The trio of Canadian DJs’ unique “powwow step” turns the pulse of First Nations music into a modern electric dance soundtrack that is politically thrilling and immediate.

A Tribe Called Red: We Are the Halluci Nation

We Are the Halluci Nation

Back in 2008, A Tribe Called Red began a thoroughly popular night at a club in Canada’s capital, Ottawa. It is called Electric Pow Wow, and the group experiments with beats, singing, and samples to a frenetic audience. Combining the rhythms and traditional singing of powwow—music meant to accompany dancing—with an array of dance genres including dubstep, dancehall, drum‘n’bass, and electro, they create what has been labeled “powwow step.” Watching ATCR seamlessly jump from supercharged drums on a remix of Northern Cree’s “Red Skin Girl” to a sing-songy sample “Indians from all directions”—a clip from Jamaican dancehall artist Supercat’s “Scalp Dem”—underlines their iconoclastic politics in the name of First Nations. At the time, Ian “DJ NDN” Campeau has noticed, “We had a platform where people were going to listen to what we were going to say, and we should probably use that properly right now and just bring some sort of awareness.”
Their third album We Are the *Halluci Nation *ramps up the activism and accompanies it with some of the heaviest and most infectious sounds around. The patch on the cover of the album underlines the heart and beat of the album: “500 years and still drumming; Our DNA is the earth and sky.” Canada’s CBC radio promoted this album as “critical listening for all Canadians.” Given Canada’s history of cultural genocide, this is a given, but the statement should be expanded. This album is critical listening for everyone.
The Native producer and DJ crew are loud and direct about their politics. The words of the late Santee Dakota poet John Trudell open the record, defining their “Halluci Nation” as “the tribe that they cannot see” who “see the spiritual in the natural” vis-a-vis the oppressive ALie Nation, who “see the material religions through trauma [where] nothing is related, all the things of the earth and in the sky have energy to be exploited.” The record’s anti-colonial message is poetic and clear. This is dance music, which could also be classified as EDM, but it’s also a range of other genres. At its soul, however, this is music that demonstrates how protest takes on different forms and to connect the physically and spiritually displaced.
“We are the evolution, the continuation,” says Trudell in the title track, charting the course for an album and a philosophy that represents and respects indigeneity. Women’s voices are centered as much as men’s. Every song brings together a community of sounds and influences from various parts of the globe. The *Halluci Nation *is thus expansive and inclusive, from the *yoik *chants of Maxida Märak that sit atop the soft drums of “Eanan” to the rhythmic throat-singing of Tanya Tagaq on the infectious “Sila” to the pure pop bounce of Lido Pimienta on “For You (The Light Part II),” as well as features from Saul Williams, Shad, and Yasiin Bey.
The first single “R.E.D.” features rapper Yassin Alsalman (a.k.a. Narcy) and Yasiin Bey, whose recent border-crossing issues reflect the reality of “ALie Nation.” Narcy, an Iraqi-Canadian MC whose work has always been political, spits out the line “Coca-cola soul controller holy waters,” a five-word collage that both reveals and describes the popular impact of capitalism. The voices of the Black Bear Singers introduce the drum of the chorus, one that calls for “original nation.” It's a banging rap song that brings together the pan-African, Iraqi, and Indigenous.
There’s nothing small or subtle about ATCR because they deal in big issues. Two interludes feature the voice of Joseph Boyden, author of The Orenda. Just as this novel dug into the history of Canada’s settler colonialism—whose legacy extends through to the horror of assimilative residential schools and racist government policy—so too do these short monologues. Presented as phone calls to a prison, they provide stark images of the impact of settler colonialism.
But the foundation of ATCR, as well as the powwow, is the drum. In the past, samples have fueled some of the group’s biggest tunes, from the Black Lodge Singers on “Electric Pow Wow Drum” to Northern Voice on “Sisters”. The drum groups that ATCR sample are legends in their own right—crowds of spectators elbow their way close to these groups at pow wows, trying to capture the songs on phones and iPads. For Halluci Nation, ATCR worked with Manawan, Quebec’s Black Bear Singers, resulting in a clear, resonant sound that provides an approximation of the huge scale of a drum group if you don't have the opportunity to experience it live. It is to ATCR’s credit that they have been able to capture some of this size, whether through these recording sessions alongside Black Bear Singers or sourcing original a capella recordings from groups like Chippewa Travellers and Northern Voice. This comprehensive attention to sound makes *Halluci Nation *a relentless record: song after song of pointed commentary and heavy beats.
“Members of the Halluci Nation are anybody who is willing to accept they need to learn how to treat other people like humans,” says ATCR’s Bear Witness. At a time when isolationist nationalism seems in vogue—a nationalism that denies colonial histories while refusing refugees—A Tribe Called Red have created a landmark soundtrack for a world in which we all are connected.


The Austrailian singer Simon Okely’s latest is a collection of crooning seduction, pop songwriting, and lush production. The breezy spirit of Laurel Canyon hovers around the album in a powerful way.

In a Mood

Simon Okely, the Australian man behind the wide-ranging guitar-pop project Slow Dancer, has often mentioned his childhood enthusiasm for Wilson Pickett, the 1960s soul singer best known for his restless energy and sparkling smile. Listening to Okely’s new album In a Mood, Pickett’s influence on the walking basslines and his warm vocal affectation is palpable. But where the soul man might choose exuberance, Slow Dancer goes mellow. Pickett’s 1966 hit “Land of 1000 Dances” is perhaps most remembered for appearances in commercials and late ’80s/early ’90s kids movies. Like so much of Pickett’s oeuvre, it’s incredibly fun. Okely’s  slow dances, rather, are not the kind you find in Pickett’s land. He is more tentative, folksier, less inspired by the black American gospel tradition. The lyrical subject matter touches on topics beyond joy and relaxation, so it’s more introspective than your average jaunt to Margaritaville.
When white people take all the energy out of the blues, they usually wind up with reputations like Jimmy Buffett or John Mayer, two men with lasting brands despite a vague sense that they are deeply uncool. And while In a Mood could certainly please the “John Mayer is actually good” crowd, Okely’s tastes are more omnivorous and his ambitions are much higher. His last album, 2014’s Surrender, was composed primarily of deconstructed and metronomic blues studies. Here he ups the ante, embracing crooning seduction, pop songwriting, and lush production.
You can tell that Okely is the kind of listener whose ear picks out remnants, the little pieces of songs—hooks, guitar melodies, and the echo of a voice’s vibratos. Because of that, the reference points for the album seem almost infinite. The influence of Nick Drake shows up, most notably on “I Would,” a gentle folk song anchored by a pointillist guitar. “I’ve Been Thinking” evokes the spaced-out and wistful power-pop ballads of Big Star, and twangy “I Was Often” is essentially a way less extra version of “Hotel California.” But there are also production moves more reminiscent of recent folk-rock innovators like Band of Horses, Midlake, or Iron & Wine. The album wears 1970s throwback on it sleeve, but its love for the mid-2000s is how it gets its point across. Nowhere does this come to fruition more than on “Bitter.” The song starts out in a minor-key soul register you could imagine Isaac Hayes singing over, before the Rhye-like cool kids’ riff on smooth jazz takes over.
Like so much indie rock of the last five years—most notably Haim, Father John Misty, Mac DeMarco, and even Vampire Weekend—the breezy Laurel Canyon spirit of Fleetwood Mac hovers over In a Mood in a powerful way. The sound indie rock gravitates to now might have seemed outré to the leaders of a few decades worth of testosterone-fueled rock revivals. Their power over the culture waned to the point that when Rumours and Tusk were reissued in 2004, Slate called them the “least influential great band ever.” Times have certainly changed. Our palates are accustomed to blues pop now, so artists like Okely have more room to rehabilitate even cornier forms of soft rock. First single “Don’t Believe” is a polished slow jam with a syncopated bass line and string refrain reminiscent of the best AM radio hits. But it eschews the most unforgivable of yacht rock sins by resting on a chorus that is catchy without being overemphasized and irrepressible.
In a Mood is a referential album, but what ultimately ties it together is Okely’s lyrical simplicity and willingness to let his songs breath. The standout lines are plaintive and pointed, like on the subtly groovy “I’m Done Waiting”: “I always want your love, but I don’t need it anymore.” Despite the various styles and genres, Okely’s reverence for his influences and his earnest emotionality help the album cohere into a whole. It’s not an album you’ll do the Watusi to, but everyone has a few good slow dances in their repertoire.


Now, Now trade guitar rock and raw nerves for slick, left-of-center pop on a deceptively upbeat comeback album whose intense lyrics and unsettling sounds stay true to the duo’s emo roots.

Saved

“SGL” may have been the least expected of last summer’s pop bangers. A sumptuous and strange offering from Minnesota’s Now, Now, who’d gone quiet after releasing their second album, Threads, in 2012, the track heralded a reinvention. After losing guitarist Jess Abbott, the band seemed to have shed its emo bent: Where Now, Now’s music was once all exposed nerves and hushed confessions, “SGL” sounded bright, fun, and confident. As a duo, KC Dalager and Brad Hale layered Dalager’s airy vocals and brash lyrics over acoustic riffs and bouncy drum beats. The new track’s title—a cute abbreviation for “shotgun lover”—said it all.
It took Now, Now a year to follow up that release with their third full-length, Saved, although they did put out the fizzy, synth-powered “Yours” in the interim. On its surface, the album is exactly what its advance singles foretold: a lavishly produced collection of pop songs fueled by hedonism and desire. Hale backs up Dalager’s coo with a small army of synths and drum pads, churning out productions that feel soft, spacious, and mechanistic at once. Their ambition is obvious—glittery standout “MJ” nods to pop royalty, weaving references to his hits around the insistent hook, “I want it all.” It’s the second song on the album, following opener “SGL,” and Dalager sings those very same words on both tracks.
She isn’t a conventionally strong frontwoman—her melodies tend to hover within a narrow range, and she keeps her gaze lowered when performing, as if she’d rather be heard than seen. There’s a captivating quality to her voice, though, that has nothing to do with its force or dynamism. Dalager expels so much air with every note that each lyric sounds like a prolonged exhale. Often, her gulping breaths are left unedited, roughing up the glossy tracks and exposing the physical labor that goes into singing.
A handful of clever production tricks, like pitch-shifted vocals, add variety to her performance on the album. On “Saved,” the words “oh my god” are bent into a wobbly, repeated plea; on “AZ,” warped variations on the hook knock the song off-kilter once it hits the outro. More than just a trope of contemporary pop, this distortion feels purposely alienating. Hale’s odd flourishes mirror the loneliness that plagues Dalager on songs like “Window,” in which she describes waiting outside a distant lover’s house, hoping to be let in.
Even as it brings the flirtation and the fun, Saved doesn’t avoid dark sentiments. There’s an obsessive edge to Dalager’s bids for attention and affection that give the album a sense of danger. She often talks about her paramours in the language of religious devotion, equating physical love with salvation. Angels, demons, saints, and sinners pop up in her world as often as they do in scripture. “I’ve been drinking, baby/Won’t you come and save me/Like an angel waiting/I let you surround me,” she sings on “Powder,” a sweeping closer that vacillates between romance and violence. The album gets its name from an exclamation on the title track: “Oh my God, I’m saved!”
As it turns out, the band hasn’t lost its emo instincts—they’ve just been repurposed. Abstracted from the context of live guitar music, the genre’s lyrical intensity still fuels Now, Now’s digitally produced, left-of-center pop. Saved is faithful to Dalager and Hale’s roots but different—and good—enough to justify the six years the duo spent making it. “This feels like the first record where, if I was on the radio scanning channels, I’d be like, ‘What is that? I want to hear that,’” Dalager recently told an interviewer. She’s not the only one who will be tempted to listen.


Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 17:55:41 -0400
\n\ >From: Snake
\n\ >X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 (Win98; I)
\n ...

Rest Proof Clockwork

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 17:55:41 -0400
From: Snake [vanhalenfan@secretpolice.co.uk]
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 [en] (Win98; I)
To: Tony Blair [henchman12@lucifer.co.uk]
Subject: X-Plaid922-1; Request for Government Assistance

Dear Mr. Blair:
My position is as an undercover agent in London's secret police mafia. I have been hired to investigate allegations that two former members of Black Dog Productions, Ed Handley and Andy Turner, have illegally obtained official documents pertaining to the creation of a highly addictive, mind- altering chemical agent (referred to in goverment documents as X-Plaid922-1) which affects its victims via audio transmissions rather than means of physical intake.
I am concerned that Handley and Turner may have, under the alias of Plaid, not only unlocked previously unrealized secrets about the production of this chemical agent, but also discovered a way to digitally reproduce it onto compact discs, cassettes, and even vinyl records. As you know, it is the reproduction of the X-Plaid agent to compact disc that is of the utmost concern. In this technologically- advanced society, nearly every home has a compact disc unit. Handley and Turner must be stopped before every person on this Earth becomes an X-Plaid junkie.
The first piece of evidence I have obtained is their 1998 release Not for Threes. The music on this record is so painfully wonderful that even I, Snake "Nerves of Steel" Snakeman, was almost drawn into its tangled web of madness. The album is an excellent indication that Handley and Turner are not working alone. Not for Threes features guest appearances by a number of female vocalists, among them Talkin' Loud Records diva Nicolette and even Icelandic sensation Bjork. When tested for levels of the addictive X-Plaid agent, Not for Threes registered a 7.5 out of 10 on Pitchfork- funded equipment. Luckily, the album did not gain widespread mainstream acceptance, though the minds of a number of club- hopping e-consuming electronic music fans were utterly destroyed.
The greatest shock to me is how an album containing the X-Plaid agent, let alone such excessive amounts, was able to garner enough of a following for the band to appear on our own BBC- operated John Peel show! Thankfully, Plaid had apparently not yet perfected their aural narcotic, as Pitchfork equipment registered X-Plaid levels for the band's subsequent Peel Session EP at a slightly less potent 6.8.
Plaid's latest album, Rest Proof Clockwork, is another story entirely. Here, they seem to have enhanced and mutated the X-Plaid agent dramatically through more varied instrumentation and exploration of what is commonly referred to as melodic "ambient" music. This allows the listener to lose themselves completely in a world of X-Plaid- induced bliss, whether they're paying attention to the music or not. A key demonstration of this is the album's closing track, "Air Locked." The music begins with a series of percussive shuffles and squeaks before beautiful, highly melodic chimes and digital effects enter the mix. The sound is almost spiritual, invoking cinematic rainforest imagery.
The X-Plaid agent is planted throughout this entire record, making it difficult or impossible to resist addiction. For instance, the orchestral "Dead Sea" is an irresistable symphony of pure evil, recalling Jerry Goldsmith's timeless score to "Poltergeist." "Little People" is a blend of \xB5-Ziq's spacy melodic attack, and pummelling, cut-up hip-hop grooves. "Pino Pomo" combines backwards effects with the feel of a futuristic spaghetti western. Even the absurdly titled "New Bass Hippo" pulls through, incorporating shuffling percussion and a Stereolab- influenced piano line.
With every passing second I work on this case, I find myself becoming more and more attached to the sound of the music, but I must venture on... to justice. I will require government assistance-- backup, arms, further documentation from the X-Plaid922-1 file, and a free lunch at the Denny's in Golden Valley, Minnesota, USA-- in apprehending these two zany, madcap individuals. Please respond ASAP.
----
Snake Snakeman,
Secret Police Mafia
Check out my Simpsons website:
http://www.simpsons.secretpolice.co.uk


John Cale's new studio album, featuring some work from Danger Mouse, is definitely strange. But the album's lacquered surface coats the chaos and imposes unwelcome order.

John Cale: Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood

Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood

On "December Rain", the sixth song on John Cale's new album, Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood, Cale sings a line about "Google getting on your nerves." He fails to elaborate, so we never find out what he thinks might irk us about Google: Google Docs (which frequently erases important data, I've noticed)? Google Reader (cramped, visually unappealing)? He just says "Google." The fact that he sings it through Auto-Tune gives the moment a whiff of parody. Cale has been on art-rock's cutting edge for decades; he's the only person at the center of the tag cloud "John Cage," "Aaron Copland," "Lou Reed," "Patti Smith," and "Sham 69." His cover of LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" rivals the original. You don't want to hear him sound out of touch.
Then, of course, there's that album title, which exists, magnificently, beyond the realm of normal taste and judgment. "Nookie Wood", to judge from Cale's heavy-breathing delivery on the titular song, is a dark, fearsome place where beasts roam and men are devoured whole. Nookie Wood is definitely strange, in other words. What it is not, sadly, is terribly interesting: Much like David Byrne and St. Vincent's recent Love This Giant collaboration, Shifty Adventures feels well-composed, immaculately arranged, and curiously inert.
Part of the problem comes from Cale's production choices, which feel less of this era than the late 1980s and early 90s: The boxy drum sounds, textured surface, and tacky-stiff keyboard sounds remind me, specifically, of Peter Gabriel's Us. The adult-contempo sheen doesn't do the songs here, which are crawling with interesting sounds, any favors. Cale works hard, banging pianos and MPCs, running drum sounds backwards, and filling the margins with glitches and loops. His viola snakes and mingles with often lightly Auto-Tuned voice. But the album's lacquered surface coats the chaos and imposes unwelcome order. It's like watching a man fail to tear his way out of an over-starched dress shirt.
If Cale had brought more memorable songs, Shifty Adventures might have fought its way out of this middle distance. But the songwriting is meandering and vague, feeling less written than whittled out of an arsenal of studio tricks. Like Brian Eno's recent solo work for Warp, Shifty Adventures has an all-frame, no-painting feeling: Lead single "I Wanna Talk 2 U" (co-produced by Danger Mouse), is rote, dutiful mid-tempo acoustic rock, without a single unexpected turn.
Cale sometimes pricks the air with a soulful line-- "I always held on to the thought/ That if they loved you long enough/ They'd find out what was missing when they finally called your bluff," is the mournful opening salvo on "Hemingway"-- but vast stretches of the album amble by without giving you a good reason to pay attention, other than to note a tactile, sticky-sounding drum loop here ("Face to the Sky") or a nice sunburst of acoustic guitars there ("Living With You"). This is what happens, sometimes, when a producer gets lost in the studio and forgets to write an album, and Shifty Adventures feels more like a collection of gadgets than songs.


On its seventh album, the Liverpool electro-pop band reaches for a lighter sound, capturing the passage of time in effervescent synths and impressionistic lyrics.

Time’s Arrow

Two years ago, Ladytron’s immortal “Seventeen” briefly went viral on TikTok. The track came out back in 2002—before many of the platform’s users had even been born—yet the Liverpool band’s brittle, dead-eyed electroclash struck a nerve. A barbed indictment of exploitation rendered in icy electronics, “Seventeen” was ahead of its time in sound and lyrics, paving the way for over a decade of darkly enveloping electro pop. In 2019, following an eight-year break, Ladytron returned with an agitated, apocalyptic self-titled album that cleared the table for a new era. Now, on their seventh album, Time’s Arrow, the band reaches for a lighter sound, with bright production, effervescent synths, and impressionistic lyrics that home in on the unrelenting march of time.
The production on Time’s Arrow renders escapism in gleaming tones. On “The Night,” over an upbeat groove and glowering synths, vocalist Helen Marnie takes a nocturnal trip that spins out of control; it maintains their seductive edge while morphing into one of the most joyously straightforward pop songs in their catalog. The band’s music works best in this propulsive mode: On the chiming standout “Faces,” Marnie’s lyrical repetition lends a throbbing pulse that accelerates alongside glassy synth lines. On the anthemic and shoegaze-y “California,” a downcast love letter to the state, distorted guitars and sturdy drums dial things up before dissipating beneath Marnie’s ethereal chorus. “California, make us happy,” she intones, letting the words drift weightlessly.
Evocative images recur throughout Time’s Arrow, which is full of flashing lights, water, and dreams that offer mesmerizing spaces for getting lost. “Flight From Angkor” revolves around a slow build of oscillating synth lines and clanging guitar, laying down an unsettled backdrop for Mira Aroyo’s gentle voice; memory, she sings, is a “hall of mirrors echoing for years.” Experiencing time as a one-directional force provides the album’s throughline, a theme that works in concert with the music’s swirling, atmospheric moods. The cinematic title track drives it home best: Set against jagged, feedback-heavy production and a menacing synth, Aroyo’s vocals grow increasingly restless, matching time’s irrepressible flow forward.
Time’s Arrow’s consistency also works against it. The record’s more placid songs bleed together: “The Dreamers” is a gauzy, shiftless ballad that circles a static chord progression and vague lyrics, while “Sargasso Sea,” a largely instrumental track that follows it, evaporates just as it starts to build toward a climax. “Misery Remember Me” fares better, a song that doesn’t wallow in the titular misery so much as sunbathe and luxuriate in it. Expressive washes of guitar and drums provide a warm, delicate comfort for the torment, captured in Marnie’s rich, layered vocals. Like the best songs on Time’s Arrow, it proves just how intoxicating Ladytron’s enduring brand of atmospheric synth pop can be.


