Vampire Weekend keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot singer Wes Miles put their own spin on modern R&B.

LP

And to think: People considered Vampire Weekend divisive. How about a V-dub spinoff featuring their keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij (the dude who typically looks like he's wearing three keffiyehs to everyone else's one) and Wes Miles from Ra Ra Riot (the dude who looks like...well, until our recent Pitchfork TV shoot with them even we weren't sure what he looked like) making bedroom R&B? It worked for Junior Boys, right? Granted, they pulled it off with precision, style, and disarming observations about heartache. Discovery, true to their name, sound more simply wide-eyed and eager. In fact, the whole thing comes off like one in a line of acts from the Shaggs to Jonathan Richman to Grandmaster Flash to Orange Juice, artists so in love with big, communicative pop that they had to take a shot at making the stuff-- technical, financial, or God-given limitations be damned.
So sure, knees are going to jerk just from the description, albeit for questionable reasons. Because there's nothing inherently wrong with the approach here, it's just the execution that can frustrate. The idea that a few eager white kids can't play with contemporary notions of R&B is of course a load of bullshit. See: Dirty Projectors, the E Street Band, the Rolling Stones-- hell, the whole British Invasion. Cringing at some people because they appropriate the textures and sounds of modern black music is a weirdly conservative and territorial reaction that forgets that quite a bit (if not all) of the forward momentum of pop/rock music over the past five decades was due to cultural cross-pollination. Cynics could sneer that pop/rock stopped having forward momentum a few decades ago and they'd have a point, and the sort of wannabe duality that leads people to piss and moan about the mere existence of a group like Discovery is arguably part of the problem and the reason why that momentum arguably halted in the first place.
So, yeah, there is going to be a lot of contextual talk about Discovery, same as there was about VW. And this thing is even a divisive listen: The first half is weirdly awesome in places, confounding in that exciting way where someone comes along and ruptures expectations, creating something both straightforward and pleasing that's also head-scratching. Discovery's sonic strengths bring to mind VW, boosting Batmanglij's claim as the central figure in the latter's sound. The groups' music aren't directly related-- there's no highlife or soukous influence in Discovery, and there might not be a single shared instrument between the two. But the spacial relationship and the approach to sonics are similar: Batmanglij's tones in both places are rounded and warm, eschewing the harsh mid-range of many current recordings. Space and pauses are important, giving the songs a dramatic tilt even when they're primitively constructed. Simplicity is the rule with both, repetition is often key, and in each case, the bands pleasantly (too pleasantly, for some tastes) draw in a listener rather than bludgeon them.
The record kicks off with "Orange Shirt", "Osaka Train Loop", and "Can You Discover?", a quietly audacious 1-2-3 of quirky songs about playing pretend jetsetter made by a couple of quietly quirky guys playing pretend pop stars. It's like an extended dismantling of Dirty Projectors' "Stillness Is the Move" spreading the parts over three songs, creating a more straightforward facsimile than that art-obsessed project would ever dream of. Eventually they even invite Dirty Projectors' Angel Deradoorian to do that melismatic skat thing she does all over "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". "So Insane" then shows up with Miles picking up Deradoorian's stop-start vocals and, holy shit, they're kind of pulling this off.
And then, the second half of the record. There's a solid Ezra Koenig collab here but for the most part the whole thing starts to go from crisp and pulsing to sort of static and mushy. The rank amateurishness of the producers comes to the fore, and starts to sound like kids playing dress-up Justin Timberlake; less modern geek-pop, more bad "Sleng Teng"/M.I.A. goofs and a teeth-gnashing cover of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back". In essence, the first half sounds like they're making music without looking over their shoulders-- it's most assuredly their sensibilities, they're simply working with a different set of tools and aims than with their typical groups. Then the second sounds like pastiche, like tongues becoming lodged into cheeks as a substitute for having anything at all to say, musically or lyrically.
Weird thing is, most people will have less of a fence-sitting take. This could be your favorite or most-hated record of the year, and there aren't many records one could say that about. But here, the split really comes down to choices in instrumentation, i.e., favoring electronics over guitars. As I moaned in an otherwise enthusiastic review of (the still underrated!) Dark Was the Night compilation earlier this year, there are some sad filters regarding the so-called roots of sounds increasingly being applied to certain sections of the indie rock spectrum. The indie world can't live on fingerpicking and textural guitars alone, and a variety of sounds and multiculturalism in indie rock isn't the enemy here; shitty Jackson 5 covers are.


