For all its unrelenting gloom, the Connecticut post-punk outfit Have a Nice Life's six-years-in-the-making second album, The Unnatural World, oozes beauty. Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place.

The Unnatural World

The most striking measurement of Have a Nice Life’s growth over the past couple years can be made by playing the new version of “Defenestration Song”—a high point of the Connecticut post-punk outfit’s second album, The Unnatural World—against the original version from 2010’s Voids cassette. Previously stringy and pale, the song is now brawny and dark. The bass line, once a bubbling throwback to Joy Division’s “Walked in Line”, has become a flood of sludge. Drums and guitar claw at each other. And the vocals seep through the sour atmosphere like a poisonous fog. An entire dimension has been added to it—and the same can be said of Have a Nice Life as a whole.
Founded by core members Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, Have a Nice Life came on strong with their 2008 debut, Deathconsciousness, then seemed to retreat in the face of an imminent breakthrough. It’s taken six years to issue a proper follow-up, but their central message hasn’t changed: Existence is bleak, gallows humor undergirds it, and sometimes wallowing in that sick paradox is the best revenge. But instead of sporting the sort of smart-ass song titles found on Deathconsciousness (“Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000”, “Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail”), The Unnatural World submerges most of the duo’s bitter irony, or at least the irony, leaving nothing but the bitter.
For all its unrelenting gloom, The Unnatural World oozes beauty. On “Burial Society”, a rolling blackout of congealed noise only barely clothes a sumptuous, lonesome vocal melody—one that’s as full of rage as it is resignation. Smothered in sorrow, “Guggenheim Wax Museum” plods and throbs in time with some cosmic, cancerous organ. Hints of shoegaze gauziness and industrial pneumatics float through “Unholy Life”, even as “Dan and Tim, Reunited by Fate” bypasses what would appear to be cheeky self-mythology in favor of dour, murky balladry. When the track’s skeletal tangle of beats and static finally disintegrates, all that’s left is hellish echo.
“Cropsey”, named after Staten Island’s eerie, mad-slasher urban legend, opens with an even more chilling sample: testimony from a young boy named Johnny, an inmate of the notoriously abusive Pennsylvania mental institution Pennhurst that was featured in the 1968 exposé Suffer the Little Children. Accordingly, the song’s spiraling synths and ghostly wails evoke stolen innocence, nerve-deadened dread, and cries for a rescue that may never come. Rather than feeling like morbid exploitation, “Crospey” slowly morphs into a goth-dub uproar that tears loose a heart of tenderness and empathy. Hope, however, is still nowhere in sight.
The album’s matched pair of drumless tracks, “Music Will Untune the Sky” and “Emptiness Will Eat the Witch”, are equal parts brooding interlude and mocking reprieve. They hover over the rest of the songs like an unspoken, fatalistic threat—an ominous horizon that can’t be escaped from. Where fellow travelers such as the Soft Moon and Cold Cave religiously exult in the darkwave tradition, Have a Nice Life use The Unnatural World to distance themselves from any kind of retroactive pull. Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. Instead it moves, and moves others with it.


With Sonic Youth drifting into an unofficial, maybe-permanent hiatus, Thurston Moore has started a louder, younger rock band featuring Samara Lubelski and members of Hush Arbors and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Their self-titled debut is the heaviest, most dissonant music Moore's put together in recent memory.

Chelsea Light Moving: Chelsea Light Moving

Chelsea Light Moving

If you've been following Thurston Moore's career over the last several years, you might have gotten the impression that the Sonic Youth singer/guitarist was beginning to mellow out. Two recent solo efforts-- Trees Outside the Academy and Demolished Thoughts-- were relatively low-wattage affairs that were anchored by acoustic guitars and strings, rather than half-stacks and bashed-up electric guitars.
Since then, Sonic Youth-- which has, for some 30 years, been the central outlet for Moore's screeching rock'n'roll id-- has drifted into an unofficial, maybe-permanent hiatus spurred by the guitarist's break-up with his wife and bandmate, Kim Gordon.
Rather than give his ears a rest, Moore, now 54, opted to start a louder, younger band. Chelsea Light Moving, named for a moving company founded by Phillip Glass that briefly employed his fellow composer, Steve Reich, is a quartet featuring guitarist Keith Wood, of Hush Arbors, and Sunburned Hand of the Man drummer John Moloney. Samara Lubelski, who's released some great, retro-leaning psych-pop solo records, plays bass.
The band's self-titled debut record is the heaviest, most dissonant music that Moore has put together in recent memory, easily out-skronking Sonic Youth's 2009 LP, The Eternal. The album opener, "Heavenmetal", is easy-going, jangling, business-as-usual, with Moore drawling out the cool, neo-hippie refrain, "Be a warrior and love life." But after that, they crank up the volume. The songs, which often stretch up to six-minutes, make frequent nods to metal and hardcore punk, genres that deeply informed Sonic Youth’s earlier records, but that the band has mostly shied away from over the last decade or so.
Moore is the principal songwriter here, but the record's best moments are its most inclusive-- the chugging meltdown that ends "Alighted" or the fuzzy free-for-all that closes "Empires of Time"-- where the guitarist becomes anonymous and melds into the din with his bandmates. The new cast of musicians also helps to inch Moore's compositions away from the sound of his old band. Sonic Youth's drummer, Steve Shelley, played tight, metronomic rhythms. Moloney's rhythms are looser and heavier, buoying some of Chelsea Light's multi-movement zone-out. When they’re hitting hard, they evoke UK blues-prog band Groundhogs plowing through the SST catalog.
The record seems like a conscious attempt for Moore to get back to serious shredding, to move away from introspection and toward the immediate thrill of pummel and screech. Sometimes, Chelsea Light goes too far, stumbling past primal and towards boneheaded. On "Lip" and a cover of Germs' "Communist Eyes", Chelsea Light Moving pays homage to early 80s hardcore and punk. These were musical movements that were defined by freaked-out 18 year-olds and listening to a 54 year-old man echo the snotty tenor of their delivery induces a sort of music-nerd vertigo. Most of the time, though, he just seems like he's trying to get out of the way so that the band can plow back into atonal churn.
Like a lot of Moore's work, the songs on Chelsea Light Moving's debut are a carefully curated mash-up of the singer’s favorite strains of American subculture-- Beat poetry (see "Burroughs"), New York poetry (see "Frank O'Hara Hit"), Texas psych-rock, no wave, hardcore, and so on. And listening to the record, you can get a feeling similar to that of leafing through a really great rock-zine. Sometimes you land on a page that clues you into the mystical, prophetic weirdos of yesteryear. Other times, you get the gross, puking cartoon.


The veteran New Zealand noise band, as it had begun to on 2008's Secret Earth, returns to something close to rock music.

Patience

It's funny that, out of 30-plus releases over 23 years, the Dead C decided to call this one Patience. Many of their other records have actually required patience-- both from the New Zealand trio and their audience. Take "Speederbot" from 2000's The Dead C, which drifts and wanders through a half-hour of stubborn noise, or "Garage" from 2007's Future Artists, 20 minutes of humming distortion and loose guitar (all good things, by the way). Patience, on the other hand, opens with the attention-grabbing "Empire". Surging steadily forward with a simple beat, churning metal/psych riffs, and sheets of whirring feedback, it evokes classic Dead C page-turners like "Helen Said This" and "Bitcher".
Come to think of it, maybe Patience refers to what the album rewards if you've been waiting for the Dead C to return the rock-rubbing style of those songs. For such followers, the trio represents a unique step sideways from rock convention. On landmarks like 1992's Harsh 70's Reality and 1995's The White House, they split the rock atom to preserve the fun parts-- momentum, guitar heft, art-punk attitude, outsider edge-- and blow up the rest. What emerged was a sound that could swing and lurch, hang together and fall apart, and rock insistently while grinding unreservedly. The logical extension of those 90s detonations was abstract noise, and the band did some great work in that realm in the 2000s. But, as it had begun to on 2008's Secret Earth, the rock side regains the upper hand throughout these four motoring tracks.
Which is not to say that you can sing along. In the Dead C dictionary, "rock" is more a translation than a definition, and besides, there aren't even any vocals here. That's a rarity-- Michael Morley's moan usually arrives somewhere along the band's far-flung journeys, but here it's eschewed in favor of creating structure and atmosphere with morphing sonics. In that sense, Patience's closest parallel is the underappreciated 1996 live album, Repent. Both albums move like storm clouds, with Morley's guitar and Bruce Russell's noise riding Robbie Yeats' primal drumming as if it were laying tracks. But this album is also open and spacious, and remarkably energetic for a band that's been at it this long-- just check out "Shaft", a five-minute blast that could pass for a teen band's uneducated, unjaded punk.
Patience closes with a track that might seem to contradict my back-to-the-rock thesis. "South" starts with seven minutes of slow chords and amorphous din, more like lost radio transmissions than music. But it eventually coalesces into a sticky beat, before descending into echoing feedback that somehow swings. In its own way, "South" rocks as solidly as the three tracks that preceded it*.* But it also serves as a nice reminder that the Dead C not only do a fine job of destroying rock, they're pretty good at sifting through the rubble, too.


The Baltimore music student’s soft-focus popcraft plays like a lost link between the hazed-out aesthetic of chillwave and the smooth precision of sophisti-pop.

