitiated, there’s plenty of gold to discover.
Without a new album to promote, Springsteen prefaced the 1999 reunion tour by releasing Tracks, a fascinating box set that unloaded a quarter-century of studio outtakes and offered an alternate route through his history as a songwriter. A few months after its release came 18 Tracks, the abridged collection included in this set that acts as a sort of anti-greatest hits. In the streaming era, I’d recommend spending time with the complete edition, where you can hear the full range of his experiments and skip around based on what period of his career interests you most. Epics like “Thundercrack” and “Frankie” are among its classics, and both are excluded from this set, I imagine, for purposes of brevity. Still, 18 Tracks provides a solid-enough representation of his strengths, and this edition marks a good opportunity to revisit his lost gems (at least until Tracks gets a vinyl reissue).
Similar to Tracks, the music on Springsteen’s 2005 solo album Devils & Dust was salvaged from abandoned studio recordings. After 1995’s stripped-down The Ghost of Tom Joad and its resulting tour—his first time performing live without a band—Springsteen felt inspired to continue in this acoustic, folk setting. The hushed songs of Devils & Dust tell stories of men and women that range from biblical (“Jesus Was an Only Son”) to pornographic (“Reno,” which almost single-handedly earned this album his first Parental Advisory sticker) and personal (“Long Time Comin’,” one of the best songs of this era). Springsteen initially shelved the project in favor of the E Street reunion tour, but he returned to it a few years later after writing a mournful protest song about the Iraq War. Bringing to mind the darker songs he had left behind, it became this album’s title track and introduces one of the most challenging and detailed albums in Springsteen’s catalog, one more akin to moodier sets like Nebraska and Tunnel of Love than his more electric work through the rest of the 2000s.
He followed Devils & Dust with another left-turn, recording centuries-old folk songs with a group of musicians he dubbed the Sessions Band. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, from 2006, was a pleasant surprise, and its resulting tour was even better. Their opening night in New Orleans is often remembered as their peak, delivered as a tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, but revisiting Live in Dublin has proven it to be an equally thrilling document. For starters, it is one of Springsteen’s most pristine-sounding live albums, capturing his energy as a frontman but also showcasing the dynamic among his band—their banjos and fiddles, horns and strings, all arranged in joyful chaos. The material itself is equally wide-ranging. An almost unrecognizable rendition of “Atlantic City” opens the set, and the traditional folk music (“How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep”) rings just as true as his own deep cuts. Time has been good to this era of Springsteen’s career, and Live in Dublin captures its peak.
Part of the reason why We Shall Overcome felt like such a breakthrough upon release in 2006 was its loose, live-sounding production. A common complaint about Springsteen’s records in the 21st century has been their sound, and while they all fare better on vinyl, the issue was beginning to show its head here. In his 2016 memoir, Springsteen discusses his attempts to self-produce the E Street Band’s comeback album after their reunion tour. (“WE WERE DULL,” he laments of the sessions, in all-caps.) And so he hired Brendan O’Brien, a producer who worked with grunge bands like Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots. His signature trick for Springsteen involved compressing the music and backing him with low drones: cellos, hurdy-gurdy, layers of tinny, distorted electric guitar. The goal might have been to summon the epic swell of his live shows, but it often muddied the sound of his band. Still, when the material sang, the production was easy to forgive.
Such was the case on 2002’s The Rising, a pivotal record often generalized as Springsteen’s response to 9/11. Stories have since circulated about him making phone calls to survivors shortly after the attacks to help find a sense of community, to understand the quieter stories behind the big, looming one. Many of these songs serve similar purposes for him as a writer, as he fills the album’s 70-plus minute runtime with choruses that sound like prayers and love songs that double as long goodbyes. It spanned material that directly referenced the tragedy (“The Rising,” “Empty Sky”) and others that dated back to the ’90s (“Nothing Man,” “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day”). Near The Rising’s completion, O’Brien suggested Springsteen cut down the tracklist to help clarify the message. No, he responded, the sprawl is the point.
An early song he wrote for the album is its closing track, “My City of Ruins.” While this era of Springsteen’s career collects several of his most heartbreaking songs—Devils & Dust’s “Matamoras Bank,” The Rising’s “Paradise”—this one feels especially personal. He began writing it at the end of 2000 about the economic decline in his hometown of Asbury Park. The setting that provided the magic and electricity in so much of his early work now appeared in bleak fragments, with Springsteen’s own history folded into its faded scenery. To a soulful melody, he acts as a tour guide before bringing it back home: “There’s tears on the pillow, darling, where we slept/You took my heart when you left.” Just before the final chorus, he asks, “Tell me how do I begin again?” In the same place where he started, finding his footing in the community that both inspired and boxed him in, he was posing a new challenge to himself, coming to terms with those things that die and don’t come back. But for now, he felt inspired and alive. So he got back to work.