The debut EP from this reverential emo band is full of nostalgia, wonder, and autobiographical detail, like a Linklater film soundtracked by Deep Elm Records.

TX, ’98

Just about every genre that prides itself on rapid evolution will still find room for nostalgists: the electronic producer dialing up the drum machines that soundtracked their first E pill kicking in, rappers like Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator roping in Kid Capri and DJ Drama as mixtape simulacra, brazen pop songs jacking the previous decade’s beats like they’re already public domain. It’s a tougher proposition within emo’s concept of perpetual youth; by the time most artists get enough distance for a clear-eyed look at their formative years, they’ve moved onto something else. The third-wave revivalism of Flight Mode’s debut EP, TX, ’98, feels at once instantly familiar and like a total anomaly. Here’s a couple of guys pushing 40, setting aside their tasteful indie-pop projects to revisit the music that set their entire lives in motion, capturing not just a sense of place and time, but “that specific guitar tuning, those specific bands.” For exactly 16 minutes, Sjur Lyseid’s memories of being 16 in the Houston suburbs burst with wistful joy: a Linklater short film soundtracked by Deep Elm Records.
From the opening “Sixteen,” Lyseid shows a subtle but crucial commitment to the bit, writing entirely in the present tense for the guy wearing the Op Ivy T-shirt in the group’s press photo. Back then, Lyseid was drawn to bands that were not much older than himself, and whether it was local heroes like Ultramagg and Mineral or the future Midwestern canon of Four Minute Mile, Frame and Canvas, The End of the Ring Wars, and Nothing Feels Good, these artists were veritable soothsayers for introverted punk teens, showing a future beyond the college towns and suburban basement scenes that birthed them. The existential reckoning of “I don’t know anything, I don’t go to college anymore” could sound damn near aspirational.
The same fresh-faced, almost androgynous vocal tone that suited his florid indie-pop project the Little Hands of Asphalt allows Lyseid to embody his younger self naturally. Without resorting to melodrama, Flight Mode capture a sense of wonderment at these momentous and mundane scenes: the experience of watching Appleseed Cast play a basement show, the wisdom that can only be expressed through a dubbed Maxell mixtape, the nights that turned into mornings at IHOP, and the first real sense of how distance can affect relationships. In “Animals,” Lyseid sings from the perspective of a devastated teen watching a friend take off from the airport, experiencing the concept of “transatlanticism” years before it was coined.
The ebullient emo-pop of TX, ’98’s A-side guides Lyseid through the unnerving euphoria of a new world opening up for him. Seemingly on a lark, he left Norway to spend a year in the Woodlands as a foreign exchange student. (He allows himself a bit of poetic license on the brilliant “Fossil Fuel,” attributing the oil-based optimism and pervasive scent of polyester to Dallas, simply because it fit the melody better.) While listeners have taken note of the accuracy of Flight Mode’s guitar tones and rumpled production, it is possible that they wouldn’t actually have been peers with their nervier, more agitated heroes on sound alone. The jangle and cascading countermelodies of “Fossil Fuel” and “Sixteen” are reflective of the members’ collective decades in Norway’s overlapping scenes of twee, indie pop, and expansive post-emo; guitarist Anders Blom is an alumni of Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson, a sorely underappreciated revival-era act who engaged in their own form of foreign exchange by releasing an EP on the seminal Count Your Lucky Stars label in 2012.
Even if Flight Mode can’t retrofit post-hardcore roots into TX, ’98, they bypassed their 21st-century chops and studio perfectionism by recording the songs after just a few run-throughs. It was intended to replicate the atmosphere of an unearthed Deep Elm tape, but the pre-distressed sound can only be traced back as far as 2017; the trio recorded it over a weekend and sat on it for four years, perhaps until it developed a secondary patina of nostalgia. The plug-and-play approach best serves side B, where Flight Mode sound more like a slowcore band that can’t help itself from stumbling into soaring melodies; the closing “Go” can only sustain its trudge for so long, ramping up on palm-muted power chords to a harmonized hook that could have blown the entire EP wide open had it lasted more than a split second. It’s a fitting and frustrating way to end, as there’s no indication that Flight Mode have a vision for themselves beyond TX, ’98. “If I remember anything, it’s not to trust my memory,” Lyseid stated, and this is why it ends where it does: Had Flight Mode plumbed any deeper, the whole thing might have fallen apart. Instead, Lyseid’s Emo Diaries can remain forever pristine.

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After a 2018 album hailed as a return to form, the duo shifts to slick, big-tent pop pastiche—Britpop, power ballads, ’80s excess—delivered with arched brows and palpable yearning.