Jules

The streaming revolution has been very good to precocious teenagers tumbling headfirst into music obsession. Imagine being a teen today: You don’t need a well-stocked record clerk or in-the-know older sibling to place life-changing albums in your hands. You don’t even need spare cash for a Sam Goody run. Those barriers to entry have collapsed—and so have barriers of taste. Low culture is high culture, indie is pop, and for every celebrity teenager who does not know who Van Halen is, 20 more non-famous teens just devoured Van Halen, Van Halen II, and 1984 for the first time without leaving their bedrooms.
Julien Chang is the sort of preternaturally talented pop wunderkind who benefits from this new world order: He has listened to a vast range of music, absorbed the most appealing ideas, and discarded the scraps. Chang recorded most of the songs on Jules, his first album, the summer before his senior year of high school. He was 17 and lapping up influences as varied as Gregorian chant, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, and the Afro-funk compilation Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump. “I was really getting into a different kind of music each week, and I recorded a new song each week,” the songwriter, who is now 20, told Billboard recently. The resulting album—self-produced and recorded in a basement home studio—earned him a deal with the London label Transgressive.
While nothing on Jules evokes Gregorian chant, the album’s breezy eclecticism floats between genres and influences with impressive fluidity. Opening track “Deep Green” travels from sci-fi mysticism to proggy grandeur before settling into a gentle psych-pop vocal melody. There is still room for a space-age guitar solo before the five-minute mark arrives.
If Chang has a signature sound, it’s his knack for soft-focus psychedelic popcraft. This album suggests a lost link between the hazed-out aesthetic of early-2010s chillwave—Neon Indian, Washed Out, et al.—and the smooth precision of early-’80s sophisti-pop. The retro glow of “Two Voices” and “Moving Parts,” with their muffled vocals and generous helpings of reverb, tilt towards the former pole. But Chang’s best material highlights his obvious keyboard chops (he’s a classically trained musician) and penchant for soft groove. “Memory Loss,” with its staccato-funk groove and pleasantly stoned hook (“My memory is failing me/And I can’t remember why”), is an easy highlight. And the spry and funky “Dogolouge,” which appears to be sung from the perspective of a family dog (“Take me out/And I don’t know where”), boasts a surprise sax breakdown that could have been transplanted from an Avalon outtake.
Much of the album has a transformational feel to it: Songs begin innocuously, then veer into unexpected territory, such as the key change in “Dogolouge.” The first single, “Of the Past,” seems content to coast on a supple funk groove buoyed by a vintage Microkorg from Chang’s father’s synth collection. But the song’s back half gives way to a startlingly proficient jazz piano solo that’s a kissing cousin to David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane.” Played by Jeheiel Smith, a friend from school, it is one of just two guest performances throughout the album.
Chang’s vocals are not quite as distinctive as his instrumental chops. Throughout Jules, he tends to layer his voice, or bury it under thick sweaters of reverb—a technique commonly favored by young musicians who aren’t quite accustomed to stepping up to the mic. And while his lush harmonies are occasionally quite striking (as on the slow-motion Fleet Foxes pastiche “Butterflies From Monaco”), this tendency leaves lethargic material like “Somerville Demo” feeling especially listless. On an album as rich with the spirit of teenage discovery as Jules, these are forgivable sins. Chang is 20, and his first album explores a wider stylistic terrain than plenty of bands manage in a full career.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Atlanta rapper attempts to convey the subtleties of romance on his new R&B-inspired album. It sounds as though he’s never even been on a date.

Love Streak

The central theme of Tony Shhnow’s dozen-plus mixtapes and albums is constant effort. “I want this shit more than anyone,” he declared on 2021’s “Want It,” a grindset ethos reinforced by the titles of releases like “No Holidays,” “Can’t Sleep,” Kill Streak, and Plugg Motivation. But Shhnow’s relentless exertion yields little on Love Streak, a new R&B-inspired album on which he talks about love like he skimmed an Axios article before walking into the booth.

Love Streak is supposed to showcase Shhnow’s more sensitive side through songs about romance and its complications, but he sounds as though he’s never even been on a date. For inspiration, he explained, he watched “love movies” like Poetic Justice and The Notebook and “would take bubble baths, light candles, and listen to 48 Hz music and shit like that.” That crash course in deeper feelings conveys the extent of his investment. Instead of grounding his writing in his chosen topic, Shhnow cuts and pastes romantic signifiers into non sequitur punchlines.
The resulting music is empty and often nonsensical. The disembodied women Shhnow invokes across the album amount to a word cloud from a porn site search bar: “thick,” “Spanish,” “sisters.” Though all these ladies are inexplicably horny for him, they lack personalities, jobs, and even home states. “She from up North, got an accent,” Shhnow says of one lover on “Control Issues.” Another sounds like a malfunctioning fembot on “Need,” offering a truly inhuman string of stock pleas: “She in my ear saying/‘Touch me, tease me/Feel me, please me/Free me, heal me/…Somebody save me.’”
Moving away from plugg, which softens trap bustle with whimsical 16-bit melodies seemingly ripped from a JRPG battle theme, Shhnow opts for production designed to evoke the tension and catharsis of quiet storm. He’s rapped over these kinds of arrangements before, but this time the choice of R&B is more intentional, positioned as a natural soundtrack to the workings of the heart: “Women are always listening to like R&B and watching love movies and Casablanca,” he’s observed. “I tried to go into their world so I could really understand how to speak on some of these topics.” But despite plush standouts like “Control Issues” and “On the Street,” the mood of seduction and longing feels strained. Women-led R&B groups like SWV and Kut Klose are sampled perfunctorily, their songs barely tweaked or reimagined. “Unordinary Drugs” turns Sade’s “Ordinary Love” into a bass-heavy clunker that sounds like a bungled karaoke round.
You could choose to ignore the tender conceit and think of Love Streak as “Tony Shhnow talks his shit over R&B-type beats,” but that would require his flexes to be distinct or entertaining. Though Shhnow imagines himself as a chameleon like his idols Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane, in practice, most of his lines are just dopey puns (“I smoke on this kryptonite, but she say I’m superior”) or boasts that wouldn’t be memorable even if he were rapping over his standard trap and plugg fare. “If getting money illegal, I promise/The president ain’t thinking pardoning me,” he raps on “Sometimes, Pt. 2.” What?

Typically, when rappers turn to R&B for an entire album, they use the melodrama and vulnerability of the genre to expand their songwriting. Chief Keef’s disarmingly tender Thot Breaker, Future’s gently toxic HNDRXX, and Ghostface’s effusive Ghostdini are all journeys of self-discovery that unlock new flows and personas. T-Pain’s solo debut Rappa Ternt Sanga is perhaps the pinnacle of the genre, transforming him into the stripper-loving robot casanova that he couldn’t be as part of harder-edged group Nappy Headz. Love Streak offers no such reinvention; Shhnow, ever the workman, just punches in and out. In the end, it really is a grind.


On his proper debut, the 24-year-old artist dabbles in generic singer-songwriter pastiche, flattening what made his intimate, solitary music so promising in the first place.

I Don’t Like You

Summer ’17, the 2019 project by British songwriter Christian Alexander, evoked such intense loneliness that it felt intrusive to listen to. Over lo-fi mist and gently strummed guitar, Alexander sang of pain, regret, and high school malaise in an effortlessly soulful voice. Writing, recording, and producing the music from his parents’ garage in Garstang, England, he self-released Summer ’17 under a guise of anonymity that added to its appeal. He quickly found success with “Going Thru,” which has since racked up millions of streams. Several months later, after releasing another project, Summer ’19, he caught the attention of Kevin Abstract, who tweeted that Alexander was his “favorite artist in the world.”
Cue a BROCKHAMPTON feature, a record deal with Abstract’s Video Store label, and a shift from his DIY garage setup to a professional studio. No longer bound to Garstang, nor the solitude that informed his early work, the 24-year-old artist is positioned to become an edgier Rex Orange County who can gracefully glide between hip-hop, R&B, and guitar pop. I Don’t Like You arrives under these pretenses, and it nearly collapses under the weight of its own ambition. Built from simple chords and inoffensive lyrics, it’s a collection of lackluster songs that aspires toward timelessness but winds up regurgitating a generic singer-songwriter pastiche with barely any pulse.
Working alongside BROCKHAMPTON producer and engineer Romil Hemnani, Alexander’s once grainy sound broadens into brighter colors. Opener “Waste Her Time” blends a dusty drumbeat, rich grand piano, and cavernous harmonies, yet it never lifts off the ground. It sounds good in the way that music in an advertisement can sound good. Though Alexander’s signature lo-fi haze still textures a few songs (“Head” and “Paper Bag”), the big acoustic numbers are sappy and spineless, like cast-off demos from “A-Team”-era Ed Sheeran. A tacky guitar riff leads “Small Things,” an aimless song about singing songs. “Bertie” borrows the strumming pattern from the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and the vocal cadence of an English drinking song. The layered harmonies and strings are nice touches, but the song remains hapless and one-note, ending in the same place it started.
Part of the problem with I Don’t Like You is Alexander’s voice, which hardly ever expands past his nasally middle register. When his voice does open up, his songs erupt: The bridge on “Where’s Your Head At?” throbs with desperation, a fervor almost entirely absent from the rest of the record. But then, in an instant, Alexander returns to neutral, and any emotional intrigue goes with him. On past projects, his melodies and homespun production were engaging enough to mask his vocal range, but here, under glossy studio lights, it falters with the burden of carrying a big-budget album.
The best moments are when Alexander dares to get dark. The title track revolves around a chorus that delivers one of the album’s sharpest melodies: “If you ask me what I think of us/I’d say ‘I don’t like you, never have,’” he sings, briefly flashing the alluring promise that pulsed through his early work. It’s not that Alexander needs to go emo to access his best material, but eschewing immediacy for accessibility flattens what made him a riveting talent in the first place. I Don’t Like You seeks to explore the contours of his sound and take bolder risks, but the result is an aloof and frictionless record that leaves little to look for beneath the surface.


Indulgent, arcane, and often hilarious, the Ohio noise-jazz improvisers’ new three-and-a-half-hour cassette collection is too weird to be boring.