James Brooks, formerly of Elite Gymnastics, returns with his first full-length under his Default Genders alias. This project uses basic A-B song structures, surging choruses, and grooves that recall 1990s big beat as a foundation for political lyrics.

Magical Pessimism 2014

Magical Pessimism 2014 lives on the internet. For one thing, you cannot own a physical copy of James Brooks’ first full-length as Default Genders. More importantly, Brooks takes a principled, proactive stand against patriarchy, rape culture, rockism, and punk fascism in a way that should be familiar to anyone who discusses pop culture on Twitter or Tumblr. You almost feel obligated to say Default Genders is well-intentioned; being mindful of privilege is surely a good thing, no? But like much of the discourse confined to the internet, Magical Pessimism often substitutes accusation for empathy, conviction for coherence, and straw men for actual people to the point where you wonder whether Brooks’ intentions are to draw attention to the problem or just his own moral superiority.
This is an admittedly unusual way to begin a discussion about a pop record; Magical Pessimism isn’t a pamphlet. And though Brooks would likely claim Default Genders as a multimedia project, before the association with Grimes and before giving himself a feminist rebrand twice, he was gaining attention with Ruin, the intriguing collection he made as half of Elite Gymnastics. As with his politics, Brooks’ musical ambitions are bold and don’t hold up to a lot of scrutiny. He expressed a desire to invert the canon so it debunks Radiohead and deifies the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack—which conveniently ignores the 11th track on that CD. Moreover, Brooks’ statement was an attempt to distance himself from the supposedly “nerd-male” influences (New Order, Joy Division) he felt marred Ruin, a record that sounds a hell of a lot like Magical Pessimism.
That’s a good thing, since Ruin was onto something, combining harsh drum'n'bass beats, blown-out ambience, and shards of noise, yet still found ways to fit Brooks’ predilections for classical composition and non-Western pop into the crowded mix. It rarely gels here, but you hear why artists have taken a shine to Default Genders; Brooks is an "ideas guy" and the application of lo-fi and punk aesthetics to non-guitar music tends to be exciting on general principle.
But Magical Pessimism still abides by typical “rock” signifiers to provide its most satisfying moments: basic A-B song structure, choruses that surge on distortion (“The Trees in the Driveway”), and beats that more often recall Moby’s midtempo big-beat crossovers or even the blazingly hetero KROQ-core of the 1975 (“Stop Pretending”). Brooks is at his best making anthems, while his deconstructionist tendencies are easy to confuse with carelessness—on the high-NRG tracks, the EQing is boxy and the mixing is inconsistent, at times burying Brooks’ voice, something that barely works as texture. Tracks cut out and begin erratically, sacrificing any semblance of cohesion or flow. Only an extremely generous interpretation would be to assume these are part of Brooks’ greater aim to demystify or at least denigrate The Album, that totem of rockism.
Then you have Brooks’ vocals, a tuneless, meek mutter used for chest-poking confrontation, divisive by design. At times, they lend an ear-turning effect to otherwise basic melodies and a conceptual force that has endeared him to a young, plugged-in niche audience. Not only does Brooks' approach tell the listener, “anyone can do this, even you,” but he shares a teen’s tendency towards thinking in absolutes about their own perceived persecution and the failings of others. And besides, his conversational cadence is the only delivery in which his most angsty lyrics (“Fine, cool whatever, thanks for clearing that up”, “Fuck that, fuck them, fuck you, ugh...fuck my life”) can sound less awkward than they read.
The problem is that Brooks applies the same black and white thinking to some of the most mature and complex topics which prove to be way out of his depth. He’s a thoughtful, sincere person and that comes through in his interviews or an unadorned observation about a stock, upwardly mobile type from “The Trees in the Driveway”—“You have to take out your piercings before you get to work/ But otherwise they’re pretty cool about the way that you dress.” When he tries to convey unearned gravitas, it just results in leaden metaphor that hits with a dull thud—“The trees in the driveway start to shed all their leaves/ Some people would it’s cause they’re dying/ But to you it just seems like they’re focused on the important things.”
Worse is that he shows little interest in actually getting to know the enemy—“punk” and “the suburbs” and “pain” are shoebox dioramas in which the characters serve as action figures, free of agency and simply arranged by Brooks to demonstrate his place on higher moral ground. If you have any kind of lingering guilt about your own privilege, a line like, “Tell me again how heavy the crown is/ About the weight of the burden of being white and male” should decimate you. But in the context of Magical Pessimism’s pervasive self-congratulation, the takeaway is that Brooks would obviously never do such a thing.
This becomes almost impossible to bear during “On Fraternity”, originally recorded under Brooks' Dead Girlfriends moniker and raising the question of whether there’s a wrong way to do the right thing. It’s been understandably viewed as a companion piece to Grimes’ “Oblivion”, a brilliantly conceived pop song you can hear at malls, gyms and on the street—the same places where one could be subject to the harassment Claire Boucher speaks upon. “On Fraternity” is in a different, more checkered tradition of men writing songs about misogyny, which can go extremely wrong, but the risk can occasionally be justified by the reward. Fugazi’s “Suggestion” was both a bold strike against their peers and sensitive towards it subject, while on Pissed Jeans’ "Male Gaze", an average schlub showed that admitting his faults and changing his behavior can be a powerful display of allegiance.
“On Fraternity” got people talking about these things, and shouldn’t that be enough? Its Xiu Xiu-esque scree provides Magical Pessimism’s most arresting musical moment, but lyrically, it’s got the resonance of a #yesallmen hashtag. On its own accord, “The way they act like even bringing it up/ Means you’re the one with the problem” could be a powerful, concise acknowledgment of the presumptions of guilt and "blame the victim" investigative process that often prevents sexual assault claims from being reported in the first place. Instead, you’re seemingly meant to marvel at Brooks’ bravery here.
That’s how “On Fraternity” and much of Magical Pessimism comes across, and yet I don’t truly believe Brooks thinks that way—even he’s called the song a "total failure." I wouldn’t be surprised if Brooks comes up with a long Tumblr post about all the ways this record has been misconstrued and he could be right about all of it. After all, you live on the internet for long enough and you realize how often good intentions can be completely negated by ineffective communication; that in real life situations, you might be friends with the guy you’ve been beefing with for months, and a two-minute conversation can defuse a grudge that resulted in reams of Twitter dialogue and reblogs. Magical Pessimism is hardly a total failure, and like many talking points that live on the internet, it can cause a discomfort that feels productive. But it’s ultimately up to the speaker to make the best use of his limited communication tools and Default Genders reminds you why so many people are relieved that Twitter finally has a “mute” function.


Who were Tolerance? A pair of new reissues reignites the mystery of the short-lived Japanese experimental act whose shadowy beats and detuned haze arrived years ahead of their time.