Buy:
The Rising - Rough Trade / Devils & Dust - Rough Trade / Live in New York City - Rough Trade / Live in Dublin - Rough Trade / 18 Tracks - Rough Trade
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The Brooklyn rapper makes good on the promise of “Welcome to the Party” with a debut full of the hardest, dirtiest tracks he can manage.

Meet the Woo

When Pop Smoke emerged late last year from the outskirts of Brooklyn, the first thing you noticed was his deep and raspy voice. Rapping entirely in ad-libs, hooks, and Instagram-ready one-liners, he sounded like a kid raised on a strict diet of Get Rich or Die Tryin’, Finally Rich, and Newports. His production, mostly from UK drill beat wizard 808Melo, mixed grimy, fast-paced drums with vocal samples ripped from UK garage and melodies that could score an anime. This stew of influences could only come from an artist raised on the internet, but Pop Smoke’s smooth arrogance and West Indian lingo remains distinctly Brooklyn. Now that “Welcome to the Party” is his borough’s current summer anthem, he capitalizes on the momentum with his debut mixtape, Meet the Woo.
Meet the Woo arrives at a pivotal moment for Brooklyn’s still-growing drill scene. Ever since 22Gz’s “Suburban” and Sheff G’s “No Suburban,” Brooklyn drill has lingered in the shadows of its Chicago and UK counterparts. Even as 22Gz signed to Kodak Black’s Sniper Gang and Sheff G became a phenomenon in New York City high schools, the prevailing theory was that these guys would never break out of the Northeast unless they switched up their style. Meet the Woo doesn’t overthink this dilemma; it’s just Pop Smoke taking nine swings at making the hardest, dirtiest shit he possibly can.
Previous singles “Meet the Woo” and “Welcome to the Party” lead off the mixtape and set its sinister tone. Of the new tracks, “Scenario” comes closest to recreating their magic: Pop Smoke’s voice is harrowing and Marvel-supervillain-worthy, the beat a haunted amusement park. He doesn’t show a lot of lyrical creativity, but he can catch you off guard with his delivery: On “Better Have Your Gun,” he goes from ignorant bravado—“Shoot a nigga, go to jail for it/’Cause I know I got the bail for it”—to demented and playful, whispering designer brands with a nightmarish echo on his voice. His limitations as a writer are exposed on “Dior”—outside of the mesmerizing hook, which doubles as an Amiri Jeans ad, he sounds stuck, repurposing lines like “Bitch, I’ma thot, get me lit” and throwing in a lazy and unnecessary and homophobic one-liner.
It might be occasionally unimaginative, but overall Meet the Woo injects life into a Brooklyn drill scene that was running on fumes. Pop Smoke just wants to cause chaos and dominate the playlists of every party before the NYPD inevitably shuts them down. He’s already accomplished this feat with “Welcome to the Party,” and something on this mixtape will follow in its footsteps soon. Maybe a Brooklyn drill rapper can break through without changing, after all.


A detailed, patient grower in an era of overstuffed instant pleasures, the sound and tonal quality on Andrew Bird's latest album is often as important as the notes he plays or the words he sings.