Loss of Life

At some point in the last decade or so, public opinion, among those who still give thought to MGMT, began quietly shifting to accommodate the notion that they are a much stranger band than their career might initially have suggested. More than just one-album wonders who never recaptured the magic of their indelible early hits, or even misunderstood tinkerers who found the spotlight in a fluke accident and quickly retreated—though both descriptions are true enough—they are artists whose work addresses the very sort of glitzy mass appeal that those early hits still command. Even “Time to Pretend,” one of the singles that earned them slots opening for Paul McCartney and soundtracking the season finale of Gossip Girl, was itself a grimly funny satire of rock stardom. After two resolutely uncommercial follow-ups, one of which has since been reclaimed as a cult classic, 2018’s synth-poppy Little Dark Age was hailed in some corners as a return to form, a dubious honor that doesn’t quite cover that album’s own idiosyncrasies. Loss of Life is unlikely to face the same sort of mistaken identity.
MGMT’s fifth album, and first for the indie label Mom+Pop after an improbably long run on Columbia, shows no signs of a tightened budget. Nor does it scan as another retreat from whatever renewed attention Little Dark Age attracted. The production is slick as can be, and the songs aren’t shy about reaching for the rafters. But this time the big-tent sounds that Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden are refracting and subverting seem calibrated in part to challenge our notions of good taste: Britpop at its most bloated and bombastic, boy-band slow jams, songs that might have soundtracked the big kiss in a 1980s action-romance flick, or those that a formerly folky songwriter of the 1970s might have recorded while struggling to navigate the era of gated reverb and fretless bass. One track, the Christine and the Queens collaboration “Dancing in Babylon,” carries the unmistakable whiff of Savage Garden. Sometimes, they play these various highly specific idioms relatively straight. More often, they warp them like funhouse mirror images: the edges are still clean and precise, but the shapes they outline are all wrong.
Resurrecting old schlock in queasy new definition is not a novel pursuit in 2024. Loss of Life distinguishes itself through its use of this soft-rock accelerationist aesthetic to bolster the thematic punch of Goldwasser and VanWyngarden’s songs, which come across as equally awed and aghast at our era’s technological splendor and the crushing dehumanization it inflicts upon all but the most fortunate. Their palette of references serves a dual function: The arrangements’ gaudy spectacle reflects the feeling of life in a wonderland of convenience, entertainment, and alienation, even as their palpable sense of yearning earnestly suggests the possibility that love could help us to transcend this well-appointed hell we’ve made. At its best, this unification of sounds and ideas also serves to heighten the experience of these songs as songs, not only on the intellectual plane, but also in that more mysterious place, closer to our hearts, where we take stock of pop music’s innumerable variables, then subject their product, through a chain of involuntary and intuitive reactions, to one more-or-less binary judgment: Is it hitting or not?
“Mother Nature” is one of several songs on Loss of Life that succeed on both fronts. The vaguely dismaying buoyancy of its acoustic guitar and flutelike synths is temperamentally suited to a lyric that beckons us to “come take a walk with me down billionaire’s row/Trying to keep our balance over zero,” delivered cheerily enough to suggest that the sight of a few mansions will have the same beneficent effect on our constitutions as that of a sunrise over a lake. Just as importantly, those instruments provide the bedrock for melodies that are strong enough to stir you even if you don’t initially clock their irony.
Loss of Life’s most satisfying appeal to the mind and the spirit at once may be the instrumental bridge of “Nothing Changes,” a six-and-a-half-minute power ballad whose outlook at first seems as nihilistic as its title would indicate. VanWyngarden’s narrator seems trapped in an endless cycle of bad habit, much as we begin to feel trapped in the song’s endless cycle of solemnly strummed chords. But just after he insists for the umpteenth time that nothing’s gonna change, everything does: the musical key, the instrumentation, the feelings it all evokes. A French horn appears, then some space-age synths playing hip jazz harmonies, and suddenly we’re not in a power ballad at all, but a delightful bit of Bacharachian lounge pop, beamed in from some groovy alternate future or past. Life gets better, the song suggests, whether the guy singing knows it or not.
“Nothing Changes” is one of four or so power ballads on Loss of Life, depending on the expansiveness of your definition. That might not seem like a lot for an album with 10 songs. But the spirit of the power ballad, its search for a tempo slow enough and a drum fill huge enough to capture the whole of the human heart, pervades this music, even when it isn’t invoked explicitly. The form’s free intermingling of sincerity and artifice seems to appeal to MGMT on a literary or filmic level, the way a particular palette of syntax or color might appeal to a novelist or director for the way they illustrate their characters’ psychological states. But we tend to value pop music, more than other mediums, based on that binary evaluation of feeling. And jamming so many long, slow songs together risks making us feel a little bored. By the time of “I Wish I Was Joking,” the penultimate song and final power ballad, you may have crossed a threshold in your willingness to appreciate the music intellectually versus feel it viscerally. Though it sports a couple of genuinely laugh-out-loud funny lyrics—the conversational frankness of “Here’s the thing about drugs” as the first line of a verse; the allusive specificity of “No one calls me the gangster of love” as an entry in the subsequent list of downsides—the tune simply isn’t robust enough to support the plodding melodrama of its arrangement, no matter how smartly it conveys the narcissistic bathos of addiction.
It is illustrative of this tension that the strongest individual tracks on Loss of Life are those that depart from strict adherence to its overarching uncanny vibe. “Nothing to Declare,” a wistful psych-folk travelogue, and “Bubblegum Dog,” a candy-coated glam rocker, could have fit in as album tracks on Congratulations or Oracular Spectacular. Though they may not add as much to the sense of Loss of Life as a unified aesthetic statement unto itself, they’re just good songs, and seem likelier than the epic “Dancing in Babylon” or “People in the Streets” to end up in fans’ regular rotation.
And then there’s the album-closing title track, which charts weird new territory not just for MGMT, but in some small sense, for pop itself. I, for one, have never heard anything quite exactly like its admixture of icy electronics, “Penny Lane” brass-band fanfares, and demented parlor-dancing pizzicato strings. At the climax—why not?—a bruisingly distorted IDM breakbeat comes like unexpected thunder, nearly drowning out the rest. It’s like hyperpop, if you combined hyperpop’s everything-now internet-age immediacy with MGMT’s long-standing curiosity about record-shop flotsam from decades prior to that young microgenre’s earliest file backups. It feels, in some oblique way, like the inevitable conclusion of all those massive drum fills and syrupy synth pads, the apocalyptic transcendence at which they’ve always been pointing, only recognized as such with the moment of its arrival. It is, in other words, the perfect thematic conclusion to an imperfect album. And more to the point, it just hits.