Anonym / Divin

The index of experimental musicians known colloquially as “the Nurse With Wound list” came printed on the inner sleeve of the British industrial pioneers’ debut album, 1979’s Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. Its 236 entries (later expanded to 291) accounted for a motley crew of miscreants and iconoclasts from the 1960s and ’70s: UK improvisers AMM; German out-rockers Neu!, Can, and Amon Düül; musique concrète pioneers Luc Ferrari and Pierre Henry; mid-century composers John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen; and names with a less burnished patina of historical import, like Horrific Child, Ovary Lodge, and Sphinx Tush.
The list was intended, NWW’s Steven Stapleton would later say, as an “attempt to get in contact with like-minded people that were interested in the music we were interested in.” In those days, that was tough. There was no internet, for one thing. International distribution for underground music was spotty; obscure records could be hard to procure, and once out of print, they passed into a realm closer to myth. Books about the stuff were nonexistent—history was still being written. So the Nurse With Wound list functioned as a countercultural atlas, signaling backroads and byways that fellow freaks otherwise might never have known existed.
Today, the list is a relic of a very different era. Many formerly obscure names are now familiar to a wide swath of listeners. Successive developments—stores like Amoeba and Other Music, P2P platforms like Napster and Soulseek, mp3 blogs and YouTube—have patched holes in many seekers’ mental maps, if not their want lists. Yet one name remains shrouded in mystery: Tolerance, a Japanese artist who released two albums, 1979’s Anonym and 1981’s Divin, then disappeared.
That the world knows about Tolerance at all is thanks to Osaka’s Vanity Records. The short-lived label was run by Yuzuru Agi, a musician and journalist who founded Rock Magazine in 1976. Between 1978 and 1981, across 11 full-lengths and some flexi-discs and cassettes, Vanity charted the outer limits of Japanese avant-rock: Dada’s kraut-inspired prog; SAB’s kosmische new age; the gnarled post-punk of Aunt Sally, fronted by experimental lifer Phew; the synth-soaked rock’n’roll of Morio Agata, whose Vanity one-off suggests a Japanese Suicide. Even among those highly esoteric colleagues, Tolerance stood out for their singularity. Their peers worked within recognizable frameworks; Tolerance might as well have been channeling radio signals from the far side of the galaxy.
Anonym opens stealthily, skulking into earshot like some strange cave-dwelling creature emerging from a dank hole. Hissing white noise establishes a ghost of a pulse; desultory tendrils of slide guitar droop like the branches of a weeping willow. Beneath it all, a Rhodes piano shifts languidly between two chords. The effect is dreamlike but queasy, less a song than an inchoate, gelatinous attempt at marking time, a waterlogged metronome dredged up from a fetid swamp.
Track two, “I wanna be a homicide,” is more insistent but no less murky. Someone mashes at the Rhodes with their fists, and someone else plucks away at single strings of an electric guitar. An unbroken stream of oscillating static muddles the focus. For long stretches, dissonance reigns, until without warning both Rhodes and guitar fall into time and key for a bar or two, before once again drifting off into separate clashing dimensions.
The whole album plays out like this, tentatively burrowing its way through a detuned haze. The motorik “osteo-tomy” features indecipherable spoken-word vocals along with slash-and-burn guitar that prefigures the kind of thing Sonic Youth wouldn’t begin doing for another three or four years; the title track plays atonal piano off a dry rhythmic clicking, like a copy of John Cage’s Etudes Australes with a sharp knife dragged across the grooves. It wraps up with “Voyage au bout de la nuit,” which might almost be a Stooges or Velvet Underground song, were it not for the relentless and off-key bass ostinato hammering away underneath, emitting sickly dissonance with every 16th-note strike. If you told me it was a looped transposition of an electric eel’s high-voltage jolt, I’d believe you.
Who were Tolerance? In the scant liner notes, Junko Tange—who has variously been described as a dental student and dental nurse in her daily life—is credited with synthesizer, effects, piano, and voice, while Masami Yoshikawa is credited with “effective guitar.” For years, the project was assumed to be a duo, but according to Justin Simon, whose Mesh-Key label has published the new reissue, a former employee at Vanity claims that Tolerance was considered Tange’s solo project—she was the only person that ever communicated with anyone at the label—and Yoshikawa merely a contributor. A dedication on the record’s inner sleeve—“to the quiet men from a tiny girl”—might seem to bear that out. (Nurse With Wound borrowed that phrase for the title of their second album, in 1980.) No matter how credit is apportioned—was the sepulchral gloom Tange’s idea alone? Was the guitar’s spiky randomness something she suggested, or a natural facet of Yoshikawa’s playing?—few artists were making music that sounded anything like this in 1979. Tolerance were way out on their own.
Were it not for the name on the sleeve, one might assume that Divin was the work of an entirely different artist. (This time, the credits read more cryptically: “LUMINAL: J-TANGE / INPUT: M-YOSHIKAWA.”) If Anonym offered a spindly, dissonant vision of post-punk, Divin proposed a smoggy proto-techno that was, in retrospect, uncannily ahead of its time. The opening “Pulse Static (Tranqillia)” thumps like a haunted drum machine in a soggy cardboard box, muted hits triggering tight spirals of analog delay. Lumpy, mechanized, and almost ruthlessly anhedonic, it sounds like the minimal techno that artists like Thomas Brinkmann would take up nearly two decades later—a glitch in the continuum, a wormhole made of solid-state circuitry.
Drum machines, and similarly technoid overtones, distinguish many of the album’s most entrancing tracks. “Sacrifice” dangles a bumbling bassline that sounds like a pre-echo of the “Sleng Teng” riddim, from 1985. “Sound Round” might be an ESG tape that has oxidized and been ground to dust; its glancing metallic accents hint at dub techno. Yet Tange’s electronics are not clean or precision engineered: They’re messy, fallible, dangerously out of control. In “Bokw Wa Zurui Robot (Stolen From Kad),” a fast, motorik drum-machine sequence gallops across a smeared bed of synths while Tange chants rhythmically into what sounds like a mic wrapped in sweat socks. Every now and then, a slightly too-loud hi-hat pattern bursts in, and you can tell from its timing that she’s punching it in by hand; it’s not quite in sync with the other drums, and the longer it runs, the further out of whack it gets.
Tolerance were the only artist to release a second album on Vanity, but while much of the label’s roster continued to operate after the label shut down, Tolerance never released anything again. Tange is credited on an unreleased 1986 recording that surfaced on YouTube seven years ago, but nothing else is known of her; the Japanese label that owns the rights to the recording is, apparently, holding onto her royalties, in the event that she materializes. Yoshikawa also vanished; few Vanity staffers can even recall meeting the guitarist back when the group was active. Yoshikawa has become as ghostly as those spectral guitar melodies.
Tange and Yoshikawa’s absence makes for a good story; it solidifies their standing as exactly the kind of artist the Nurse With Wound list was meant to preserve for posterity. Their disappearance also feels like a fitting complement to the mysteriousness of the records themselves. Tolerance’s music is enigmatic in its essence; it presents only questions with no good answers. What were they listening to? Why did their drums sound like a toaster being tossed in a bathtub? Why is Divin’s third track played in reverse? What did they know that we don’t?
And the biggest question, of course: Why did she, or they, quit making music? Did Tolerance simply express all they wanted? There’s a spontaneity and purity to these two records that makes that seem at least possible. Tange and Yoshikawa went into the studio on two different occasions, using two totally different setups, and lightning struck twice. Why take further chances?


Darkthrone’s seventeenth studio album, Arctic Thunder, is a seamless, genre-hopping lexicon of death growls, doom dirges, and thrash runs as immediate as they are all-encompassing.

Arctic Thunder

Ever since they first slicked on the corpse paint in 1986, the seminal Norwegian black metal band Darkthrone have raged an unrelenting war on the Puritanical mores of the West: devout Christianity, blind patriotism to both God and Country, the status quo’s broader distrust of anything rock. Of course, as the original espousers of “True Norwegian Black Metal” and former associates of Burzum’s gun-toting, white nationalist frontman Varg Vikernes, they’ve had to swat off many an accusation of racism.
Considering Darkthrone’s anti-establishment mindset in tandem with their controversial past, it’s easy to label them outcasts–and yet, in 2016, Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell and Nocturno Culto are hardly pariahs. I’m not just speaking in terms of the metal community, either: just this year, Nagell’s neighbors in the Oslo suburb of Kolbotn elected him—the debauched king of KVLT!–to town council. (The musician, to his credit, did his best to dissuade voters; his “campaign” comprised but a single photo of the bearded axeman cradling his adorable cat, with the caption “Please don’t vote for me.”). “I’m not too pleased about it. It’s boring,” he later grumbled to CLRVYNT, later admitting, a bit begrudgingly: “I’m a pillar of my community.”
Darkthrone’s seventeenth studio album, Arctic Thunder, bristles with a similar recognition of power, albeit over a far more hostile constituency than the prankish Norwegian suburbanites who stuck Fenriz in office. Like most of Nagell and Culto’s output since downsizing to a duo two decades ago, it’s an album tailor-made for a diverse metal electorate. Rather than Xerox their classic A Blaze in the Northern Sky, the pair express their longstanding aggression through a seamless, genre-hopping lexicon of death growls, doom dirges, and thrash runs as immediate as they are all-encompassing.
Don’t mistake their expanded palette for a lack of focus: as always, Darkthrone keep these eight songs’ latent chaos on a tight choke-chain, timing the hellish tremolo riffs as carefully and slowly as an October surprise; before arriving at the weepy pinnacle of lead single “Tundra Leech,” we must first power through the Pentagram-y crunch of both verse and chorus, its already-dramatic lurch made all the more queasy by otherworldly groans, trembling and liminal like a vengeful spirit howling from the other side of the void. That haunting catharsis seems downright generous, however, compared to cuts like “Throw Me Through the Marshes” and “Inbred Vermin,” which offer even less tangibility and resolution: the guitars’ firm-footed cadence does little to allay the mounting dread inherent in their creeping backbeats, Trojan horses to presage the duo’s imminent (but nonetheless unpredictable) sludgy torrents.
However foreboding their latest effort may be, Nagell and Culto aren’t out to scare us shitless—as with its predecessor, 2013’s excellent The Underground Resistance, Arctic Thunder’s predominant mood is one of playful, if unflinchingly perverse, glee: a thirty-nine minute, low-stakes stampede down memory lane, recorded at the Bomb Shelter rehearsal unit they utilized at the end of the ’80s, back when their nightmarish journey started. The album’s proliferation of feel-bad jams ensures an entertaining listen that’s bound to shut up the purists who consider the band’s downsizing a detriment—in fact, even as a duo, Darkthrone have never sounded more like themselves. Considering how important transparency is to politics, as well as music, it should come as no surprise that Nagell attained public office. Of course, being photographed with a cute cat didn’t hurt, either.


The Russian electronic musician’s latest album turns pointillist quirks into erratic maximalism—call it pop music for people who enjoy both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Lisa Frank.

WOW

Franz Kafka wrote about animals a lot: a monstrous bug, a young panther in a menagerie, a mouse named Josephine who wants to wow you with her song, a dog who sees a powerful triumvirate of other dogs levitating and has some thoughts about it. He wrote about these creatures in prose that is defamiliarized, exhausting, wickedly funny. The Russian composer Ekaterina Shilonosova, who performs as Kate NV, shares a similar sensibility with the Austro-Hungarian writer: On her excellent fourth record, WOW, there is a suite of animals, and she is both rigorous and whimsical about them.
On WOW, NV abandons the slightly more legible songs of 2020’s Room for the Moon, and the cohesiveness of 2018’s для FOR, opting instead for delightfully fractured inscrutability. WOW is dense and hyper-saturated with chintzy synths, field recordings, and heavily manipulated vocals. Call it maximalism; call it pop music for people who happen to enjoy both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Lisa Frank. It exists in a zone that NV has been working in for a while, one that involves fermenting and reimagining everything from Japanese city pop to the ECM New Series to corny ’80s chart-toppers. Opener “oni (they),” which features Japanese-language lyrics written by Foodman, feels like being inside a pinball machine: Each flicker of synth lights up brilliantly, bouncing erratically from point A to B.
Each song is its own absurd room. Like previous records, WOW makes good use of Found Sound Nation’s Broken Orchestra sample pack, sourced from damaged instruments from Philadelphia’s public schools. On “confessions at the dinner table,” there are synths that sound like they’re giggling or yawning, field recordings of a door opening, the sound of clinking dishes. Violin and clarinet burst in at the midpoint. It is like a food fight, rendered in the aesthetics of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, where two girls in flower crowns stomp around on a table drinking brandy and throwing cake at each other, fucking with everyone they meet.
But NV’s music isn’t twee. Just because something is cute doesn’t mean it’s not rigorous, and her playfulness has a purpose: In upsetting expectations, it’s meant to keep you on your toes. Her songs are slanted, oblique. “razmishlenie (thinking)” builds in such a way that you’d think it would eventually depressurize, yet it does not; it stays at the same level of intensity for the song’s duration. There’s no payoff, but not in a way that is necessarily disappointing. Her music can be a workout; its self-containment can be almost alienating.
Perhaps that’s because there’s not necessarily a narrative. You couldn’t say that WOW is about anything. Instead, it’s defined by its aesthetic cohesion, a beautiful sense of formal seriousness that holds court over the record’s surrealistic menagerie.