Noble Beast

A long hike through the folds in Andrew Bird's brain is what you sign up for when you play one of his albums. He's been wandering that path since 2003's Weather Systems, when he retired his former band, the Bowl of Fire, and moved to Western Illinois to live with his thoughts on an old farm. On his new album, Noble Beast, Bird can sometimes seem too far inside his own head. And he also appears aware of it, addressing that solitude on "Effigy": "When one has spent too much time alone..." He doesn't answer with another lyric-- perhaps he doesn't have an answer. Instead, he lets you fill in the blank while he reels off a pretty, rustic violin figure.
Noble Beast is, in many ways, a record that asks you to forget the way you currently approach the album. It didn't click for me on early listens. The sometimes drifting song structures, frequent tonal shifts, odd lyrics, and interludes presented a stuffed canvas full of interesting sounds that didn't seem to have a focal point, didn't seem to have a place where you were supposed to enter the composition. Eventually, however, everything fell into place. Marinating in an album in this way is old-fashioned in the overloaded peer-to-peer era, but it's a fitting approach from Bird, a guy who often wrestles with the implications of modern technology and communications.
The sound of the album is as important as the notes Bird plays, and this extends to the lyrics, where he's gradually gone from word-play to syllable-play, often choosing lines for their sounds and tonal quality more than for their meaning. Nevertheless, Bird's music is still emotionally powerful-- he gives uncommon weight to odd phrases, sometimes backing off pronouncing a word fully. His diction comes and goes similar to the way Thom Yorke's does. Some of the phrases don't mean anything; others jump out oddly, like the way he follows a free-association game on "Masterswarm" with the startlingly cogent, even harrowing line, "They took me to the hospital and they put me through a scan." Bird injects the music with similar contrasts, opening "Effigy" with a spooky bed of looping, processed violins before shifting into one of the album's most traditional-sounding moments, with finger-picked acoustic guitar playing a simple, straightforward melody.
Despite early listens, I quickly found myself returning to the record even as I corresponded about it with some nonplussed colleagues. And it revealed itself to be fantastically detailed, from the woodwinds that spice the electronic pulse of "Not a Robot, But a Ghost" to the bassline that comes out of nowhere at the finale of "The Privateers". More broadly, it takes you even further into the canyons of Bird's mind, and it does so with an organic, unhurried flow that's ultimately an improvement on 2007's Armchair Apochrypha, a record I felt was sometimes too fussy and mannered. Even the bonus disc that comes with the deluxe edition, Useless Creatures, has a captivating looseness that finally brings some of the high-wire energy of his unpredictable live shows into the studio.
Noble Beast is has its weak spots-- "Nomenclature" in particular takes the repurposing of language purely for its sound a step too far, not least of which because Bird chose a cumbersome, ugly word-- but one of the benefits of working so far in your own sphere is that your mistakes will always be interesting, and better than that, you get to learn from them. I have no idea what Bird will learn from making this record, but he seems to have taught himself plenty about what his music can be during his time alone-- and now he's reminding us about the value of patiently engaging with music as well.


The South African 23-year-old follows up his scene-sketching debut with this taut eight-track collection of luxurious amapiano designed for the genre’s growing mainstream audience.

Where You Are

Amapiano translates, from the Zulu, to “the pianos.” But it’s the log drum—or, more specifically, the thick-thumping, springy pluck of a bass sound that the Fruity Loops DX10 synthesizer calls a log drum—that’s come to define this vibrant strain of South African house music. Teno Afrika, aka 23-year-old Lutendo Raduvha from Pretoria, situated in the country’s densely populated and fervently creative Gauteng province, is one of the scene’s most visible proponents. He bends amapiano’s stocky percussive trademark into something tinged with acid technicolor stretch marks. Where You Are, the follow-up to 2020’s scene-sketching Amapiano Selections, is a taut eight-track collection that lays down a marker of where this fast-mutating sound is at right now.
Teno’s take on amapiano is in many ways typical of the sound’s current cresting iteration: at once gully, rude, and luxuriously slick. He plies a minimal take on the already-svelte sound, hefting emphasis onto his log bass, rolled snare cracks, and deftly hypnotic synth flicks and stabs. This is particularly the case on “Bells,” a gut-busting five-and-a-half-minutes of pacy dips and curls, its log sound pushed to a deliriously tweaking distortion. “Gomora Groove” and “Halaal Flavour” are similarly potent, their pulsing basslines like Semtex: firm, yet flexible, and concealing an explosive core. These are party tracks, with cousins in UK funky, and elder uncles in Pretoria’s melange of kwaito, diBacardi, gqom, and stateless hybrids like Mujava’s “Township Funk” or “Saka Saka.”
On occasion, Teno dips into the more luxurious, soulful strains of what’s become known as Harvard Amapiano. The sub-genre is slicker, smoother and more indebted to the self-indulgent, self-aware cool of deep house and Afrotech. Tracks like the hazy, Leyla-featuring “Where You Are” lean into this aspirational, penthouse aesthetic—its drifty pads conjure perfume ads more than sweat-dripped dances. The introduction of (mostly female, often singing) vocalists is a relatively new turn within the scene’s near-decade span to date, and one that’s grown consistently since the genre broke onto mainstream SA radio and out into modern metropolises like London, Tokyo, and Los Angeles over the summers of 2020 and 2021. These are songs destined, if not designed, to attract a more mainstream, radio-friendly audience. Teno’s nod to the trend reflects the sound’s evolution to meet the constraints of search engines and radio playlists, but doesn’t go so far as to pour concrete into the amapiano mold. On the KayCee-featuring “Fall In Love,” he flips vocals into pops and trills, with dashes of distortion for good measure; and on “Duma ICU,” with regular collaborator Stylo MusiQ, those plush synths take on an icier temperature, paired with a warbling synth that sounds like a cartoon UFO landing. So it is that with each fork, a gap forms and something fresh fills it—spreading and sprawling with the same energy and human ingenuity as the fizzing townships from where the sound originated.