Typically working with dub and ambient music as Bvdub, here Van Wey ditches drums and bass for a full-on, immersive Gas-inspired experience.

Brock Van Wey: White Clouds Drift On and On

White Clouds Drift On and On

As Bvdub, Brock Van Wey pokes holes in the fabric between dub and ambient music. On his first release under his own name, White Clouds Drift On and On, he discards drums and bass entirely, producing his finest work yet in the process. The tracks are built from tapered, drenching loops of tone, massed in respiring pulses. The music beats, shivers, yawns open. The album's title, while almost comically generic, is apt: without drums, it's wonderfully unimpeded, like a huge pendulum slowly spending its energy. We would get that it's Van Wey's most personal work even if it weren't for song titles like "I Knew Happiness Once"-- the tracks are sensitively inhabited, with a human ache in every cascade.
Though Gas is Van Wey's most obvious forebearer, traces of modern minimal techno and dubstep echo in the distance. You can detect the Field on "A Gentle Hand to Hold", where an idyllic guitar loop slaloms lazily through voices as evanescent as soap bubbles, and Burial on "Too Little Too Late", with its gauzy clatter, and vocal information about rapture and pain. The album's emotional depth makes itself plain, but it has a conceptual dimension as well: It lies on a continuum of deconstruction. Dub itself is already an abstraction of something else; White Clouds is an abstraction of dub; and the bonus disc-- a series of interpretations by Stephen Hitchell, as Intrusion-- abstracts White Clouds. Hitchell breaks up Van Wey's glaciers into ice chunks floating on vast seas, sometimes gathering them back up with nets of percussion. The second disc also stretches the total play time to upwards of two and a half hours. This amplitude winds up being important.
White Clouds is immediately pleasurable for the opulence of its sounds. From the unhurriedly swooping strings of "Too Little Too Late" to the tinkling piano in an engulfing corona of drones on "A Chance to Start Over", Van Wey cultivates an unremitting sense of majesty and loneliness. But to praise ambient music for prettiness is like praising a house track because you can dance to it. Epic pace and scale are what push White Clouds over the border between pretty and awesome. The deliberate pace screws with your perception of time, and minutes melt away unnoticed. When "I Knew Happiness Once" finally begins to swirl around the drain, I'm always astonished that 16 minutes have elapsed. Van Wey lets his parts linger until they feel inert and permanent, only then introducing new elements-- often ecstatic voices, piercing what seemed an impenetrable wall of sound. He uses long forms not to antagonize or subdue, but to unleash a welter of happy-sad feeling. It's the most gracious, forthcoming ambient music I've heard this year.