Moth Cock: *Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights *

A fixture in the Hausu Mountain roster since the label’s 2012 founding, Ohio free-jazz duo Moth Cock bridge the gap between the noisy DIY cassette scene of the aughts and the progressive, MIDI-powered scene that emerged in its place. Their manic improvisation blends Pat Modugno’s crunchy live electronics and trumpet with Doug Gent’s saxophone, testing one surreal textural fusion after another at length. Though they’ve typically stuck to a traditional 45-minute album format in the past, dropping off a small handful of drawn-out jams per tape, their latest Hausu release allows the band to explore its maximalist impulses to the fullest.
Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights, Moth Cock’s low-fidelity answer to Autechre’s NTS Sessions, gathers its three and a half hours of material from their recent Twitch broadcasts. The physical release spans three cassettes, and even as a digital release, it’s unlikely you’ll have the time (or desire) to consume it in one sitting—a dilemma that plays to the band’s strengths. Several of the album’s 14 tracks stretch 20 minutes or longer, developing discrete atmospheres and timbral vocabularies despite emerging from the same small arsenal of instruments. Each jam is a fresh rabbit hole, and the record’s generous structure encourages listeners to leave and return at their leisure, tumbling down a different tunnel every time.
Half-hour opener “Castles Off Jersey,” a hazy drone performance accented by howling woodwinds and synth arpeggios, waxes nostalgic for the tape-warped ambient music that flourished on Blogspot around the time Moth Cock formed. “Invisible Pranks,” which stretches out at similar length, sounds like the work of a different band, assembling its suite-like structure around tortuously woven drum machine beats. Mechanical toms and snares rush into the mix at the outset, forming a singeli-like maze of rhythm. Gent’s sax emerges with a bestial wail, then scrambles to orient itself with a series of zig-zagging licks. When its phrasing steadies, Modugno raises the floodgates, deploying sampled bike horns, throbbing bass synths, and even more drums, as if attempting to trip up his partner. Despite its length and abstraction, the track remains in constant flux. Even as things devolve into what sounds like a deluge of Space Invaders sound effects halfway through, Modugno seamlessly splices some of Gent’s more melodic ideas into a final loop pedal collage.
Like chapters in a short story anthology, the individual tracks are as—if not more—rewarding when approached one at a time, in no particular order. “Mineshaft Full of Caspers” is Whipped Stream’s most thrilling isolated experience, propelled by wobbling dub rhythms and a kitchen-sink approach to sound design. The duo cycles through samples with assembly-line efficiency, presenting a dissonant guitar riff, unsettling chanting, or cartoonish congas to flesh out their funhouse soundscape. Moth Cock’s toolbox seems bottomless, and whenever things threaten to get stale, Modugno starts tinkering with the mix, pitch-shifting and mangling the entire performance. The aesthetic isn’t necessarily “accessible,” not unless you’re the type to haggle over harsh noise cassettes on Discogs, but there’s no shortage of novelty, and if one idea’s not your speed, Moth Cock will probably replace it with another before you’re tempted to skip ahead.
The shorter tracks here occasionally fall short of their ambitious neighbors. The sci-fi inspired synths on the relatively melodic “Almost Flirted” and the house-adjacent “Finn McCool” are fun detours that leave you wondering how they might have evolved with more space to unfurl. These sketches would have been high points on a C-60 cassette release, but in the context of this ambitious multi-tape album, they feel gratuitous. Moth Cock work best when they have space ahead to confidently chart their next few moves.
Whipped Stream is indulgent, arcane, and often hilarious—the mere existence of a tastefully packaged three-tape box set emblazoned with a reference to insect genitalia feels like a prank. Appropriately, it’s the first Hausu Mountain release to bear the label’s new 10th anniversary logo: an anthropomorphic cake-in-a-trophy topped with slime-green frosting. For a collective as entrenched in Tim & Eric-esque surrealism and jam-band fandom as this one, you couldn’t ask for a better birthday present.


The debut album from the young pop figure transforms her jittery, emotional miniatures into songs that feel more extroverted, more joyful, and sometimes more complete.

Heaven knows

Intimacy and distance exist in a delicate balance for PinkPantheress. Since she started posting snippets and demos to TikTok in 2020, her shy club tracks have exuded warmth and tenderness, like a friend whispering secrets in your ear on the dancefloor. Her earliest singles—like “Break It Off” and “Pain”—captured the desperate yearning and the lingering pain of young love. At the time she was a teenager studying film in London, uploading music in her spare time, and naturally she kept the public at arm's length. Her songs were light on details, heavy on suggestion, and rarely stretched longer than a couple of minutes. Just when it seems like she might be willing to open up, the song ends. She’s onto another breakbeat and another thought.
Heaven knows, her debut album, largely dispenses with this approach. Working with a cast of new collaborators—including pop industry staples like Greg Kurstin and producers with roots in the underground, like PC Music’s Danny L. Harle—she transforms her jittery, emotional miniatures into pop songs that feel more extroverted, more joyful, and sometimes more complete. It’s a natural step, following the success of “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2,” the pillowy, pastel-hued club cut with Ice Spice that vaulted up the Hot 100 earlier this year. That song’s prismatic production and charismatic guest appearance represented PinkPantheress pushing at the boundaries of her ambition—aiming bigger and broader than ever before. The track’s inclusion here is reflective of a general desire across Heaven knows to outrun the URL spaces she came from. Earlier this year, she said that she doesn’t use TikTok anymore, and that she’s uninterested in being an “internet artist.” She’s always had a desire to be pop in the most literal sense, the sort of songwriter, she told NPR, who makes music “your cousin or your mom” could relate to.
Consequently, she returns to the palette that’s worked for her so far: synths that flicker with technicolor richness, dizzily 2-stepping drum programming, and the fragile wisps of the upper range of her voice. “Feelings,” as its title suggests, digs into her tried-and-true themes: desire, anxiety, and general uncertainty. But the song—which casts a similar nocturnal glow as early ’00s R&B—feels more fully realized, with gleaming production choices and a more emphatic vocal delivery. Throughout the record, she excises any hesitance or half steps: She embraces the fluorescent confidence of newfound stardom.
PinkPantheress claims to write intuitively: Her songs were short because that’s how long she felt they needed to be. She doesn’t seem to want anyone to read into the relatively epic length of songs like “Capable of love” (three minutes and 43 seconds), but it is a notably different listening experience. Her older, miniature songs sugar-rushed through their ideas, while “Capable of love” teases out its melodies patiently, indulging tasteful repetition and turbulent dynamics that she previously wouldn’t have room for.
Heaven knows flexes her abilities as a writer, producer, and curator of guest spots (Kelela and Rema’s appearances add crackling energy to “Bury me” and “Another life,” respectively). But part of what separates her from nostalgia-pop peers like piri & tommy or Yunè Pinku was a willingness to lurk in the shadows of the club, letting quiet overtones hang heavy over the tracks. Even as she extends herself as a songwriter, and as she grows more comfortable in the spotlight, she hasn’t found a way to build on the full extent of her mystique.


Much more than mood-setters for Stranger Things, the synth masters of S U R V I V E carve out a compelling niche of their own.

RR7349

Overnight success is rarely that, but in the case of experimental synth group S U R V I V E, you’d be forgiven for assuming that they arrived fully-formed this past summer. Two of their members collaborated on the Stranger Things OST, Vol. One and Two, the soundtrack to Netflix’s zeitgeist-consuming sci-fi TV series. Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s uncanny ear for ’80s synthesizers—not to mention their proclivity for building their own from scratch—was absolutely perfect for scoring a supernatural thriller set in the Reagan Era. But as one-half of S U R V I V E’s four-person outfit (they’re joined by Adam Jones and Mark Donica, on even more synths), they now find themselves at a crossroads. With the band’s newfound success, their fans will surely be looking for the points of reference that hooked them in the first place: the film compositions of John Carpenter, Tangerine Dream, Giorgio Moroder, and even Vangelis’ less grandiose moments.
And while those influences are abundant on their new album RR7349, the challenge here, as with any band who becomes suddenly popular, is to avoid that albatross and temper those expectations with enough individuality to stay true to their core sound and identity. It's not an easy balance, but the album gets there, and once it settles into its slick groove, is unrelenting in its deconstruction of their soundtrack work.
Despite, or perhaps because of the restrictions of their instrumentation, S U R V I V E’s music has gone through a range of tones and atmospheres since their inception only seven years ago. 2012’s HD009 (all of the band's releases are simply titled after their catalog number) consists of two tracks, both exactly 22:06 minutes long, interacting like mirrored reflections of the same ambient piece of music. That year they also released Mnq026, a record that more closely resembles the structure and tone of the Stranger Things OST, while maintaining the eerie sparsity that permeated their music up to that point.
However, the slight of hand that S U R V I V E recreate across all of their records has nothing to do with ambiance, or underrated cinematic touchstones, or even their vast knowledge of their cherished instruments, which, credit where credit’s due, rightfully make up for much of the band's appeal. The most difficult part of making instrumental, non-dance electronic music for an audience beyond your typical avant-garde connoisseur is injecting it with a sense of narrative, a story, an energy that replaces vocals and conventional musical structures to give the tracks an augmented dimension. S U R V I V E are very good at this. They may be one of the best bands currently employing those skills, and RR7349 is their most succinct example yet.
As engrossing and brilliant as the Stranger Things OST is, its success relies, much like the TV series, largely on its capacity to mimic the feel of an era. There’s not a moment on it that is as stomach-lurching as “Dirt,” an early highlight of RR7349; like most of the tracks on the album, it's sensory almost to the point of overwhelmingness. The pulsating “Sorcerer” is built around a harsh, driving percussive synth line that bulldozes almost everything underneath it, and when a drum machine actually does pierce through the layers and layers of foggy keyboards, like on “Copter,” it’s so arresting it almost jolts you out of your seat.
The album closes with “Cutthroat,” its best track, a composition so deliciously creepy you almost wish it were accompanying a particularly splattery scene of mayhem. Its arpeggiated squelches swirl in an unsettling void until, little by little, deep bass and tinkering chimes begin to seep in, and suddenly, the next thing you know, you're caught under the weight of the track's increasing paranoia. Based on “Cutthroat” alone, it’s clear that S U R V I V E’s capacity for imagination and evocation goes well beyond homages to film scores of the 1980s, and much like the machines they meticulously build to create their dense soundscapes, they’ll continue to tweak and augment their sound until the unholy day their monstrous creation is completed.


Armed with passable productions and an uneven roster of guest stars, the Wu-Tang dynamo's first full-length release since 2011's Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang LP rarely smacks of anything like victory. The sound's too lousy-- and the stakes too low-- to live up to his past glories.