Pairing her simple, unaffected vocal style with carefully synthesized arrangements, the Chicago-based musician departs from her indie-rock foundations in search of musical and personal freedom.

I Want the Door to Open

Lillie West wants to capture an impossible feeling in her music: being so present in the moment that time doesn’t exist. On I Want the Door to Open, her third album as Lala Lala, the London-born, Chicago-based musician embraces the possibilities afforded by digital recording as a means of conjuring her own impossible utopia.
On 2018’s The Lamb, West recorded songs about her sobriety with a three-piece rock combo, playing many of the parts herself to prove that she could. But for I Want the Door to Open, she sought a new sound to serve her more cryptic and less confessional lyrics, and to help break her out of what she called “the indie rock box”. She wrote for instruments less familiar to her, like piano and bass, in order to rely on her melodic intuition. Working alongside co-producer Yoni Wolf, of WHY?, and an array of musician friends, West creates expansive synthesized environments to fill with her earnest, intimate voice.
I Want the Door to Open slips into new grooves on each track, like a mind in a perfect state of creative flow. The shuffling feel of “Color of the Pool” is accentuated by a synthesized bass line West wrote after listening to a loop of the track for 30 minutes straight. “Castle Life” begins as a four-on-the-floor beat but shifts into more intricate guitar and drum interplay once West insists “I do, I do/I move, I move” in the first chorus. West’s lyrics are oblique but rooted in natural imagery like rabbits crossing a road through settling fog.
The shapelessness of the album can sometimes feel indecisive, but “DIVER” has an irresistible chorus, with West joyously “swimming out towards my new life” over swelling strings and propulsive drumming by Nnamdi Ogbonnaya. Even if she’s caught in the tides, she’s free from impenetrable screens and faces distorted in windows, a life spent refreshing a never-ending feed. The narrator compares herself to Sisyphus, the mythological Greek king doomed to roll a stone uphill forever as punishment for cheating Death, but here the effort that accompanies eternal struggle turns out to be its own exhilarating reward.
West searches for freedom in each song, a pursuit that feels particularly universal after months of pandemic-induced repetition. On “Lava,” she wants to look right into the camera, breaking the imaginary boundary between surveyor and subject. She swallows a bird and exhales a tangerine on “Straight & Narrow,” defying natural laws like an alchemist. She wants to be the see-through “Color of the Pool” and wants to touch the heat of a fuel source without getting burned. She frequently writes about breaking boundaries, as if recognizing the impossibility of her imagined utopia. In West’s simple, unaffected vocal style, these lyrics feel like a dare to herself and the listener. And when she plainly sings, “You’re living like you’re on a screen,” on “Prove It,” it sounds like gentle advice from a friend.
The freedom West seeks isn’t isolation but its opposite: to understand and to be understood by a community with perfect clarity. Her musician friends help bring the songs to life, and the best guests are the singers that emphasize the emotion in West’s performance like actors sharing a scene. Ben Gibbard’s clear delivery on “Plates” is a foil to West’s comfortable mumble, while on “Straight & Narrow” Kara Jackson stretches her voice to add flourishes to West’s melody. “Photo Photo” is a brief round featuring Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham of Ohmme, sung with the intimacy of a vocal warm-up.
The penultimate song, “Utopia Planet,” concludes with West’s grandma Beth affectionately describing one of West’s painted self-portraits as someone from another world. It’s a touching example of mutual understanding, spontaneous but rich in interpersonal history, swaddled in layers of Sen Morimoto’s saxophone. The album ends with a brief coda in the form of “GB,” a recording of her grandmother singing a verse from a song from the 1930s. Midway through the song, she stumbles on a lyric, then chuckles as she catches herself. It’s an unexpected and heartwarming moment: a fleeting reminder of the passage of time that makes being present in the moment feel all the more real.