On his first song-oriented album, the Arcade Fire’s composer-in-residence folds folk music and dissonance into delightful odes to nature’s pleasure and power.

Richard Reed Parry: Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1

Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1

Aside from being the easiest Arcade Fire member to pick out in a police lineup, multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry has also enjoyed the most visible extracurricular career of his bandmates. A self-taught composer, Parry elevated the orchestral undercurrents of the Arcade Fire into the defining feature of his post-rock ensemble Bell Orchestre, a steady stream of commissions for the likes of the Kronos Quartet, and an album for classical bastion Deutsche Grammophon. But Parry is also the son of a folk-singer and a former hardcore kid who frequented the same all-ages Toronto haunts as future members of Fucked Up. On Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1, his first song-oriented solo album, he folds formative loves of campfire sing-alongs and disruptive dissonance into a meditation on nature's serene beauty and destructive force.
Parry’s classically inclined solo pursuits have often felt like understated answers to Arcade Fire’s arena-sized catharsis. The same holds here, even as he deploys some of the bigger band’s favorite tricks—exultant group vocals, thundering drum builds, dramatic crescendos. But Parry uses those devices to fashion a world a million miles away from the digital-age angst and dystopian disco of Arcade Fire’s Everything Now, instead taking a pastoral path toward similar themes of unplugging and savoring IRL experiences.
Alongside collaborators like the National guitarist Bryce Dessner and Little Scream leader Laurel Sprengelmeyer, Parry arrives at an earthy, elaborate sound that harks back to the golden age of mid-2000s blog-prog: the ornate art-folk of Sufjan Stevens, the high-beam harmonies of Dirty Projectors, the ritualistic abandon of Animal Collective. The album even stands as a rootsier counterpart to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, sharing DNA with its creator’s main gig but cultivating it in a more impressionistic manner.
Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 (yes, a sequel arrives next year) is also our first real opportunity to hear Parry sing outside of the Arcade Fire’s throat-shredding group choruses. His voice is gentle and graceful, reflective of his reverence for the natural phenomena he details. Within the first few seconds of opener “Gentle Pulsing Dust,” he’s treating his window as a cinema screen that frames some never-ending sylvan documentary. Overtop fluttering oscillations and circular acoustic patterns, he sings, “First the rain begins, and the quiet settles in/And it’s awesome.” Though that peaceful rainfall begets an apocalyptic seven-day storm, Parry’s sense of ecstatic wonder remains unaffected by the tumult, as if he were leading a cult-ceremony salute to nature’s higher power.
Shout-outs to barn cats aside, Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 transcends twee platitudes about our environment to amplify the raw emotions and introspection one can experience inside it. The album’s origin, after all, dates to Parry’s 2008 visit to Japan. Venturing into the woods near Mount Koya, he heard uncanny singing that reminded him of his late father’s folk band. “On the Ground,” the song that stems from that experience, feels like an attempt to communicate with those disembodied voices, Parry’s synth-modulated words echoing inside an unanswering void. Parry rallied members of his dad’s old group, the Friends of Fiddler’s Green, to help rouse those spirits, too. Together, they forsake the typical crescendo for a series of skyward surges, like fireworks being shot off one at a time.
For a guy whose band became famous for singing about perseverance in the wake of death, Parry spends much of Quiet River of Dust peacefully contemplating life on the other side, be it through the affecting ambient instrumental “Sai No Kawara (River of Death)” or the album’s staggering nearly 10-minute peak, “I Was in the World (Was the World in Me)?” As that song attests, communing with nature isn’t only a way to feel more alive; it offers a sneak preview of death, allowing you to imagine yourself as one with the earth. The song’s structure mirrors our departure, as Parry guides a Neil Young-like country-rock lick into a cyclonic swirl.
But the most telling moment emerges after the storm subsides, when only the hum and chirp of insects remain to remind us that the Earth will keep spinning long after we’re gone. Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 is an enchanted forest of a record—deceptively tranquil, but always buzzing with hidden life. Parry’s other band famously told of us of a place where no cars go. This is what it feels like to actually be there.


On his most introspective album to date, the everyman balladeer from Queens considers beachside sandwiches, making money from art, and what it means to be home.

Wandering Rebel

By now, fans know what to expect from a Juan Wauters album. A folksy hodgepodge of short songs delivered in a nasal croon. Unpretentious lyrics observing the beauty of ordinary life, sung in English and his native Spanish. A warm, loosely plucked acoustic guitar as the central instrument. Oh, and he’ll probably mention something about being from Queens. But his biggest trademark is his freewheeling charm (à la Jonathan Richman), rooted in his love of community. Wauters’ focus has typically been outward, spotlighting his many collaborators and the people he’s met through his music and travels. But after canceling plans for 2020, he relocated to his birthplace of Montevideo, Uruguay, where he found love, stability, and a new definition of home. He processes this reckoning throughout Wandering Rebel, his most introspective album yet.
As always, Wauters’ lust for life takes communal and corporeal form. His projects are laden with features, from indie darlings like Mac DeMarco and Homeshake to the traditional Latin American guitarists Alejandro Dominguez and Luciano Fuentes Borquez. On “Modus Operandi,” fellow New Yorker Greta Kline (Frankie Cosmos) observes sidewalks deserted during the pandemic and asks if the city will ever be the same again. “When it gets rough out here/People that have options go back to their suburbs,” Wauters laments in response. “To them, it was just like some kind of Disney World.” “Milanesa al Pan,” with Argentine singer Zoe Gotusso, is a joyful contrast. Accompanied by group vocals and sweetly textured guitars, the pair take on the roles of long-distance lovers who reunite on the beach to share the titular Argentinian sandwich.
Wandering Rebel skews insular, though, and its somber moments are the most resonant. Thunder cracks through “Nube Negra” (“Black Cloud”), where Wauters writes about changing his surroundings and finally coming to terms with his dark mental state: the globetrotting philosopher acknowledging that you take yourself everywhere you go. Y La Bamba’s Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos plays the role of the cloud, the watery mystique of their harmonies personifying the way depression lingers without a clear cause or solution. Dreams of settling down are also heavy on Wauters’ mind. “I’m looking to have a family/So if this music thing not pick up/We’ll have to make some changes up in here,” he confesses on the title track, his frank talk-singing taking center stage over John Carroll Kirby’s wistful piano. It feels vulnerable; Wauters has always favored straightforward thoughts, and here there isn’t even a goofy beat or quirky melody to hide behind.
In its latter half, Wandering Rebel takes on a more melancholic and contemplative tone, revealing a side of Wauters that his charisma as a performer sometimes conceals. But he maintains his slice-of-life idiosyncrasies. There’s still room for a song like “En un barrio de Montevideo,” the kooky rough cut of an album closer. Over looped synths that could’ve been a James Ferraro throwaway, it contains two slurred, Auto-Tuned voicemails. One is from a radio station requesting an interview about Wauters’ music; the other is someone hitting him up about a gig polishing floors. It’s weirdly out of place but quintessentially Juan: an unassuming document of the double-life realities of a working artist who never takes himself too seriously.


With celestial synth arrangements and heavy-lidded streams of consciousness, Bladee’s newest album offers a vision of pop that’s grounded in real emotion but shrouded in otherworldly mystery.

Spiderr

In an interview in 2019, Bladee unveiled a key moment in his mythos: the time he was struck by lightning during a visit to Thailand. He was far away from his home in Sweden and felt he couldn’t go to the hospital, so he just decided to sleep it off. “I was sure I was gonna die, but I didn’t,” he remembered. “I felt like an angel or something.” It wasn’t the first time the young artist and Drain Gang co-founder—born Benjamin Reichwald—had taken a moment of negativity or trauma and turned it into an existential revelation.
Bladee has made his name on vast, genre-blurring pop music that’s shot through with a delirious, new-age-y optimism. Over euphoric synth arrangements that recall the colorful history of internet rap, the aqueous sounds of chillout rooms at clubs, and Arthur Russell’s first-thought-best-thought pop music, he sings of seeing divine beings, ascending to heaven, and sharing the peace and equanimity he feels with others. As he put it earlier this year, in a bar that feels like a mission statement, “Beauty is my drug, I’m the pusher.” Cryptic yet ecstatic, he's a true believer in the transcendent power of pop. On his new solo album, Spiderr, he continues to imbue every beat and breath with the urge to pursue a deeper spiritual truth.
Produced almost entirely by frequent collaborator Whitearmor—with some assists from Sad Boys affiliate Gud and Joakim Benon (best known as a member of the dreamy Swedish duo jj)—Spiderr works within a familiar palette of celestial synth arrangements and heavy-lidded, stream-of-consciousness emotion. Lead single “Drain Story” builds on the shapeshifting sound that Bladee has favored over the last few years, full of stuttering percussion, squirming synth, and breathy ad-libs. On paper, it’s not a lot different from PC Music’s pop prismatics, or the Adderall-addled anthemics of plugg, but Bladee’s gauzy falsetto is a calming presence amid the maelstrom, promising peace and answers to life’s most complicated questions. “Give you something to believe in,” he sings. “I got that something that you’ve been seeking.”
Spiderr is more dense and, at times, more compelling than other recent Drain Gang releases because it isn’t purely euphoric; Bladee digs into the darker side of his existential meandering as well. “I Am Slowly But Surely Losing Hope” is exactly what its title promises, a tenuous exploration of weakness, dejection, and despair. It’s one of the most tumultuous arrangements in Bladee’s catalog to date, pairing the chattering electronics that have become Whitearmor’s signature with ragged guitars—a reminder that the members of Drain Gang first united over the shredded sounds of hardcore punk. Though it’s a tense track, full of meditations on loneliness and a plea for a slow death, it makes the album’s lighter moments all the more striking.
Throughout his career, Bladee has occasionally tried to undercut these more moving moments with a brittle sense of humor (and he does so here too, proclaiming on “Dresden ER” that “Life is but a joke”). But he’s at his most affecting when he’s at his most sincere—offering enigmatic, koan-like wisdom over dreamy production that often threatens to drift away into the ether. It’s a vision of pop that’s grounded in real emotion but shrouded in otherworldly mystery. In the process, he re-establishes himself as a kind of musical mystic, unspooling hazy spiritual truths to an increasingly devoted cult of followers.