Unexpected Victory

The avalanche of mixtapes that accompanies every new year has positively blanketed 2012 in rap music, with seasoned veterans and hungry newcomers alike sending 2011 off with one last test of the DatPiff download limit. While Rick Ross' grandiose Rich Forever mixtape, on sheer size alone, has threatened to blot out a lot of its Q1 competition, solid efforts abound for hip-hop fans-- this has been the single best month in what seems like years. It's here, in this overcrowded field, that Wu-Tang dynamo Raekwon has unleashed Unexpected Victory, essentially his first full-length release since 2011's fine Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang LP. In any other month, Victory might eke out a few more ways to live up to its title. But for Rae, spitting criminology raps over grimy orchestral stabs and murky slivers of soul isn't exactly unexpected, and-- armed with a crop of passable productions and an uneven roster of guest stars-- rarely smacks of anything like victory.
Victory splits its time between fellow New York vets (Mobb Deep, Busta Rhymes, C.L. Smooth) and relative newbies (Fred Da Godson, Chicago's L.E.P. Bogus Boys), and holds to a fairly tight-knit stable of guest rappers and producers (Sauce Money, Scram Jones) eager to cook up a slinkier take on post-RZA muck at the Chef's behest. Flossy, almost Rossian widescreeners "Just a Toast" and "Luxury Rap", the sinewy, stretched-out soul of "Silk" and the Just Blaze-nodding "MTV Cribs" bring a little light to the proceedings, but the sound here mostly hangs out in the dank realm Rae's been favoring forever. Victory's greatest flaw is its wildly varying fidelity; listening, you'll have to get up every few minutes to work the volume knob, and even then, you may not be able to make out everything that's going on in, say, the hissy "The Brewery". Still, on a tape that could use a few more outliers, skits, practical jokes, something, this little bit of audience participation works wonders for engagement; you'd probably never hear Ceazar-n-Reason's lackluster "Brewery" verses if you didn't have to crank the song so loud to hear Raekwon at all. Couple that with the incongruous appearance of young Altrina Renee's post-Aaliyah/"E-Mail My Heart" lunger "Facetime", and you've got less mixtape, more data-dump: an anything-goes, congruity-be-damned assortment of whatever was lying around at the time.
Ever since threatening defection from the Wu following 2007's intoxicatingly odd 8 Diagrams, Raekwon's revealed himself to be a key figure in the Wu-Tang's conservative wing. His much-lauded 2009 LP was, after all, the sequel to one of the more singular LPs in rap history, and while Cuban Linx II wasn't exactly a Xerox, you could certainly see where he'd laid down the tracing paper. Last year's Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang was similar, richly detailed, in-the-pocket mafioso talk over stark, gritty strings. It's a lane Rae absolutely owns, one he's ridden pretty much since the start, and while he should be congratulated for never bending to any whims but his own, his set-jaw consistency doesn't always make for the most dazzling music.
He gets some good lines in all over Victory, of course; any Raekwon song with "Story" in the title is bound to be a good one, and both "Soldier Story" and the 9th Wonder-produced "A Pinebox Story" find his masterful narrative skills and unflinching brutality as sharp as ever, still stringing together bits of seemingly disconnected detail until a picture begins to take shape. But, when he drops a Twilight reference in his very first verse here, he seems a little lost without a plot. It can't all be smoke-filled backrooms or alleyway beatdowns, but elsewhere, Rae seems a little scattered, either resorting to stock phrases ("Riding at breakneck speed/ Gimme weed/ Gimme cheese/ I like cheddar") or finding a reference-- any reference-- that sorta works. (Raekwon, if you're wondering, is on Team Jacob.) The occasional line pops out, but it's rare that he grabs you for a whole verse that doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Victory's guest roster hits more than it misses; the elder statesmen types bring about what you'd expect to the table, though Prodigy had me rolling with "you tacky like headrest TVs." It's rising star Fred Da Godson who fares best here, though, noting on "Luxury Rap" that he's "a phenomenon [like] Travolta with the tumor" who "should rhyme with some Wallabees on." But, apart from the irrepressible Busta and a few of the more excitable youths, these guys tend to trade in the kind of cold-eyed, unexcitable confidence Rae does, which-- coupled with Rae's own coolness of demeanor and the general steeliness of these beats-- leaves one with the weird feeling that there's both a lot of Raekwon on this record and not very much Raekwon at all.
I was maybe three or four spins into Unexpected Victory before I realized something: I had no idea what exactly Rae meant to promote with its release, what gap he meant to stop by unleashing these songs into the world. I'm told Rae, Ghost, Cappadonna, and the LOX are at work on a collaborative LP called Wu-Block, and of course, there's talk of a new Wu-Tang LP by year's end. To prepare for the new Wu LP, GZA reportedly went to MIT to spend a few days studying mitochondria or something; you'll be pleased to hear there's been no talk of Raekwon shipping off to Le Cordon Bleu for a week of chef's training. Ultimately, you want Raekwon rapping; preferably, you want Raekwon rapping about the grisliest possible subjects, over crackling, cinematic RZA beats. Unexpected Victory's sound is too lousy-- and its stakes too low-- to ever possibly live up to his past glories. What's most frustrating, though, is how little Rae's adjusted to this brave new world of the mixtape-as-album; here's one of the premier album artists in hip-hop history, tossing out what amount to well-intentioned scraps without even bothering to check if the thing's mastered before it went live. Can you blame anybody for burning their first click on Rich Forever?


The LA duo’s sixth album is notably abstract and eccentric, showcasing a renewed sense of possibility.

People Helping People

No Age’s breakthrough release, Weirdo Rippers, came out 15 years ago, when Billie Eilish was five years old and people could still afford to live in Los Angeles. The compilation of early lo-fi singles shifted guitarist Randy Randall and drummer-singer Dean Spunt into indie rock’s low-watt spotlight; stories tended to focus on their deep involvement in L.A. performance art venue and community space The Smell, a hub for the city’s burgeoning bohemia. The Smell is still kicking. And so are No Age, thankfully, even though their hazy, propulsive, and blissful skate-punk hasn’t changed substantially since 2007.
Between 2008’s universally acclaimed Nouns and 2020’s Goons Be Gone, Randall and Spunt have remained committed to their foundational sound—wielding whirls of guitar effects to smear three- or four-chord punk songs—but tend to differentiate each release through mixing and tweaking. They’ll lower the levels of distortion or accentuate Spunt’s slurred, slacker vocals; they’ll cut out the drums, or anything resembling a song, entirely; they’ll thrash away or chill out. But on People Helping People, No Age’s sixth album, Randall and Spunt break from their template with music that’s more abstract and eccentric. For the first time since their early releases, they’re playing with a renewed sense of possibility.
Of all No Age’s LPs, People Helping People has the most in common with the jagged arrangements of 2013’s An Object. Yet that album was still primarily song-based, whereas People Helping People emphasizes sound and texture. It’s bookended by two ambient pieces, and the first track resembling classic No Age—the squelchy, nervy, and unexpectedly poignant “Plastic (You Want It)”—doesn’t arrive until nearly a third of the way in. Seven of the 13 cuts have no vocals; five have no drums. The most straightforward songs are an unusual hybrid of IDM and post-punk. No Age draw lots of comparisons to Hüsker Dü, but People Helping People is more like Mouse on Mars trying to make The Flowers of Romance.
The kitchen-sink sound design is likely a byproduct of the recording process. People Helping People is the first No Age album created without an outside producer, in their own studio in Randall’s garage. Some songs feel like experiments with new tools. A motorik-paced synth-drum beat is the sole backing on “Compact Flashes,” with clipped guitar scrapes and drum hits entering at random. “Interdependence” is a phased-out passage of psychedelic guitar shredding that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Six Organs of Admittance LP. The ceremonial and downright dreamy “Blueberry Barefoot,” backed by orchestral synth chords, could be a Disintegration demo, a punk church wedding, or hold music for androids.
Spanning just over half an hour, People Helping People requires a few listens before its logic begins to click, but eventually the fractured music  overlaps with their catalog, even suggesting new directions for their work to come. No Age’s music always felt like it was equally at home in a gallery or a basement show, but now they seem to be inching further toward the art world. That holds true for Spunt’s lyrics, which are still too cryptic to be sloganeering (“I don’t like the obvious, I made you my man,” he sings on the single “Tripped Out Before Scott”). The video for closing track “Andy Helping Andy,” directed by noted L.A. photographer and experimental filmmaker Kersti Jan Werdal, shares a similar sensibility, with a montage of found footage of Andy Warhol. None of these gestures are pretentious or off-putting. In fact, they’re in line with No Age’s persistent virtue: to inspire and energize through ambiguity and without resorting to cheap sentiment.


With newly complex arrangements and more freeform songwriting, the Atlanta duo ventures from its bedroom pop origins with occasionally fascinating results.

The Gaping Mouth

Lowertown writes about childhood as a recent past, like a strong gust of wind could transport them back to adolescence. It doesn’t hurt that the duo, made up of vocalist and guitarist Olivia Osby and multi-instrumentalist Avshalom Weinberg, are barely out of high school. The two bonded over The Glow Pt. 2 and Alex G during sophomore year at a private school in Atlanta, and they graduated into the uncertainty of 2020 with a self-produced album and a record deal with Dirty Hit. Their second EP on the label, The Gaping Mouth, gestures toward their bedroom pop influences but veers from the form, cutting a meandering path into adulthood.
Osby sings with a nervous lilt, cramming rushed syllables into contrastingly lolling measures as if each verse might be her last. Though her voice retains the same baseline youthfulness as on last year’s Honeycomb, Bedbug EP, it sounds gnarlier and brattier, nasally vowels elongated and protruding from her whispered phrases. Her pinched aggressiveness suits the more freeform writing, recalling Frances Quinlan’s raspy indignation as she sings about blackbirds (“those stupid little beasts”) on “Seaface,” her voice dripping with contempt.
The songwriting is a marked step above Lowertown’s previous efforts: Conspicuous Alex G imitations (the dog named “Randy” in last year’s “My Dog” might as well have been “Harvey” ) are replaced by poetic imagery and nonlinear narratives. Although Osby’s stream-of-consciousness mumbling leads to a few stoned aphorisms (“Everything is intentional if you payed attention to it,” she murmurs on “Clown Car”), there are just as many surprising gems: “You are the iris in my eye,” she sings on the title track, “The more light, the more you shrink away.” Her cryptic metaphors and close miked vocals evoke the hushed tones of an insomniac’s ramblings, sometimes literally: Producer Catherine Marks liked Osby’s 4 a.m., home-recorded vocal take for “The Gaping Mouth” so much that she used it in the final mix.
The music and lyrics on The Gaping Mouth move independently of each other, reaching the same destination at different paces. Osby sings over Weinberg’s instrumentation with a shared mood but a distinct rhythm. Phrases and musical motifs repeat, but anything resembling a chorus hardly reappears in any predictable fashion. Instead, Weinberg’s accompaniments seem more like loose guides for Osby’s words, more like a score to her slam poetry than a unified song.
Weinberg experiments more with song structure here, and his willowy compositions often leave a more lasting impression than the words. His classical training and background in jazz and math rock are evident in the nimble fingerpicking and complex rhythmic changes. On the prettiest moments, it’s tempting to want an instrumental version of these songs, their delicate melodies cast into the background even by Osby’s quiet delivery. For an album so grounded in the minutiae of teenage emotions, the plaintive accompaniment, which evokes solo guitar composition more than indie rock, feels mismatched. But when they lean into more straightforward song structures, as on closer “Sunburnt,” the duo’s chemistry comes into clearer view, Osby’s voice rising to meet the bigger sound.
Lowertown tends to catastrophize adulthood, but they lace their anxiety with caveats—they know 19 isn’t old, but it’s “old enough” to be threatened by the passage of time. That nuance sometimes comes at the expense of melody: The winding verses of The Gaping Mouth might find their way into the margins of a notebook, but they’d be a tough sell for a karaoke night or a cathartic group singalong. Still, that sense of solitude might be the point. Leaving childhood is a deeply isolating experience, even more so when lockdown and quarantine plague your last year of high school. The Gaping Mouth sounds the way that adolescence feels: self-aware but not yet self-assured.