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The Chicago rapper has earned his role as a leader of rap. His latest album recalls the best records of the ’00s graced with a singular kind of songwriting that sounds inarguably like the present.

Humble Beast

Like many new rappers, what makes G Herbo interesting is his relationship to the present: how he makes his art speak to both his reality and his generation. But what defines Humble Beast is how he weaves the past to the present, tying forgotten threads of hip-hop tradition to his firm hold on the zeitgeist. It’s not a project consumed with looking backward, trying to recapture some past glory. Rather, it’s a young artist pushing himself, exploring the genre’s history to find pathways relevant to him now. Crucially, his pivot towards narratives and soul samples is a necessary bit of reframing, a signal of “maturity” and moral responsibility forced upon drill artists who’ve been unfairly typecast and pathologized as one-dimensional purveyors of violence.
G Herbo’s first major record was 2012’s “Kill Shit” alongside frequent collaborator Lil Bibby. It was the song that launched a thousand songs, the primary blueprint for much of the New York and UK drill scenes. The core of his sound, though—the part that makes him one of the genre’s most relevant new stars, and pushes the genre’s sound well past those imitators—is not riding this one approach until the wheels fall off, as others are wont to do. Instead, his strength is a particular sense of songcraft, a skill which proved itself again on his 2015 Chicago summer smash “I’m Rollin,” and extends here to its twin singles, “I Like” and “Everything.” These are records which chart new waters not just for drill artists, but for rap music broadly by tapping into his core audience and pushing new styles in response. Here is where he earns his role as a leader.
A common denominator of these bigger hits is a sensation of taking up space. His vocals fill the canvas, a maximalist rap style which prefers bold gestures to subtle ones. While most artists would be tempted to use an Uzi Vert feature for his heralded songwriting skills, “Everything” is a Herbo record through-and-through. Brash rapping bulldozes through equally tough production, a clenched fist crashing through a brick-wall beat. The song’s concept, while not especially creative on the surface, is executed with a subtle musicality that operates as one gripping hook after another.
On “I Like,” he takes a slightly more relaxed approach—this is, after all, a “for the ladies”-type record, albeit the most aggressive-sounding one in recent memory. Yet this shift to a semi-casual tone is what gives his in-your-face intensity the ability to surprise, zigging when you expect it to zag. “I Like”’s sexual politics may be fairly retrograde, but part of its appeal is its no-nonsense bluntness, a sense of getting to the honest point. Its hooks, cacophonous production, and memorable phraseology (“My name’s G Herbo/I like nasty bitches!” is an unforgettable introduction) are compositional tools, not just “beats” or “lyrics” but the animating force of coherence at the heart of his work.
His compositional skills on these album highlights—alongside lyrical exercises like “Bi Polar,” and pleasantly unexpected left-turns like the spare curiosity “This n That” with Lil Yachty and Jeremih—suggest that his best songs help redefine the boundaries and borders of the genre’s current moment. Yet Humble Beast as a whole is more ambitious than this—it has to be. His similarity to New York rappers always suggested a lineage descended from the Lox, rather than the southern influence of Gucci Mane. The above singles aside, a bulk of the tracks on Humble Beast rely on a post-Kanye/Just Blaze/Bink-style soul sampling, giving it the feel of a lost major label album of the mid-aughts. Its best moments, like the riveting storytelling cut “Malcolm,” feel like a rediscovery of hip-hop’s forgotten narrative possibilities, especially when coming from an artist whose fanbase is young enough not to remember who the Lox is in the first place. Far from a cynical marketing pivot, moments like this suggest an organic curiosity in the traditions of his art.
Lyrically, his style throughout Humble Beast is more blues-inflected than the archetypal East Coast rap record, sticking to personal stories, the names of friends and streets, burrowing into his conflicted emotions, and veering away from punchlines and wordplay. His vocals still power through the production, his brawny verses like purposefully rough outlines of a pencil drawing. In some ways, his writing is still developing; the effortless, artful sophistication of Chicago legend Bump J’s standout verse on “Crown” is a master class, and it’s no slight to G Herbo to say he stands in his shadow.
Humble Beast feels musically bifurcated between its street and soul segments; a street-soul production synthesis could give his sound some cohesion, and giving his reflective moments a contemporary canvas could only increase their urgency. Likewise, the same compositional talent he brings to records like “I Like” and “Everything” doesn’t gleam as brightly when the songs tilt lyrical and autobiographical, though his emergent narrative style still carries a strong emotive power. One gets the sense he’s still working out his comfort level in these moments. With some exceptions (“Malcolm,” “Man Now”), those songs lack the seductive qualities of his best songwriting, where his undeniable, muscular intensity demands attention, and sets him apart among the best young rappers currently working.