The drill rapper’s mainstream takeover continues with an engaging, guest-heavy, but otherwise run-of-the-mill album.

Almost Healed

It’s no exaggeration to say that Lil Durk has been constantly healing from trauma for over a decade. As a member of drill’s first wave in Chicago in the early 2010s, Durk’s music has always been rife with amped-up tales that rumble with intense gun-fueled action and the physical and emotional fallout that follows it. But the sheer amount of hardship and loss he’s suffered, like many from his background, is staggering—to the point where every new project is both a victory lap and a pressure-release valve. Life has not let up on this dude: He’s one of the most popular and successful rappers in the world but the PTSD from a constant drip of lost family and friends keeps him on edge.
Up until Almost Healed, his eighth solo album, the therapeutic benefits of his music have mostly been subtextual, relegated to his tone and the sheer weight of his stories. At least it’s never been as heavy-handed as it is on the opening skit “Therapy Session,” where Alicia Keys stiltedly asks him about the deaths of King Von, his brother DThang, and his ongoing beefs with YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Gunna with the airy chirp of an overeager guidance counselor. It’s a mawkish start to an otherwise engaging and scattershot album.
Whether he’s mean-mugging his way through the trenches or opening up about his broken heart, Durk brings his words to life like a comic book splash page. The proper opening track “Pelle Coat” foregrounds those talents with four minutes of traumatic memories, visceral action, and YouTubers on his shit list. Scenarios tumble out over Chopsquad DJ’s slight keyboards and hi-hats: snitches, bodies in the street, the guilt over the deaths of Von and his cousin Nuski, Durk’s mother suggesting he decamp to Detroit. But one observation near the beginning of the third verse is a one-two knock-out: “I send money to funerals/Even though they goin’ to hell for all them niggas they killed/You know I'm part of my brother 'nem forever ever, I'm goin’ to hell.” The trail of death he’s seen is harrowing enough, but Durk acknowledging that he’s essentially damned himself beyond salvation is chilling. It’s a heartbreaking moment in a discography full of them, the kind that only comes from the darkest forms of experience.
“Pelle Coat” is a hell of an opener, hitting heights that Almost Healed doesn’t reach again for the rest of its runtime. Every song doesn’t need to rip the listener’s heart out, but the rest of the album jumps between these personal revelations, sappy crossover treacle, and standard drill-and-pain tracks. Lead single “All My Life” walks a tightrope between the earnest sociopolitical pleas of Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture” and the goodhearted PSA hogwash of Logic’s “1-800-273-8255,” complete with a choir of children singing its hook.
That balance is upset a handful of times, most notably on “Stand by Me,” Durk’s second collaboration with country singer (and “reformed” n-word user) Morgan Wallen. Their dedications to faceless love interests are sapped of all the detail, urgency, and personality that drives Durk’s best songs. Both “All My Life” and “Stand by Me” are clear shots at crossover hits, but at least the former gives us some powerful words from guest J. Cole about the dead rapper media industrial complex to sink our teeth into.
The rest of Almost Healed is a grab bag of middling to pretty good Durk cuts from across the spectrum. The pretty good: Durk and New Orleans upstart Rob49 doing back-and-forths over a vicious LilJuMadeDaBeat production on “Same Side” and colorful threats to opposition on “300 Urus.” The middling: run-of-the-mill collaborations with 21 Savage on “War Bout It” and Chief Wuk on “Big Dawg.” “Cross the Globe” boasts a feature from the late Juice WRLD, and his somber and paranoid verse (“I got the juice, feel like 2Pac/They tryna kill me in the black Beamer like 2Pac”) doesn’t match Durk yelling about going deep into some young lady’s guts while screaming “Free Thug!” There’s no humor or fun parallel here—it’s a jarring distraction.
That clash of sound and content points to the big problem with Almost Healed: It never knows what kind of experience it wants to deliver. Its therapy-speak intro and gauze-wrapped cover art suggest this is Durk’s stab at a legit concept album, wrestling with his demons like a more violent take on Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. But about halfway through, it plays out just like any other Durk album, with all the sadness, anger, flashiness, and white-knuckle intensity you’d expect. This could all be chalked up to portraying the many sides of Durk, but there’s little narrative thread guiding that thought, and so it feels like a thin conceptual veil placed over things we’ve seen and heard before. There’s little differentiating this from 2020’s The Voice or 2022’s 7220 and it lacks the razor-sharp focus that made Just Cause Ya’ll Waited 2, a brutal and affecting listen. Durk’s presence is strong and his endurance is inspiring, but his intentions are as muddied as ever.


New Zealand psych rocker Connan Mockasin’s collaborative album with his dad, Ade, has bad jokes, stream-of-consciousness poetry, and an odd, undeniable appeal.

It’s Just Wind

It only took 40 minutes without a heartbeat to resuscitate the project Ade Hosford and his son had joked about making for years. The younger Hosford, who records as Connan Mockasin, has spent the past decade as a refreshingly strange psych-rock outsider with a distinct pop sensibility and seemingly little concern for public opinion of his work. In summer 2018, a few years after Ade’s near brush with death, father and son convened in Marfa, Texas to record their debut as a musical duo. Reunited with one of his earliest influences, Mockasin has made his most grounded and intimate record to date, and also his funniest.
It’s Just Wind may sound like a profound title, but it’s actually Ade’s evergreen defense of flatulence. The decision to name a collaborative coup de gras after a fart joke tracks when you recall that Connan once made a whole album of tongue-in-cheek sex music. But while Connan’s helium-powered humor can eventually wear on the nerves, Ade’s seven decades of experience have honed his deadpan delivery. On opener “The Wolf,” he serves up clunker after clunker: The little piggy tells the big bad wolf that his house is “made of dope”; the wolf threatens to “burn it to the ground and smoke it, you porky little shit.” Bad as these jokes are, they’re told with such grandfatherly enthusiasm that they still elicit a smile. Meanwhile, Connan’s blissed-out guitar tangles with John Carroll Kirby’s synth keys and beat machine, suffusing Ade’s silly sentiments with an almost mystical aura.
“Te Awanga,” a nod to the tiny beach town on New Zealand’s North Island where Connan grew up, pairs a breezy neo-soul guitar lick and tropical keys with sung stream-of-consciousness poetry. It’s rare to hear the untrained voice of an older man paired with such pretty instrumentation, and the effect is a bittersweet dissonance. In fleeting moments, Ade’s raw expressive power evokes the greats—Leonard Cohen without the low end, Scott Walker without the spine-tingling quaver, Peter Murphy unplugged and exorcised of his demons.
The record’s midsection is made up of solo Connan tracks that work to varying degrees. “What It Are” is a tightly wrapped nugget of fast-paced funk that lasts exactly as long as it should. The “Maggot Brain”-biting “Edge of Darkness” outstays its welcome, a reminder that not everyone can play like Eddie Hazel. It’s a relief, then, when Ade rejoins on “Marfa,” singing in an honest, regretful tone about shitty jobs, retirement, and gradual decay. It never feels like grousing until Connan jumps in halfway through, harshing the depressive vibe with a bad Thom Yorke impression. Despite this interruption, the song is soul-wrenching.
A few recurring ideas surface in It’s Just Wind’s father-son free-association game, none more prevalent than the image of a round peg in the square hole. First introduced in “Te Awanga” to describe the difficulty of moving to a “new land,” the metaphor receives a full 14 minutes near the record’s end. “Round Peg in a Square Hole” fumbles for footing for a minute or two, but the steady pulse of Kirby’s automated drumming helps it find direction. Slowly, the song gathers momentum and slippery new timbres, until Ade comes rumbling in like a battle-worn Bill Callahan to drive it home.
Square pegs, as we all know, do not fit into round holes; but what of a round peg in a square hole? The significance of the words hangs just out of reach as the record comes to a close with the squirmy stops and starts of “Stuck” and the quiet, spacey ballad “Clifton.” Maybe they’re thinking of a drifter in a new town, or a father alienated from his son, or a romantic love that’s hopelessly run its course. Or maybe it’s just another thinly veiled sex joke.

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Knit together with ambient passages and found sound, the teenage rapper and producer’s debut feels like a jumbled journey through folders of ideas that reveals new layers with every listen.