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The K-pop group’s latest is part memoir, part fan service, and part amateur psych eval. They can still tap into something enchanting, but the glimpses of personality here are fleeting.

Map of the Soul: 7

The BTS brand has never been stronger. The seven Bangtan Boys have already parlayed their massive fanbase into a merch and media empire that includes a Mattel toy collection, a mobile game, and a soundtrack doubling as a collaborative EP. Their new album, Map of the Soul: 7, is already a huge global hit. It sold two million copies in its first two hours in South Korea and is projected to do bigger first-week numbers stateside than Justin Bieber did. The shareholders are satiated. The Army is spoken for. The K-pop superstars have emerged as the product arm of a worldwide commercial apparatus that’d make the Svengalis behind turn-of-the-millenium teen-pop salivate.
Except the members of BTS maintain that there’s still a beating heart at the core of the machine. Authenticity is part of their appeal, and they use vaguely philosophical, Jungian blueprints to make music about being true to one’s self. 7, which follows (and includes much of) the 2019 mini-album Persona, is part memoir, part fan service, part amateur psych eval. Though the music is flattened enough to appeal to just about everyone, it can still tap into something enchanting, but the glimpses of personality are fleeting.
The “seven” in the title is an obvious reference to the number of members in the group and the number of years they’ve been performing together. Fittingly, the album is dedicated to their group arc and highlighting their individual journeys within. 7 is highly self-referential, with new songs sampling old songs and alluding to others dating back to their 2013 debut. It is tasked with doing a lot—not only chronicling the group’s path to this point but also unpacking the rest of their ambitious yet hard to parse concept: an exploration of the relationship between the persona and the shadow. There is some obvious overlap between the two: the negativity we unconsciously bear and its correspondence with the masks we all wear mirrors the dichotomy of managing a public face amid the looming private pressures of being a famous K-pop star.
Because the album repurposes Persona as a five-song preface, 7 really begins with the interlude “Shadow,” performed by Suga. “One message that penetrates the album as a whole is that you must face your inner shadow, but resist becoming submerged into its depths,” he explained during the album’s seemingly endless press junket. “Shadow” is supposed to set the tone for a more intense exploration of self from the Boys, together and individually, but it turns out to be the most thoughtful moment on an album that is unnecessarily drawn-out, jumbled, and uneven.
Persona lacked the natural fluidity and chicness of their best music. Those problems aren’t exactly mitigated here, since most of those songs appear on this album too, but within this new context, they feel like a flashback before the saga continues. Many of the new songs are better about balancing Easter eggs for day-ones with new entry points for more casual listeners. J-Hope’s solo cut “Outro : Ego” flips the boom-bap sample from their first intro “2 Cool 4 Skool” into a vibrant dembow groove, and this sonic convergence of the band’s past and present traces its musical history, as he traces his personal one in the lyrics. Conversely, “Louder Than Bombs,” co-written by Troye Sivan, is moody synth-pop that represents the group they’re transforming into—one less reliant on rapping.
Unlike most of their K-pop peers, the BTS prototype was constructed specifically around rap. “I had considered putting together a hip-hop crew, not an idol group,” Big Hit CEO Bang Si-hyuk, also known as group producer Hitman Bang, told Time last year. “But when I considered the business context, I thought a K-pop idol model made more sense.” BTS rappers RM, Suga, and J-Hope were the holdover trainees from that original vision; Bang Si-hyuk refers to them as the group’s “musical pillars.” Tiger JK, of the trailblazing Korean rap group Drunken Tiger, has claimed that BTS cornerstone RM broke the stigma of idol-group MCs as mere roleplaying puppets. Rap-laden art-pop is still what they do best, but they’ve diverted their focus of late. In its attempt to placate every type of BTS fan, 7 sacrifices what’s most effective about the unit.
There are a few reminders. On the lyrical speed run “UGH!” the group’s trio of MCs place themselves among the best Korean rappers, lashing out at haters in the process, with J-Hope putting on a cartoonish display to rival a kook like Danny Brown. With trap drums and heavily Auto-Tuned vox, “Black Swan” sounds like the kind of SoundCloud rap novelty that, in an alternate reality, would land the posh crew on a No Jumper pod. And when solo, Suga and J-Hope each sound comfortable in their elements.
As on 2016’s Wings, the members of BTS separate for solo turns on 7, and those can be more illuminating than their characterless crossovers with Halsey and Sia. Jimin glides throughout the sanitized, Latin-leaning “Filter,” bringing some color to its convoluted concept and tapping into music’s hottest market. Jungkook’s “My Time” uses a strobing R&B template usually reserved for professing love to capture the overwhelming pace of his career like a nostalgic time-lapse video. But for every moment on 7 that feels revelatory, there’s another that is regressive. On the spectrum of transitional, autobiographical pop, it’s closer to Bieber’s flavorless Changes than Ariana Grande’s vibrant thank u, next.
No genre courts extramusical interest quite like K-pop. There’s a blood pact between stans and idols that complete devotion to the product may sometimes have a dehumanizing effect. As the biggest act working in the industry, it’s interesting that the members of BTS seem to have at least a surface-level desire to maintain the humanity within their cash machine. But their conception of the shadow is personified so literally (as a swallowing black mass of negativity) and so vaguely (rarely speaking to the being of any individual specifically) that it lacks pointedness.
If the most personal is indeed the most creative, then 7 could have benefitted from a bit more personality. V has been open about how “scary” it is to be stalked by fans and Suga has rapped about depression before, but that kind of candor and complication doesn’t factor much into this, their album about the dark side of the psyche and the BTS journey. They could’ve gone deeper and used this psychoanalytic framework to say more about the joys and terrors of all-consuming celebrity—about what it does to the soul. Much has been made of BTS’ autonomy as creators, but their album feels like a brand activation, the latest petition for everyone to like and subscribe.

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Jordan Lee’s latest record aims to make his beatific melodies and rich orchestrations match the gravity of his subject matter.

Mutual Benefit: Thunder Follows the Light

Thunder Follows the Light

Climate change can feel like an ambient crisis—slowly, sea levels rise, at first in micrometers and then in centimeters, and then in feet. Incrementally, summers feel hotter, and storms seem to rear their heads more often and more violently. It is this combination of inevitability and deferred disaster that makes climate change an alluring inspiration for artists: Ryuichi Sakamoto salvaged a waterlogged piano from the 2011 Great Tōhoku Earthquake to manifest the warped sounds of environmental catastrophe. ANOHNI used her 2015 single “Four Degrees” to paint a terrifying view of the future, one where dogs cry for water and fish die en masse. On Thunder Follows the Light, the latest album from Jordan Lee as Mutual Benefit, the climate crisis is a call to self-reflection. The album assumes that we’re all heading towards an apocalypse—political, environmental, or both—so we might as well be kind to one another while we’re all still here.
Interiority is nothing new for Lee. His debut LP as Mutual Benefit, 2013’s Love’s Crushing Diamond, was a striking collection of contemplative chamber folk, filled with careful musings on the transcendent quality of love. His follow-up, 2016’s Skip a Sinking Stone, plotted Lee more firmly in the folk-rock tradition of vagabond anthems and tunes about heartbreak. But behind the gentle, sloping guitars and rich orchestration, Lee quietly slipped more radical political views into his writing: the hopelessness of an impoverished mining town, the brutality of state violence—broad discontentments refracted through the prism of Lee’s personal experience.
With Thunder Follows the Light, Lee directs his focus towards more theoretical injustices, studying the works of science fiction author Octavia Butler and activist Naomi Klein to imagine a world without polar ice caps. Leading up to the new record, Lee spoke of “massive societal strain on both people and the environment” and a metaphorical “lightning before some thunderous change.” But writing from within can only go so far when the subjects at hand are, quite literally, matters of life or death. And rather than rise to the challenge, Lee seems content to sing broad platitudes. Despite his best intentions to reflect a necessary sea change in the way we treat our terrestrial home, the resulting ten tracks put forth distinctly quotidian coping mechanisms for waiting out the “thunder.”
Throughout the album, Lee carefully avoids any political stance; for Lee, there is no hardship that cannot be overcome with intimacy and affection. On album opener “Written in Lightning,” he embeds himself into the farmer’s market crowd, asking, “If love is an armor, then can we love stronger?” On “Storm Cellar Heart,” Lee romanticizes taking shelter from a storm with a lover by his side: “When you hold me, it’s so much better; it’s enough to drown out the thunder.” This doe-eyed optimism is easily digestible, and that is perhaps the biggest issue: the realities Lee purports to write about are not easy.
Though the lyrical themes may lack potency, Thunder Follows the Light highlights Lee’s knack for composing beautiful melodies. It is densely packed with bespoke orchestration, filled with glittering piano and mellow horns. Lee’s voice, as always, is lilting and gentle, so hypnotically rhythmic that it often recalls children’s lullabies. On “No Dominion,” he strikes an agreeable balance of muted, contemplative piano and somber, religious lyrics: the title is a reference to a poem by Dylan Thomas, which in turn references St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. The sentiment is heavy, arguing for the perseverance of an ineffable soul after our earthly bodies no longer occupy this earth. For a brief moment, as he sings about reciting Thomas’s morbid poem, his voice drops and flattens. It is a welcome reflection of the sobering topics at hand, and proof that Lee can write an affecting and serious ballad.
But too often, the preciousness of the album’s instrumentation seems cloying in the face of such weighty subjects. Meditations on historical ignorance like “New History” are mismatched with the cheery vocal harmonies that deliver them. A solemn commentary on rising sea levels, “Waves Breaking,” is sadly drowned out by the song’s overcrowded arrangement and muddled metaphors. For Lee, romantic and even fantastical idealism has long been a means to parse his inner demons. But when those demons become too large for charming poetics, beatific melodies and jangling orchestral compositions fail to rise to the occasion.