Machine Entertainment Group / 150 Dream Team


The Russian electronic musician offers a mind-melting and hypnotic take on techno.

Nina Kraviz: stranno stranno. neobjatno.

stranno stranno. neobjatno.

Earlier this year, Nina Kraviz looked like she might be at a turning point in her career. The Russian electronic musician has spent the past decade using a two-pronged attack to establish herself as one of contemporary techno’s prime movers. On the one hand there are her take-no-prisoners DJ sets—a mixture of rave anthems, vintage IDM, and mind-melting experiments in rhythmic abstraction. On the other there’s her label трип (Trip), a showcase for a new generation of underground producers from places like Russia, Finland, and Iceland—and, often, the source of the very freakiest cuts in her sets. But premiering a new audiovisual live show at Coachella this past April, she took a strikingly different tack, blending theatrical staging and even acting—at the outset, she poured herself a cup of tea before staring deeply into a full-length mirror—with a new focus on her vocals.
It wasn’t entirely successful, though Kraviz’ search for new frontiers in live electronic music was, at the very least, provocative. But on her new EP on трип, Kraviz is back in her wheelhouse, revisiting the stripped-back style that has been a staple of her work since early tracks like “Ghetto Kraviz.” That single, the most successful of her career, came out on Radio Slave’s REKIDS label, and “Dream Machine,” the first of the EP’s three tracks, suggests Radio Slave’s influence, at least at first: Hypnotic and slow-burning, it plays pumping synthesizer chords off a restrained drum-machine groove and fills in the empty spaces with Kraviz’ distant whispers and an occasional flash of dissonance reminiscent of a freight train’s mournful whistle. But four minutes through the six-and-a-half-minute track, she flips the script: “I think I’m falling for you,” she intones, and the track is flooded with trembling organs. It’s a little bit eerie, a little bit sexy, and a little bit over the top, despite its studied restraint.
“I Want You” is harder-edged and much better, with a sound more in keeping with Kraviz’ DJ sets. Rigid toms hammer away, the claps and hi-hats distorted and raw; Kraviz chops her vocals up into ribbons and weaves them through the jagged beats, scraps of speech (“I started to worry”) disappearing behind overlapping layers of pure, satiny tone.
“Stranno Neobjatno” is the best of the bunch. It’s even faster than “I Want You,” but the smoothness of the groove belies its breakneck tempo. Gurgling synths and dial-tone chirps curl around a bare-bones kick/clap rhythm; in the background, shimmering bell tones flash back to Jeff Mills’ steely minimal techno. “Stranno neobjatno,” murmurs Kraviz, over and over, and while that might not mean much to you (the Russian phrase means something like “weirdly immense,” or the sublime), the effect is seductive, her sing-song tone pulling you deeper into the swirl even as subtle electronic effects steadily distort everything around. It’s more funhouse mirror than full-length mirror, and it offers a convincing look at Kraviz’ talent for low-key psychedelia.