Drive-By Lullabies

quinn cares deeply about how she is seen. Few photos or interviews with the 16-year-old rapper and producer from Virginia exist online. Her body of work lives on the digital fringes, sprawled across alt accounts and aliases. Explore her SoundCloud page cat mother for her latest experiments in drum’n’bass, or user-574126634 for a data dump of 30-second freakouts, intimate demos, and a bizarrely great Westside Gunn/Machine Girl mashup. Browse her website to view her virtual gallery of liminal space photos.
This scatteredness suggests an artist distancing herself from the notoriety she achieved in 2020 as one of the faces of hyperpop, after blowing up online with her song “i dont want that many friends in the first place” and becoming the first artist from her SoundCloud scene to appear on the cover of Spotify’s hyperpop playlist. (Due to technical complications, the music she’s released on streaming is currently still listed under the name p4rkr, a moniker she deaded nearly two years ago after coming out as trans.) As labels swooped in to sign teenaged peers like Glaive and ericdoa, quinn, who then went by osquinn, soured on the hyperpop tag and the visibility she’d gained. For several months leading into 2021, she deactivated her Twitter. In the spring, she re-emerged, announced she had been going through serious depression and quit vocal music, and released several meandering drum’n’bass and dark ambient records under the aliases cat mother and trench dog. On Twitter, I watched her collection of gear grow: Day by day, she would add another sampler or camera or pedal or synthesizer, proudly posting a photo and sometimes even sharing the work she’d used it to create. It’s how we see her on the cover of her self-produced debut, drive-by lullabies: her face obscured by a Pioneer DJ controller.
The artwork hints at how this album is sequenced: a jumbled journey through folders of ideas, with notions of temporality and genre flattened by the mix. It feels like a terminally online teenager clicking through tab after tab on a web browser, digging into different rabbit holes. Need a lo-fi rework of “Hands on the Wheel?” Check. A song that sounds like a deep-fried remix out of SoundCloud’s dariacore scene? Check. A random riddim explosion? quinn’s got you. The vocals are back, but this album prioritizes mood over the hookiness of her bigger singles from 2019 and 2020. Some songs have the spare, anxious feel of last year’s “mbn”; some fold in quinn’s recent forays into dark ambient and drum’n’bass; and the sole interlude, which quinn says she freestyled in 2018 at age 14, sounds like a kid’s earnest take on Some Rap Songs. Even back then, quinn’s music was about understanding how she is seen, navigating a gaze: “I was way, way better than my mom told me.” This was the thrust of the music that catapulted quinn into the mainstream last year, and it continues to power drive-by lullabies, a portrait of a small celebrity navigating personal life.
The sound design reveals new layers with every listen, showcasing the meticulous detailing quinn picked up during her turn to instrumental music. Those explorations sometimes felt aimless and imitative on their own; anchored by her warbling voice, they gain direction and burst to life. Droning ambient passages and bits of found sound accompany, break up, and rope together drifting verses, acting as a kind of glue for genre experimentation. It recalls the way her inspiration Dean Blunt wove the sound of water through several tracks on The Redeemer. But where Blunt’s voice is deep and resonant, quinn’s is round and warmly robotic. When her voice first emerges on “The World Is Ending Soon!” it’s like a sprite flowing from fog, born from a mess of static and guitar strums.
On that song, she begins charting a complicated relationship to an unnamed other, imagining how they might find each other when the “stars burn out and explode.” This connection serves as the emotional core of lullabies, a way of tying together the record’s moving parts. Still, lullabies sometimes threatens to spiral into creative oblivion. There’s a lot going on here—maybe too much for an introductory record. The instrumental song “birthday girl,” where a warped piano segues into a physician’s monologue on depression, might scan as overindulgent to even the steadiest quinn fans.
But to open ears, this album is a quiet thrill. There are brash moments that recall quinn’s older music, like “perfect imperfection,” which shakes out a drill rhythm before constructing a wall of synth noise, but lullabies largely finds beauty in smallness and rawness. On “silly,” you can hear quinn’s take on the soft, JRPG-like sounds percolating through dltzk’s Teen Week, kurtains’ insignia’s manor, and other 2021 digicore records. “coping mechanism” is simply gorgeous, quinn’s crushed-up vocals drifting past tiny glitches and birdsong. But then there’s the calm refrain, almost hilariously morbid: “Have you seen enough people die? I didn’t think so.”
The ambiguous “you” in this line is a device quinn deploys often to unpack gaze. In her knotty single “and most importantly, have fun,” it captures how being online and interacting with fans produces cognitive dissonance. On lullabies, it seems to map onto DMs and text messages, channeling how even the most intimate digital spaces reduce our bodies to vague directives. “See I want something to do with you,” she sings to a romantic interest on the gurgling “Change That.” This introduces a quietly captivating three-song suite that concludes the album’s relationship arc. Through tender exercises in indie rock and soft, cryptic language, she teases out details of a lack of mutual understanding, of mess-ups and miscommunication, of two people seeing past each other.
Critics love to frame the reigning internet music of the moment as a snapshot of an online generation, but quinn’s songs do not approximate a vague generational trend or aesthetic; they feel wrought from a place of private meaning, directed to a shapeshifting subject. She’s at her poetic best on “mallgrabber p,” weaving complicated feelings between two people into endearing, nursery-rhyme verses. quinn has cited countless artists as influences, from 100 gecs’ Laura Les and JPEGMAFIA to Sybyr and Duwap Kaine, but when I hear how quinn tumbles through the words here, I’m reminded of Lucy, an artist from Western Massachusetts whom quinn loves to shout out. Lucy found an online following in the mid-2010s as part of a collective called Dark World Records. His music was weird and funny and, like quinn’s, disarmingly earnest. But right as that group was on the verge of a real breakthrough, Lucy left Dark World and retreated from the internet limelight. He pursued his joyous outsider music away from the press, bringing small crowds to basement shows around New England. Then, last spring, he re-emerged with an album called The Music Industry Is Poisonous. Listening closely to drive-by lullabies, you can imagine quinn feels the same way.

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After surfacing three years ago with a fresh, powerful sound, the London dream-pop quartet release their debut LP.

Ester

Almost three years ago a band called Trailer Trash Tracys surfaced on a No Pain In Pop compilation. Their song "Strangling Good Guys" stood out with its satisfyingly distorted drums and haze of lusty shoegaze pop. It was a cut that sounded fresh, powerful, and ended up feeling ahead of a curve that gave us the similarly fuzzy pop of the first Best Coast, Pearl Harbor, and Smith Westerns demos.
A couple of singles and a long delay later, the band finally arrives at its debut record, Ester. While it's not a bad record, it ranks as a disappointment. The re-recorded version of "Strangling Good Guys" acts as a handy capsule to illustrate its problems: The blown-out drums of before are now neutered and low in the mix, and the toothy shattered-glass guitars are muzzled by newly flat production. It sounds like a song recorded by committee and subject to endless revisions, each new take diluting the original's potency. The delight of the demo version was that it felt like it existed on instinct and gut feeling, whereas this just sounds over-thought and dull.
There's a minute of a great song in "Dies in 55", but that also falls apart beneath cluttered, confused elements. We're treated to awkward drum rolls, non sequitur bass drops, and a bassline that might well be offbeat, though in such a rhythmless environment it's difficult to tell.  There's nothing solid to glue these stuttering ideas together, and what started brightly quickly becomes a mess.
Trailer Trash Tracys sound much better when they mine simple patterns. "You Wish You Were Red" is carried by a basic beat, nonchalant guitar, and a sparse bass pattern. The economy of ideas means that each good one has space to really work. The restraint lends the song an airy glow and also allows Susanne Aztoria's honeyed vocals to come to the fore.
"Candy Girl" is another high point. The song first emerged a couple of years ago and, unlike "Strangling Good Guys", sounds as good as ever. The booming electronic drums and dirty, crackling guitar still carry a feeling of effortless cool as Aztoria's vocal swoops and dives. Her impressive knack for a tune is the band's big strength, and it's a shame that too often those melodies are squeezed or thrown off course by unnecessary parts.
"Engelhardt's Arizona" is a perfect example of this. Aztoria's yearning vocal fizzes with intrigue, sounding a bit like Nina Persson of the Cardigans, but it's almost impossible to pick out any nuance beneath a maddening guitar part that feels like the product of somebody who just learned hammer-on techniques and wanted to show them off.
That the 30-odd minutes of Ester took so long to finalize makes for a slightly baffling proposition, given that its two best moments sound so casually off-the-cuff and effortless.  At this point it's hard not to feel like the Trailer Trash Tracys who sounded pretty vital in 2009 have been left behind by a whole slew of bands that followed their starting gun and reached the finishing line quicker, and better.


Mike Cooper isn’t widely known, but to the extent that the wider world has heard of him, it’s as part of the canon of exploratory singer-songwriters of the '60s and '70s. But he also provides live music for silent films, paints and does collage, and releases albums of experimental, loop-based guitar music. The shimmering, tropical Fratello Mare is one such album.

Fratello Mare

Mike Cooper isn’t widely known, but to the extent that the wider world has heard of him, it’s for a series of folk-rock albums that veer thrillingly towards free jazz and improvisation. Trout Steel, Places I Know, and T**he Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper were all reissued last year by Paradise of Bachelors, reasserting his place in the canon of exploratory singer-songwriters of the '60s and '70s, people who found unexplored corners on folk songs and pulled on them until they bent into new shapes.
But those albums are a footnote inside the wider, weirder world of Mike Cooper. He also provides live music for silent films, paints and does collage, and releases albums of experimental, loop-based guitar music that sound like tropical-kitsch recordings from the mid-20th century drowning in soup. Fratello Mare is one such album: Cooper’s chosen instrument is a 1930s National Resophonic guitar that he has rigged with a series of effects pedals and loopers. He generates a slightly nauseous, shimmery river of sounds with it, fragments of pearly guitar notes that resemble Hawaiian slack-key guitar floating in a viscous solution filled with chattering incidental noises. On "On Passing Bamboo", there is the woody thunk of some mallet percussion, and in "A House in Bali" some pre-recorded wind chimes loop nightmarishly.
Cooper has a fascination with Pacific culture, with tropical kitsch and folk music (he is a devoted collector of Hawaiian shirts), and the chatter of birds fills the background of almost every piece here, as well as the cries of other animals, while his improvisatory guitar peals quietly. The energy coursing through these warped recordings is that of a strange, terrible dream you might have after a luau. There are field recordings scattered through the album that Cooper made himself on the islands across South East Asia and the Caribbean, and they surface in fragments, sometimes recognizable (the riiip of a motorcycle engine tooling away from us), often not.
Cooper’s music, in any of its forms, seems drunk on the intermingling of folk traditions, searching for a spot between them all that renders the strange familiar and vice versa. He is an improvisatory musician, one who generates his music in sheets, loops, and layers, and he seems to accrete these found-sound albums like a spider spins silk, or a vine grows pumpkins. They just appear, fattened and ripe, the fruits of his memories, travels, and idiosyncrasies.


The second album from the soft-rock innovator is world-weary and contemplative—the music adopts a lush, earthy palette and his voice sounds better than ever.