The core elements of Sonic Youth were still scattered all over their 1986 album, but its dark and sordid sound brilliantly captured the essence of an “underground” band coming to life.

EVOL

Sonic Youth were destroying music: In the no-budget 1989 film Weatherman ‘69, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore thumb through dollar-bin-grade vinyl records before ominously snapping them to bits. Like anything, the act was a symbol, irreverent, a simple fuck-you. In a way, it was noise: the sound of life and death at the same time, annihilating music and rendering it limitless.
This clip from Weatherman ‘69—shot and directed by the band’s SST Records comrade and eventual art world fixture Raymond Pettibon—remains a shining document of Sonic Youth’s anarchic era on that L.A. hardcore label. EVOL, the band’s sordid third LP, released in 1986, was their first of two pivotal albums for SST. Sonic Youth began to fuse with lawless West Coast punk: Minutemen and Black Flag versus sadistic cops and sun-bleached strip-mall banality. This ultimately showed how unmistakably East Village the Sonic Youth camp was. Sonic Youth was subterranean subway clangor; windowless bohemia; a fast-walking stomp on a sidewalk grate; the hallowed doors of Trash & Vaudeville; a secret. As if to assert their Downtown identity, the album opens with the somnambulant churn of “Tom Violence,” a song inspired by Television’s Tom Verlaine, which narrates a classic renegade pose. In her liner notes to the 1993 CD edition, transgressive zine writer Lisa Suckdog quoted Moore’s lyrics: “‘I left home for experience’—me, too!’”
By 1988’s Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth’s deep inquiry into pop and the avant-garde—into Madonna on the one hand and La Monte Young on the other—had cohered into a fundamental sound. Pettibon’s black-and-white cover illustration for 1990’s Goo became an eternal RayBanned shorthand for wry art-punk cool. But on EVOL, the pieces were still laid bare: bent glitter-pop here, macabre spoken-word there, gauzy instrumental noise, a persistent clatter, all with a reverby DIY iridescence that sounds buried in the ground. EVOL is “underground” as both form and aesthetic: deconstructed and raw, dim and boomy. Gordon once called the sound of Downtown “abandoned,” and that fits here, too. If Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth’s opus, EVOL was crucial research. There’s a directness that makes everything feel close. It is pure tension with little release. The entire record is a shadow.
EVOL was not just a skewering of rock’n’roll but also of America. A college syllabus could revolve around its vast allusions to Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson, The Great Gatsby, and Alfred Hitchcock. EVOL might have a cheeky Richard Kern horror-film still on the cover, it might feel like the most dissonant passages of the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star held captive and tormented in a cavernous haunted house, but the album was beyond a “faux-goth” record, as Gordon once described it. EVOL is a graveyard for 1960s peace-and-love idealism. (The title is “love” backwards.) The destructive force of no wave and hardcore was cast as a new kind of sonic conceptual art.
The spooky EVOL title was inspired by the multimedia artist Tony Oursler, who in 1984 devised a black-comedy video piece, also called “EVOL,” offering a hallucinatory critique on the construct of love. Gordon wrote about Oursler—as well as Pettibon and the artist Mike Kelley—in a 1985 Artforum essay called “American Prayers.” Her article discussed the failures of Pop art (think of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans) and how these three men more successfully upended American iconography. The ideas in “American Prayers” echo through EVOL’s doomy screech. Sonic Youth weren’t protesting American conservatism like their hardcore contemporaries, but EVOL was an affront to the American myths that fostered it. The atonal sorcery of “Marilyn Moore” was inspired by Norman Mailer’s book about Marilyn Monroe, but instead of a shiny portrait, Moore sings of how she’s “full of disorders,” with a “hammer in hand and her head to the floor.” A great photograph of Sonic Youth from this era, by SST’s Naomi Peterson, captures their negative realism: The band looks depressed and disheveled in front of a Wonder Bread truck, Gordon with her back to the camera. Sonic Youth pushed Warhol into the red.
EVOL has a seductive, uncanny ease, which makes its violent undercurrents even more frightening. It was Sonic Youth’s first record to feature new drummer/hardcore kid Steve Shelley, previously of the Crucifucks, and their atmospheric songs could newly thunder and pop. EVOL has enthralling hooks—this was around the time Gordon recorded “Addicted to Love” in a karaoke booth for The Whitey Album—albeit skewed ones, pop songs trudging uphill, carrying the weight of their own dread. Sonic Youth’s tilted cover of Kim Fowley’s cheap “Bubblegum” has only grown seamier with time. With a twisted hop, “Star Power” was inspired by the unbelievable 1970s Star magazine, which was aimed at underage groupies: “She knows how to make love to me,” Gordon sings. The equally poppy “Green Light” borrows one of The Great Gatsby’s major recurring images, a symbol of the American Dream. Sonic Youth’s racket implicitly subverts that.
It’s sinister all over. Lee Renaldo’s densely-packed monologue “In the Kingdom #19”—the very number connoting a process, the Beat-inspired endless scroll—is a tale of “death on the highway” and “blood everywhere” and “smoke and flames, alright.” It’s eerie for how the agony of the careening car crash feels like an inevitability on U.S. highways of 1986 and today; eerier still because the Minutemen’s Mike Watt appears on the track, laughing and playing bass. It was Watt’s first recording following the death of his best friend, bandmate, and forever punk hero D. Boon, in a van crash, in 1985. The track’s samples of skronking traffic may evoke the Cagean idea that music is everywhere, or color its bop-prose swarm. Moore called it “a way of trying to be celebratory about the fact that you die” and told biographer David Browne it was inspired by Boon. Per Sonic Youth lore, Moore threw lit firecrackers into the booth while Ranaldo was recording it.
Neil Young said “Expressway to Yr. Skull” was the best guitar song ever written. When Sonic Youth opened for Young on tour, he liked to stretch under the stage while they jammed it. EVOL ends with the barrage of its epic seven-minute sprawl: If noise has ever sounded more arresting, this controlled chaos could erase your memory. “We’re gonna kill the California girls [...] We’re gonna find the meaning of feeling good,” Thurston sings laconically, like Brian Wilson on bad acid, mixing classic Fugs-like New York antagonism with the nihilism and hedonism of Los Angeles. Any question of whether EVOL belongs in the pantheon of New York rock is obliterated by that grenade of a lyric. It is EVOL’s neat concluding paragraph, and no less than when Moore makes an overt reference to critic Greil Marcus’ marvel of rock’n’roll history, Mystery Train, his groundbreaking 1975 book. “Mystery train/Three-way plane/Expressway to your skull,” Moore sings, before a burst of squalling cacophony gives way to ambient noise, minimalism, and space. Rock history is collapsing onto itself, derailing, but then so is American history, American culture.
Gordon wrote in her memoir that she wanted to feel music like a crashing wave—“deliverance, the loss of myself, the capacity to be inside that music”—and EVOL’s “Shadow of a Doubt” is the sound of it cresting. It’s the highlight of EVOL: One of Gordon’s most iconic vocal performances ever, capturing the inspired, physical reach of her spacious speak-sing. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, the song is charged by all the anxiety, suspense, and noirish voyeurism his films represent. This fever dream of violence and lust is the tale of a woman in public: punk-feminist city music. It feels of a piece with EVOL’s surreal piano revery “Secret Girl”; Gordon has said she wrote its lyrics in light of how “threatening” it could be to portray yourself as a girl in rock. Both songs build tension and never resolve, never climax conventionally, never conform to a linear start-middle-end of pop hegemony, which feels so anti-rock, their own feminine kind of hardcore.
What is it that makes Kim Gordon “cool”? Her Black Flag earrings? Her flip-up shades? The fact that she made a song called “Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu”? Perhaps it is the process of becoming that exists in every note she pushes out, the sense that her stoic persona is an act of edging into the unknown, and then being vulnerable enough to let the unknown take over.
EVOL, after all, was also an evolution for Sonic Youth. SST originally pressed 5,000 copies; EVOL sold 40,000 in one year. Like most Sonic Youth albums, EVOL is packed with so many ideas, so much rigor and obsession, it is too absurd to begin to wonder what they would have done in our current era of endless information. But if EVOL is one of Sonic Youth’s more do-it-yourself records, that manifests as an inspired “do anything yourself,” as a 40-minute testament to the virtue of curiosity. For all the “NO” that Sonic Youth’s earliest iteration espoused, EVOL explodes possibility, offering “yes” after profound “yes.”


Inspired by goofy junk like the Brian Eno-composed Windows 95 sound and the melodies that kick out of a keyboard when you punch "demo," Far Side Virtual is a collection of eerily wholesome music delivered in an uncomfortably straightforward manner.