The Australia-born, Iceland-based composer returns with his best album yet. Unlike his past work, there are no guitars, piano, or stringed instruments; instead, the 41-minute collection focuses on synthesizers and the heavy percussion of ex-Liturgy drummer and current Guardian Alien leader Greg Fox and Swans’ Thorr Harris.

A U R O R A

Ben Frost’s interests are vast, and that includes the way he approaches his music. The Australia-born, Iceland-based composer has written scores for dance companies, soundtracked films, and collaborated with visual artists and poets. He cast himself as a kind of endurance artist on the cover of his 2007 album Theory of Machines and, in 2013, directed his own theatrical adaption of Iain Banks’ novel The Wasp Factory. Frost also co-produced experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare, Volume 3 in 2013, played “fire” on Swans’ The Seer a year earlier, and is an important collaborator for Tim Hecker. Outside the studio, he’s articulate when discussing what he’s doing, loading comments about his work with heavy concepts and meaning: his interviews fold in references to biology, astronomy, literature, nature, art, professional basketball. For all this, his music is equally fascinating when you strip away the context and simply let the sounds he’s making overtake you.
Frost’s latest album, A U R O R A, offers his best example yet of this sort of aural suffocation. The uptick could partly be due to a new approach: Unlike his past work, there are no guitars, piano, or stringed instruments; instead, the 41-minute collection focuses on synthesizers and the heavy percussion of ex-Liturgy drummer and current Guardian Alien leader Greg Fox, Swans’ Thorr Harris, and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. A U R O R A is, in a sense, the proper companion to 2009’s excellent By the Throat, but it’s shaggier and more intense. Still, Frost is able to maintain a sense of spaciousness amid the feedback.
That feeling of distance coincides with the facts of A U R O R A’s creation: Frost wrote most of the collection on a laptop while working with photographer/filmmaker Richard Mosse in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. (Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, in turn, made a series of grainy films—explosions, volcanoes, bullets through bodies—as a rollout to A U R O R A, as well as the album’s cover art). He also recorded in Empac, New York, and Reykjavik—where he mixed the record with Valgeir Sigurdsson—and somewhere along the way, Tim Hecker provided sound design and post-production work.
Despite its scattered creation, I tend to listen to A U R O R A as one long piece, letting the different modes congeal into a whole. You hear minimalism buried in the fuzz, and it’s also easy to tell that Frost is fond of industrial, punk, and metal. Instead of the noisy, meditative openers of past outings,  A U R O R A's first track, “Flex”, sounds like an airplane taking off; the steady, escalating synthesizer gives way to frantic jazz drumming partially consumed the crackling, loose wires around it. This bleeds into “Nolan”, a track that would fit easily on Tim Hecker’s Harmony in Ultraviolet, featuring a percussive thump—sticks rattling, synthesizers lapping. Like much of A U R O R A, it feels like a battle between the human and the digital, Frost’s cold synthesizers and laptops vs. his collaborators’ sweaty percussion.
But the album is not all violent stoicism; there’s dark humor here as well. “Diphenyl Oxalate”, a track named for the chemical used in glowsticks, hits like a black metal rave, and it’s one of a few places where Frost seems to be creating dance music, or at least music that makes your innards move. In this mode, he fits in line with producers like Container, Sandwell District, Demdike Stare, and Vatican Shadow, but he never stays in one place, and the album is filled with variety and a great sense of dynamics. The previously mentioned “Nolan” takes an Eastern turn, and mixes in wind chimes beneath a gale force surge. “No Sorrowing” is a hazy, restful drift. The warping “Sola Fide” sounds like loose wires and firecrackers, but maintains a melodic side. (In the liner notes, Eddi the Bomb is credited with “explosives.”)
If the album has a center, it’s “Venter”, which has a little of everything Frost does well. It opens with a blend of clean and distorted hand drums, which are joined by a distant, crystalline synthesizer that grows stronger over the first two minutes before practically being buried by the sound of bells and chimes. For the remaining four and a half minutes, these strands fluctuate, growing more intense, but also more refined. Then, at the four-minute mark, almost like offering some kind of introverted, experimental take on an EDM drop, the track gains a new kind of force and momentum on the back of whiplashing electronics. It’s an epic track, the kind of song that fills up a room.
Frost named "Venter" after biologist Craig Venter, the first person to create a cell containing a synthetic genome. In an interview with Pitchfork, he said the scientist would be his dream collaborator: “It would be about getting some face time with the guy who literally synthesized life—he made life. It just makes me feel so small and insignificant.” A U R O R A can be heard as Frost’s attempt to create something physical, and it stands above the rest of his discography.