An Inbuilt Fault

Will Westerman can’t escape his head. Self-deluded and spiritually adrift, he’s wondering how to construct a meaningful life amid so much suffering. On his ambling, often brilliant second album, An Inbuilt Fault, the Athens, Greece-based singer-songwriter spins loping, tangled narratives of intense isolation, failed relationships, and broken power structures over quietly complex soulful folk. For an artist whose vision of pop-rock was once so bound and clean, Westerman now spreads himself wide across his music, forming a tapestry of rich textures and deep introspection. His songs become small fires on a starless night.
In 2020, Westerman released Your Hero Is Not Dead, a restrained, sophisticated debut that blended soft rock and electro-pop. His primary influences—Talk Talk, Joni Mitchell, and Arthur Russell—could be heard throughout the project, yet his approach to songwriting and production felt uniquely his own. And while Westerman continues to use electronic elements in his songs, the instrumentation on An Inbuilt Fault is earthy and plain, sparse and intricately arranged. After meeting Big Thief drummer James Krivchenia at a show in London, the two linked for extended jam sessions that eventually became the bedrock for the album. The guitar work, mostly handled by Westerman and Luke Temple, is deft and harmonic, and Krivchenia’s drumming introduces a limber physicality to Westerman’s music, a style more naturally fit for Westerman’s voice than the programmed kits he once favored. Built from these essential pieces, An Inbuilt Fault also adds woozy trombone, thin violin, and live keys to generate a unique palette of lush, contemplative sounds.
What really brings the record to life, though, is Westerman’s voice. On Your Hero Is Not Dead, his singing channeled the musky, gentle tones of Nick Drake and Arthur Russell, rarely opening up into unknown territory or mutating beyond his middle range. He now deploys his instrument in new ways: a quiver on the edge of an ascending note, a slight swoon when he loosely riffs at the end of a bridge, a silky falsetto in the upper reaches of his register. His pleading tenor anchors the closing soft-rock spectacle “Pilot Was a Dancer,” while the album’s title track swirls with spectral harmonies and raspy vocal runs.
Westerman’s consciousness must be an intoxicating and claustrophobic place, one with an ominous inner monologue and a healthy skepticism toward technology and politics. “Idol; RE-Run” is ostensibly a critique of the Capitol riots and Donald Trump’s presidency, but it hardly feels like on-the-nose commentary. When he sings, “That matador, survival/Ammunition front is all gone now/Like Mother’s love, it’s all gone now,” he appears to be psychoanalyzing the pathology behind all violent and fear-mongering men, not just Trump and his followers.
An Inbuilt Fault’s most affecting writing, though, arrives when Westerman turns inward. On “Help Didn’t Help At All,” he laments an increasing disassociation from any kind of identity. “I needed help/Help didn’t help at all/I only have myself/Now even that feels so ephemeral.” In the context of the album, lines like this evade grim navel gazing by considering that helplessness may be an inherent human trait: We want to leave our heads and enter the world of living things, but what do we do when therapy and exercise and happy hours and juice cleanses don’t help us feel better? What if we wind up feeling further from ourselves than ever before?
Despite its world-weary vibe, An Inbuilt Fault resists lapsing into nihilism or desolation. Moments of grace or catharsis emerge in brief, unexpected flashes, like on “Take,” when Westerman mutters what might be the most overtly moralizing line on the record: “Taking breaks the heart of love.” It’s not a condemnation but a reminder that there are still ways to transcend the pitfalls of everyday existence. In doing so, An Inbuilt Fault becomes a faithful companion for anyone emerging from the trenches of an existential crisis—it’ll loom on the outer edge of your worst days.


The Australian pop icon has made several decades’ worth of great disco—yet her new album is a polyester-thin fabrication that sounds as if she’d only just heard of it recently.

DISCO

Among the many perversities of 2020 is how much disco there’s been for a year without discotheques. From Róisín Murphy to Jessie Ware to Dua Lipa and Lady Gaga, musicians collectively longed for the unattainable dancefloor. Most of it is quite good, and none of it needs to advertise itself, with pay-attention ALL-CAPS, as DISCO. The idea of Kylie Minogue “going disco” is more than a little redundant: She’s made several decades’ worth of the stuff, including several modern classics. She has recorded (excellent) tracks called “Disco Down” and “Your Disco Needs You.” Kylie claimed in a recent interview that she never envisioned the album as “a concept”—dubious, since her next words were about how she imagined the title as DISCO from the start. But she built a home studio, immersed herself in deep cuts, leveled up her production skills, and engineered for the first time, all to prevent the album from becoming “a tribute record.”
Whatever the album was that she conceived, the album she recorded is just that: a polyester-thin fabrication that sounds as if she just learned of disco’s existence during quarantine. While making the album, she redirected her producers to Earth, Wind & Fire YouTubes whenever the record started sounding like “electro-pop”—i.e., like herself. The lyrics drop names like Wikipedia: Studio 54, “I Will Survive,” the Electric Slide. Kylie works against her voice, trying to studio-contort her vocal into a dancing-queen diva or multitrack herself into a gospel chorus. If Golden sounded like Kylie LARPing country music, DISCO frequently sounds like Kylie LARPing dance—which shouldn’t happen. No one better expresses the record’s essential uncoolness than Kylie herself: “Gramps is on the dance floor. It makes me picture David Brent busting out his dad moves.”
Uncool is not bad, and if anything, DISCO could stand more of it: to evoke actual disco in all its frisson and desperation, rather than the remembered-40-years-later version, full of kitsch and clip-art disco balls. The album, with a couple exceptions, has two modes: overly tasteful cruise-ship programming, and gauche rehashes. Kylie front-loads the weakest material—maybe passable in a set, but fatal in an album, where there’s no club to leave. “Magic” has a fizzy, sparky chorus, the sinuous melody of “Miss a Thing” has a little “Confide in Me” to it, and “Real Groove” pulls Kylie’s voice into rubber and sends it ricocheting, but none of the tracks go anywhere, and lose their energy less than halfway. “Monday Blues” doesn’t bring up energy so much as yank it back, coating its spangles in flop sweat. A “Celebration” remake that’s lawsuit-level blatant, it’s so studied it forgets to celebrate.
Not everything is so doomed by comparison. “Last Chance” is also an obvious homage, this time to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” but the scenario comes with its own urgency, and while Kylie isn’t quite transcendent, she fills the role well. The album’s requisite appeal-to-deejay song, “Where Does the DJ Go?” is ridiculous (where does the DJ go after last call? Home, usually), but it’s an authentic kind of ridiculous, akin to the urgent, emotionally frantic, and absolutely real crises of raining men or blowing up a building with boogie. The overclocked “Voulez-Vous” arrangement helps; it’s brittle and a little too fast, sounding like stretching the night past its limits. On “Supernova,” Kylie’s voice has more bite and life than all the above tracks combined, even before the ecstatic soprano swoops toward the end. (It’s one of the few places on the album she works with her voice, not against it.) The metallic robo-chassis vocal effects, the intergalactic metaphor collision, and the desperate, high-key lust memorably evoke ’70s space disco novelties like “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper.”
The next track, “Say Something,” is the strongest and also the least disco. The track loses its sequencer a third of the way in, and when it comes back it’s left quiet. There’s no real chorus and almost no structure at all. What’s left is a luxuriant amount of space for Kylie to spiral higher, buoyed by rocket-exhaust sighs and airy choirs and zero-irony affirmations: “Love is love,” “Can we all be as one again?” Finishing the track reportedly brought Kylie and longtime cowriter Biff Stannard to tears; they knew they were onto something. Perhaps they got caught up in the moment. Perhaps the lyrics hit a bit different in spring 2020 than fall 2019; Kylie’s said as much. Perhaps they heard the sparkling moment where Kylie stopped being DISCO and resumed being Kylie.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Through blunt lyricism and melodic delivery, the veteran rapper’s first album for Yo Gotti’s CMG label opens up about trauma and mental health.

Survivor’s Guilt

After years as one of rap’s most prolific workhorses, Sacramento’s Mozzy has entered a new era. Now aligned with Yo Gotti’s label CMG—rebranded from Cocaine Music Group to the more presentable Collective Music Group—he joins a roster of young and hungry talent that extends far beyond California. While his sing-song West Coast delivery might sound laid back compared to the drawl of Moneybagg Yo or the pure grit of EST Gee, Mozzy shares a penchant for blunt lyricism and vulnerability with Gotti’s proteges.
Survivor’s Guilt, Mozzy’s latest solo effort and first for CMG, wears the heavy baggage implied by its title like a badge of honor, as Mozzy opens up about hearts broken, wounds unhealed, and time served. As a now 35-year-old who started spitting at age 16, Mozzy is a certified veteran when it comes to spinning stories and baring his soul. He never needs to raise his voice or act out just to grab your attention; his delivery is assured and consistent but never overconfident. But despite how second nature rapping is for Mozzy, he never lets that confidence tilt into arrogance. On Survivor’s Guilt, he makes a point of acknowledging how pride has often been a stumbling block in working on his mental health.
From the opening bars of “Not the Same,” there’s a lurking sadness underneath, but it’s more clear-eyed than dejected or defeated. Rather than hiding his scars from the world, Mozzy accepts them as an inextricable part of his skin and his story. On “Real Ones,” Roddy Rich sings his bleeding heart out: “Lost a lot of real ones/Never shed tears.” In lieu of crying or talking it out, rapping is the means by which Mozzy exorcizes his demons.
The delivery on Survivor’s Guilt is frequently melodic and the production ornate, but Mozzy’s music is never quite pop, working more with tightly-packed verses and emotional storytelling than with hooks. Graceful retro touches, like the chorus of vocoders on “Wouldn’t Be Us,” give his music a classic tenor without resorting to a deliberately throwback style; soothing vocals from Blxst emphasize the traces of R&B bubbling underneath Mozzy’s lightly sung raps. Spanish guitar, glistening piano, and mournful strings fill out a luxurious sound that balances out the despair and struggle in Mozzy’s lyrics. Despite the regional differences, it’s not unfair to compare Mozzy’s melodic delivery to the hybrid singing flows of Houston rap, given his extensive work with gravelly-voiced Texan legend Trae the Truth.
Part of why Mozzy has been able to remain so blisteringly prolific is his effectiveness as a collaborator—a substantial portion of his discography are joint projects, and mixtapes with the likes of Gunplay and YG contain some of his best work. Mozzy proves an effective tag team partner with EST Gee on “Lurkin’” and 42 Dugg on “Smoke Nuffin’”, his years of experience and confident flow weaving effortlessly with the forcefulness of his younger labelmates. Collaboration allows Mozzy to slide into a more uptempo and hook-oriented register than his solo introspections, like the club-ready “In My Face,” which recruits 2 Chainz, YG, and Saweetie for a sweet slice of hyphy.
But it’s when Mozzy speaks on his own that his music is most distinct and direct—searing monologues like “Ain’t Really Real” draw the listener close as in confessional. On “Open Arms,” Mozzy shares an aching story of growing apart from a childhood friend, only to reunite years later in the prison yard. After a lifetime of holding back tears, he lets it all out in a vulnerable flood, an ocean of regrets and trauma that threatens to drown him. The first step in processing any kind of emotional pain is acceptance, and Survivor’s Guilt is an album-length exercise in recognizing and acknowledging the wounds Mozzy has been too scared to heal.