Far Side Virtual

James Ferraro's latest stares down our contemporary world of the future, invaded by iPads, overwhelmed by Skype meetings, and caught up in the unnecessary conveniences of self-serve frozen yogurt spots, with an equal sense of dread and awe. All those 1980s and 90s approximations of the future, in which we'd collectively have luxury stacked on top of luxury, actually sort of arrived, and they're totally awesome-- and really fucking creepy.
Far Side Virtual is inspired by goofy junk like the Windows 95 sound (composed by Brian Eno, it should be mentioned) and the melodies that kick out of a medium-priced keyboard when you punch the "demo" button. It's a collection of eerily wholesome sounds delivered in an uncomfortably straightforward manner. Either a whole lot of work or very little work went into this record.
This is a "sell-out" album. Not in the pejorative sense of pandering-- it's actually a much more difficult listen than his previous work-- but because it's intended to score mindless comfort and endless hours of outlet shopping. And unlike his other releases, which toyed with similar concepts of getting lost in the technological, consumerist singularity of energy drinks, action flicks, and worldwide web convenience, this one doesn't send the soundtrack through the gossamer hum of a VHS. There's no distance between the concept and the execution here. Every sound on, say, "Fro Yo and Cellular Bits"-- a triple threat of rocking drums, melting synths, and a guitar solo that wants to be Eddie Van Halen but comes closer to Stan Bush-- is clear as a bell.
Indeed, the songs here are exactly the same as what they're ostensibly parodying, which is bold and maybe even the point. Such dedication to an aesthetic means Far Side Virtual gets a little tedious: It's 16 songs that aren't all that catchy but aren't exactly ambient either. Subsumed by his concept, Ferraro is one with the buying and selling machine, which was perhaps his perverse goal all along. "Hopefully these songs were made available for ringtone," he declared in this Elle interview, "and the album will be condensed into ringtone format, so the album won't be the centerpiece, it will just dissipate into the infrastructure."
There is however, an obsessive focus on authenticity that really works towards justifying the album's goofy indulgences. Quite a few tracks feature a robotic voice speaking to you ("Sir, Richard Branson's avatar says hello"), providing a bizarre, world-building aspect to the project. And, hey, this kind of music is pretty great! There is a place for pleasant, lilting tunes made to be ignored. The propulsive MIDI symphony of "Dubai Dream Tone" and the stiff jazz on "Adventures in Green Foot Printing" are undeniable and surprisingly affecting-- like a cyborg Vince Guaraldi was placed in front of a keyboard and told to knock out some somber tunes.
The nightmarish qualities of the music begin to break through on "Dream On" and "Condo Pets", both of which possess some of the creepy, cacophonous drone of Citrac or Night Dolls With Hairspray, subtly unveiling the horrors behind music that's just way too springy and wide-eyed. You suddenly realize you're listening to 45 minutes of utilitarian music that doesn't really have a purpose. Can something be utopian and dystopian at the same time? Probably. Maybe even always.


The Polish composer’s sumptuous new album draws on Renaissance-era vocal music, contemporary theater, and the uncanny magic of Auto-Tune.

Peach Blossom

Growing up in Lublin, in the east of Poland, Piotr Kurek could never quite decide what kind of music he wanted to make. First he played drums in a garage-rock band; then he banged out gabber on his PC. At the same time, he was learning the cornamuse, a Lord of the Rings-looking double-reed instrument, and schooling himself in the work of Thomas Binkley’s medieval ensemble Studio der Frühen Music. So perhaps it stands to reason that Kurek’s music is all over the place, as he cheerfully admits. On 2011’s Heat, the Warsaw-based composer combined sampled exotica with vintage organs and electric piano, evoking humid landscapes and mid-century kitsch. He wove a double helix of Baroque counterpoint and minimalist repetition on 2012’s Edena, then turned around and paired drum-machine jams with quixotic electric guitar soloing. And on 2020’s A Sacrifice Shall Be Made / All the Wicked Scenes—based on scores written for Beijing’s Paper Tiger Theater Studio—he pivoted to doom-metal drones, Renaissance opera, and whispered incantations.
But there are common threads to almost all Kurek’s albums. He’s particularly fond of treating the voice as an instrumental texture—sampling and stacking it into intricate chords, to sumptuous and uncanny effect. On last year’s spellbinding World Speaks, he directed his focus to the anatomical sources of voice, delving into an array of nasal and guttural tones evocative of cartilage and flesh; now, on Peach Blossom, he trades laryngeal meatspace for the hyperreal polish of Auto-Tune.
Auto-Tune is more than a quarter century old, and few genres have not yet been slicked by its chrome. Yet Kurek makes its cyborg mewling sound newly strange. The album opens with a lone voice cooing sweetly to itself: first, a single, unadorned line, and then two multi-tracked parts braided in blissful harmony. In its deepest register, it sounds almost like a bowed cello, while flickering tremolo and rigidly stepped melisma evoke—not unpleasantly—the bleat of a baby goat. This brief prelude, “The Art of Swapping Hearts,” morphs seamlessly into the title track, in which the voice bursts into an a cappella constellation of bagpipe-like wheezing and humming—thick, grainy globs of tone distributed in weirdly perfect swirls, like an AI rendering of peanut butter.
Similar pitch-correction techniques play out all across this short, captivating album, complemented by sparse, pointillistic daubs of flute and marimba and, in the interconnected “Breathing” and “Ds / The Moss Beneath,” a bed of sentimental Hollywood strings. The mood is idyllic yet alien, and scattered interruptions—an acoustic chime reminiscent of a pinging iPhone high in the mix; a low voice muttering “whoa”—keep even the most syrupy passages unpredictable. The Auto-Tune spell finally breaks on the closing “Bau”: Over a melancholy, MIDI-driven chorus of stacked and arpeggiated monosyllables, Paper Tiger performer Xiangjie delivers a thrillingly ominous spoken-word monologue. He sighs and grumbles in a gravelly baritone untouched by pitch correction, part purring cat and part shredded speaker cone; the results sound like a Chinese-language Linton Kwesi Johnson fronting Meredith Monk’s ensemble.
The songs on Peach Blossom grew out Kurek’s compositions for a performance by the Münchner Kammerspiele, 某种类似于我的地洞：心室片段 Heart Chamber Fragments, once again directed by Paper Tiger’s Tian Gebing. The album’s title is a reference to a fable written 16 centuries ago by the Chinese poet Tao Yuanming, who tells the story of a fisherman who stumbles upon a hidden valley where a utopian society has flourished for centuries in seclusion. When the fisherman leaves the isolated village, he attempts to mark the path back to its hidden entrance, yet no seeker ever succeeds in finding it again. Kurek’s otherworldly album feels like a map of this lost paradise; every cryptic, crystalline note—ancient and futuristic alike—might be a coordinate pointing to a fantastical place that exists outside the familiar sweep of linear time.


Produced by Brandi Carlile, the Nashville songwriter's melancholy new album presents only a few facets of a complex artist.

Brandy Clark

Brandy Clark is one of the finest rhymers in Nashville. In addition to finding unexpected pairings of words, she can use a simple AABB to blur comedy and tragedy, or combine humor with pathos. “Crazy Women,” off her 2013 debut 12 Stories, opens with the memorable question of “Who’d’a guessed that Aqua Net/Could start a fire with a single cigarette?” Both set-up and punchline, that couplet doesn’t treat the arsonist as a joke just because she McGuyvers her revenge from household items. Instead, it reminds you that a woman wronged is a woman to be reckoned with.
There are more great examples on her fourth album, matter-of-factly titled Brandy Clark, but what’s more surprising are the few instances when her rhymes fall flat. On the swampy murder ballad “Ain’t Enough Rocks,” Clark relates the story of a woman whose abusive husband turns his attention to her younger sister. They weigh his body down, then plead ignorance with the police. “Cops blamed it on his liver, so they never drug the river,” she sings. “Those girls don’t even shiver when they’re fishing off that dock.” Perhaps in another, more animated version of the song, those lines might stick out as defiant: a third finger in the face of anyone who might well, actually… the song’s vigilantism. But in this grave and self-consciously southern gothic version—more “Janie’s Got a Gun” than “Goodbye Earl”—she delivers that clever procession of liver-river-shiver in a self-serious whisper that deflates the song’s righteous anger.
“Ain’t Enough Rocks” is both the opening track on Brandy Clark and the only third-person, character-driver song on an album full of first-person testimonials on love, sex, family, and country music. Its position as the opener is a confusing bit of sequencing, but one that gestures toward a larger problem. This is a collection that embraces melancholy to the neglect of humor, world-weariness at the expense of wit. Produced by Brandi Carlile, this self-titled album only captures a few facets of a deeply complex artist. Clark can break your heart with a turn of phrase or a stray observation, but too often she sings like she’s suppressing a sly wink. That’s exactly what she needs to sell the line on “Buried” that goes, “I’ll be an over-you-achiever.” Rather than a phrase that laughs in the face of unending heartache, it’s just a bad pun.
On the other hand, those are just sour moments, stray clunkers. Pun aside, “Buried” is impeccably penned and beautifully performed. “If you don’t want me/If you’re beyond me/If you don’t love me anymore,” Clark sings on the chorus, as the instruments fall away to leave her delicate twang hanging in the air. There’s a powerful story in the way she delivers that “if”: worry and sadness and fear in the i, resignation and acceptance in the way she cuts off that f. If there are some flaws in her diamonds, there are plenty of instances that make you realize that Clark can do things with a song that others simply cannot. Her depiction of her grandma in “She Smoked in the House” is so vivid, so precise, so lovingly observed that you mourn this woman who “saved in Folgers cans, swore store credit was a scam.” By the end of the song she’s your grandma, too.
An accomplished songwriter, Clark is also one of Nashville’s best writers about music, and she includes on every album at least one track about how music can make you feel understood, how it can reflect your life back to you. Songs become metaphors for lost lovers, hope chests for stray memories, especially on “Best Ones”: “The good songs don’t get stuck inside my head long after they’re over/They don’t sound like Lower Broadway with your head on my shoulder… but the best ones do.” Even on the merely good ones, there’s always the sense of someone living in Clark’s lyrics, making decisions about how to transform those feelings into melodies and rhymes.


The songwriter extraordinaire lets guests and producers steal his spotlight, making for a pop compilation that is interchangeably chill, spanning every genre at its absolute lowest key.