A captivating solo performance at Manhattan’s most haunted showroom, the latest release in Neil Young’s ongoing archival project showcases a fascinating pivot point in the young songwriter’s career.

Carnegie Hall 1970

By December 1970, Neil Young was America’s bizarro sweetheart. Over the course of three LPs with Buffalo Springfield and three acclaimed solo albums, he had mastered folk and rock idioms and alchemized them into something utterly sui generis. He could be churlish or tender like Dylan, he could rock like the Stones, he could harmonize like the Beatles and wax philosophical like the Dead. He was intensely cool with a side of creepy. Carnegie Hall 1970, the most recent entry into Young’s ambitious, ongoing archival project, reveals the emergent superstar accompanied only by acoustic guitar and piano, playing a stately survey of his early material before a rapturous audience of devotees. Like so much of his work, the concert feels oddly fraught with the portent of history: an icon-in-progress’ pilgrimage to Manhattan’s most haunted showroom, another journey through the past.
The year prior to Carnegie Hall, Young became a late addition to the commercial juggernaut Crosby, Stills & Nash, who were riding high on the universal acclaim and massive sales of their 1969 self-titled debut. Stephen Stills felt the need for a second guitar player and recommended his frenemy and former Buffalo Springfield bandmate; Graham Nash objected but Young was allowed to join, and he promptly made the group stranger, sadder, and more interesting on 1970’s follow-up Deja Vu. That album went on to sell a staggering eight million copies and made each of the performers household names, and yet Young improbably maintained an air of mystery. By the time he took the stage at Carnegie Hall, the 25-year-old artist had semi-miraculously threaded the needle between full-scale ambition and cult-figure credibility.
Consolidating these gains, the set contains a judicious and even generous survey of Young highlights from his Buffalo Springfield, solo, and CSN&Y days. Acoustic reworkings of guitar-freakout favorites like “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Cinnamon Girl” verge on cordial while still retaining the patina of outlaw charm. The solo piano version of the Buffalo Springfield nugget “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” strips the original of its psychedelic armor and arrives at the painful core of its existential striving. And a rueful version of “Ohio,” a recently issued response to the Kent State University shooting of four student Vietnam protesters, vibrates with rage. The concert transpired only seven months after the shooting occurred.
The overall mood is strangely collectivist for a performer so frequently inclined to build tension between himself and his audience. In an odd bit of abortive showmanship, he asks the crowd to sing along with a lilting take on “Sugar Mountain,” before stopping mid-song to encourage them to do better, and eventually giving up the gambit entirely. “See what happens when we try to please you?” he jokes with palpable exasperation.
Even within the show’s relatively sedate setting, there are hints of the artist whose future hallmarks would include aggressively raising the bar for in-concert sonic abuse and antagonism. A stunning version of “See the Sky About to Rain” previews a song that wouldn’t officially surface until 1974’s Ditch Trilogy linchpin On the Beach, and the brilliantly doleful bummer ride of “Bad Fog of Loneliness” hints at the shifting tradewinds of the hippie dream. Cast into bold relief alongside a surfeit of crowd-pleasing hits, these stark compositions suggest all the nervous, groundbreaking places Young was headed. In the years ahead, he would relish both his command of an audience and his license to confuse. He would leverage CSN&Y into a shockingly successful two-front war on the charts. He would pivot impulsively between ragtag country, manicured folk, and abrasive drunk-tank boogie. He would emerge from a deep and competitive field as the weirdest rock star ever. Warm, engaging, and magnetically solicitous, the Carnegie Hall show is a fascinating pivot point, showcasing Young at his most engaging and vulnerable, nailing one door shut and prying open another: It’s a last look back at the old folkie days and a tentative first reckoning with the wooly neurosis of a new decade.

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