Poo Bear: Poo Bear Presents: Bearthday Music

Poo Bear Presents: Bearthday Music

A historical fact: Poo Bear wrote two of the biggest jams of the early ’00s: Usher’s “Caught Up” and 112’s “Peaches and Cream.” Even on a personal level, it’s hard not to root for Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd. After their Connecticut home was destroyed by a tornado, he and his family moved to Atlanta, where he wrote his first hit at age 14 (112’s “Anywhere”). But hitmaking doesn’t last, particularly not when you attach yourself to folks Boyd described as shady characters, including mid-’00s producer and cautionary tale Scott Storch, whose mansion Poo Bear lived in at one point. Even his PR, like documentary Poo Bear: Afraid of Forever, calls the industry “devoid of mercy.”
Thank Justin Bieber—strange as the prospect might seem—for Poo Bear’s comeback. The two started hanging out earlier this decade (“making bad decisions with a minor—smoking weed and getting into trouble,” he told  The New York Times then started hanging out writing songs, including Skrillex/Diplo collaboration “Where Are Ü Now” and “What Do You Mean.” While these hits didn’t start the tropical house trend—a few years prior, a wave of European chill like Klingande’s “Jubel” and Robin Schulz’s remix of Mr Probz’ “Waves,” was washing ashore in the States—they made them ubiquitous in shopping malls, festivals and car radios near you.
Since then, Poo Bear has been busy but has kept a relatively low profile. “I don’t want to oversaturate the market, and I want to keep this exclusivity,” he told the Times—an ultimately futile task, given the 15 tracks of micro-targeted guest features that comprise Bearthday Music, ranging from B-listers to C-listers to artists who peaked two decades ago to Bieber, exactly once. If it all seems a bit like leftovers, it’s because that’s exactly what the album is, as Boyd admitted to Rolling Stone. “So many great songs go in the place I call the music abyss: We make all these great songs, record them, and nobody hears a lot of them. I wanted to be a vehicle for putting out those records.”
Expect to see a lot more of these vehicles, which also include Sia’s This Is Acting or Charli XCX’s Pop 2. After all, there are no streaming royalties in the music abyss; better to release your scrapped material and make money off it then have the demo leak, like “Hard 2 Face Reality” did in 2014. But unlike Sia and Charli’s entries, Bearthday Music is a Poo Bear album in name and pun only; he doesn’t sing on most of the album, nor, as a topline writer, handle much of the production. And the problem with hanging your artistry on a bunch of other vocalists and producers is that you are counting on them to be good.
Instead, Bearthday Music is interchangeably chill, spanning every genre at its absolute lowest key. There’s trop-house for festival food-truck lines; hip-hop that’s so laid-back it’s sedated; way too many campfire strums like “Love Yourself”—the sort of radio filler Poo Bear said in 2017 he didn’t listen to, since “it’s not inspiring.” Producers include Skrillex, Boi-1da, and the Audibles, but the only way to tell their work apart is by reading their contracts.
Poo Bear was never a particularly showy songwriter—he tends toward “melodies simple enough for a child to sing along,” he told the Times—and his best hits rely on the likes of Usher’s star power or Jack Ü-like production pyrotechnics. Nobody provides those; everyone is debangerized. Ty Dolla $ign’s “That Shit Go” does not. Zara Larsson contributes “Either,” a song about hot, melodramatic, conflicted love that Larsson sings with all the inner turmoil of someone caught without a pencil sharpener. When anyone is memorable, it’s not in the way you’d want. Perhaps hoping to recapture her Murder Inc crossover days, Jennifer Lopez tries out triplets; it doesn’t go well. And it’s maybe not the best move, as a lyricist, to hand your opening track and single off to Jay Electronica and these #deep words: “Love and death are quite similar/How they come and go like cat burglars/Reality is kind of hard to face/Like actual facts is to flat-earthers.” (To be fair, it’s hardly the worst thing written by a Roc Nation affiliate this month.)
None of this is Poo Bear’s fault, of course, but his name is on it, and he doesn’t offset it. Listening to the album straight through is like reading the source code to a recommendation algorithm: possible, but a slog and beside the point. Which is a shame, because the most missable track in the streaming context is the last one, “Early or Late”: Poo Bear’s one track here without a guest feature and, probably not coincidentally, the one track that exudes the R&B warmth of his older hits. “I don't want to be an artist,” Boyd told Rolling Stone, but nobody else is stepping up.


It Happened in Flatbush is a flat album in every way, filled with mealy-mouthed hooks and uninspired tropes—a spiritless effort from a NYC rap group that initially seemed novel in a post-TDE scene.

The Underachievers: It Happened in Flatbush

It Happened in Flatbush

On the first verse of It Happened in Flatbush, the latest mixtape from Brooklyn-based rap group the Underachievers, Issa Gold comes for blood. “Niggas really just average, can’t sell a fucking thing/Niggas’ numbers is trash, Troy Ave would never win” he seethes, referring to an ongoing beef between Underachievers and their Pro Era associates with Troy Ave. Over cascading keys and a rattling beat that fits perfectly for a rap group co-signed by Brainfeeder, Gold and AK, the group's dual MCs, trade verses with a light-hearted yet fierce temerity, shouting out the deceased Capital Steeze of Pro Era (whom Troy Ave recently dissed) and declaring their Beast Coast collective will finish Troy off permanently.
It's an early peak. Unfortunately, it's also the most potent moment on the entire interminable run of It Happened in Flatbush, the Underachievers' first release since their 2015 album Evermore: the Art of Duality**. Originally turning heads in 2013, the group seemed novel in a post-TDE/A$AP scene: A New York duo who weren't cheesy enough to insist on taking NY hip-hop back to some idealized ‘90s golden age, or desperate enough to hop the coattails of rap's latest trend. Though initially tethered to their vague mystical allusions (calling to mind ‘90s groups like Leaders of the New School) and a heady “conscious” vibe, they quickly settled into a comfortable role that didn't play up their Brainfeeder connections, or lyrically deviate all that differently from A$AP's “party and bullshit” ethos and Pro Era's nostalgia trips.
This continues on It Happened in Flatbush, which is a flat album in every way, no pun intended. None of the beats really knock, instead dutifully bopping along as the two MCs stick to forgettable, uninspired tropes about weed, women, and New York chest-thumping. For all the multi-syllabic bars about how much they're winning, It Happened in Flatbush can be dismissed with one word: joyless. There’s no spirit in any of these songs, just repetitive verses and boasts poorly anchored by weightless, mealy-mouthed hooks. One example is the penultimate track “John Lennon,” which initially matches the intensity offered by opening track “Never Win,” but ends up lumbering along instead of taking off, offering a cumbersome bridge and no thematic resolution.
Intentionally or not, too much of the tape sounds unimaginatively inspired by TDE. Issa Gold frequently lapses to a hard syllable, ratatat flow that's pure Schoolboy Q, while AK's gruff bark brings Jay Rock to mind, but you wish either could match Ab-Soul's pathos. There are nearly no memorable lines (although “I’m like LeBron/I’m like Mussolini, Genghis Khan/a leader of the town” got stuck in my mind for all the wrong reasons) or impressionable beats. Even on “Gangland,” where Issa Gold raps, “I blow weed til I collapse, every night I say I quit/but every morning I relapse,” the line doesn’t land because there’s no emotional context to place it into, no weighty dynamic that redeems all the flat “smokin’ Cali shit” talk with something that grapples with morality a little more meaningfully outside this one passive moment.
Contrast all this with the Technicolor fun of a group like the Bay Area’s Heartbreak Gang, New York's genuinely weird Doppelgangaz, or Tacoma's obscure but rewarding ILLFIGHTYOU, whose debut 2013 mixtape picked up similar buzz. It Happened in Flatbush lacks a compelling reason to listen, especially if their vaguely intriguing mystical conscious brand is what got you into them in the first place. It's a concentrated dose of rappity-rap New York stuff—fine if your patience for it runs high, but if not, likely to make you tune out.


The culmination of a three-and-a-half-decade admiration, Steve Earle's latest is a Townes Van Zandt cover album.

Townes

Steve Earle first met Townes Van Zandt in Houston in the early 1970s, when the former was just a teenager and the latter had a couple of well-made, if not especially strong-selling,  albums full of dusty melodies, desperate blues riffs, and heartbreaking metaphors. Teacher and student moved (separately) to Nashville, where they attended guitar pulls with the likes of Guy Clark and Steve Young. With his bone-deep intuition of country's potential for clearly and unpretentiously expressing emotional pain, Van Zandt, who died in 1997, taught Earle well, and you can hear the elder's influences in later compositions songs "Goodbye", "Mercenary Song", and "Everyone's in Love with You". In turn, Earle has lionized Van Zandt, naming him a patron saint of barrooms and benders and even naming his first-born Justin Townes.
So a full album of Van Zandt covers was inevitable-- the culmination of Earle's three-and-a-half-decade admiration. In fact, it's surprising that Townes, as the album is titled, didn't arrive sooner. The concept may be genuine, but the timing seems calculated: For most of the Bush administration, Earle's career has been in a doldrums, and his last album, Washington Square Serenade, was quite possibly his worst. What should have been his ace, however, is not even a face card. Townes might have been inevitable, but it didn't have to be so dull.
Earle keeps things fairly simple, performing stripped-down arrangements with a small group of musicians who function less as a backing band and more as a bunch of friends drinking beer on the front porch. For the most part, it's just Earle alone with these songs, his gravel voice matched to Van Zandt's well-worn lyrics. This approach works well enough on "Pancho and Lefty", which here becomes a headhung lament and thankfully lacks the synths of Willie and Merle's duet. Likewise, "Colorado Girl" and "Marie" re-create the casual intimacy of a late-night guitar pull. These are, along with melancholy closer "To Live Is to Fly" and the bluegrass-stained "White Freight Liner Blues", the album's brightest spots, as if Earle were emphasizing sentiment and performative spontaneity over all else.
But what's lively on some songs is deadly on others. Earle plugs in for the bluesy "Brand New Companion," although it drags ass so much you wish he'd unplug again. "Delta Momma Blues" picks up where "White Freightliner Blues" leaves off, but either the song just doesn't support the playing or this take was not especially inspired. And can someone please steal Earle's drum machine and distorto harmonica? There's something vulgar about the way they sound on this rough treatment of "Lungs", which features Tom Morello. This version trades mordant humor ("Well, won't you lend your lungs to me?") for apocalyptic doomsaying and turns the original's modest blues rhythm into a cartoonish "When the Man Comes Around". Earle is certainly allowed to manhandle these not-quite-canonical songs, but in the rough and obvious way he mistreats them, he leaves little room for subtlety, restraint, or even taste.
As gifted as Van Zandt was, Earle has him on range. Throughout his career, he has played hardy rock, straightforward country, growling blues, rambling bluegrass, and tender folk, and he has played with the Pogues, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Del McCoury Band, Iris DeMent, and too many others to name. He's even published a collection of short stories and is working on a novel. Too bad Townes isn't as varied. There are nods toward certain styles and genres, but they come from the originals more often than from Earle himself, which makes the album sound overall a little too timid. If you're curious about Van Zandt-- and damn, you should be-- Fat Possum reissued several out-of-print albums in 2007, and pretty much any of those is a good place to start. If you're more interested in Earle, give a listen to Guitar Town or Train A Comin' or anything more than 10 years old. And if you're interested in the two of them together, track down the recently reissued Heartworn Highways collection, which features live guitar-pull performances from the 1970s. By comparison, Townes, though well intended, shows neither of these formidable artists in his best light.