Ghostface teams up with Toronto jazz-funk dons BADBADNOTGOOD for Sour Soul, his latest foray into working with a live band. It features collaborations with DOOM, Danny Brown, Tree and more.

Ghostface Killah / BADBADNOTGOOD: Sour Soul

Sour Soul

Once upon a time, the prospect of hearing Ghostface over moody live-band psychedelic soul held promise. Twelve Reasons to Die dropped less than two years ago, and Adrian Younge’s outsized 8mm splatter-flick gloom funk was fresh enough to make the record sound something like a comeback. Ghost’s storytelling had certainly been stronger in the past, but at least he was spinning his conceptual tales over murky, time-faded R&B-noir. After further collaborations with groups carrying Real Instruments, like the déjà vu of last year’s 36 Seasons, where Ghost teamed up with Brooklyn funk band the Revelations for another detail-scarce Tony Starks yarn, the novelty has worn off, and it’s easy to start asking whether Ghost still has it.
Toronto jazz-funk dons BADBADNOTGOOD are a good fit, ably replicating the kind of gritty ’70s pulp-paperback breaks Ghostface has long favored. But Sour Soul could have every musician who ever played with the J.B.’s backing him up and it still wouldn’t obscure the fact that he’s slacking on the mic. His voice is still his, and it’s difficult if not impossible for Ghostface to actually sound bored. But if you gravitated to DOOM team-up "Ray Gun" just because "Angels" was hot and still hold out hope that Swift & Changeable will see light of day, the disappointment will hit hard: "Back in black, it’s your local superhero from the hood/ Ironman Starks got the good/ Not that good good like Snoop/ I bulletproofed the coupe/ Polished up the suit and gathered the troops." He goes on to make a Matrix reference in the year 2015 and states "Ain’t a bird or a plane, it’s a ghost on the mic." A ghost of himself, maybe.
Ghostface gets outshone every time there’s a guest verse—a concentrated dose of DOOM wiseassedness on "Ray Gun"; Elzhi punchlining all over "Gunshowers"; Tree rasping with a thousand-yard stare on "Street Knowledge"; the continued lights-out rampage streak of Danny Brown on "Six Degrees"—but the feeling that he can barely carry this record on the mic goes beyond that. His flair for narrative and knack for offbeat observational details are nearly gone; pop-culture punchlines land with a thud and play more like spot-the-reference jokes than evocative analogies—"my clan is Bravehearts, you move like Paul Blart" on the title cut is probably the most egregious example.
Ghostface still knows how to balance his most well-known facets: the bombastic comic-book hero, the ruthless criminal mastermind, and the independent philosophical thinker. Ghost working through these notions in such close quarters doesn’t really feel like a personality crisis; he’s always been equally convincing as a man dispensing advice on keeping your drug distribution efforts low-key and your spiritual mind on the right path a verse or two apart. Even if the language isn’t anywhere near as transporting as when Fishscale jumped from dope tales to love songs to underwater revelations, there are at least hidden dimensions under the all-too-matter-of-fact statements.
The lackluster lines are even more of a letdown given the strength of the music. BADBADNOTGOOD’s arrangements are the most immersive yet in this three-album run of live-band Ghostface. The core trio leans towards RZA’s old Morricone-via-Stax waypoints here and there, then warps them into something more enigmatic and heated—basslines and drums creep and skulk instead of just booming, string arrangements recall the late '60s heyday of David Axelrod turning the Wall of Sound into cresting liquid waves. The instrumental version of this album is going to make a lot of SoundCloud-bound demo-tapers lose their minds trying to get their turns in.
Make no mistake: The presence of BADBADNOTGOOD and some show-stealing guest verses are reason enough to face the prospect of Ghostface in second gear. There isn’t even that much to weather, what with the whole record being all of 33 minutes, with only nine tracks actually featuring a Ghostface verse. Both the scant material and under-inspired lyricism are symptoms of the same problem: a dearth of unexpected ideas from an MC once seemingly capable of endless ones. Ghost’s done worse, but he used to be so excitingly unpredictable. Now you pretty much know what you’re going to get.


The producer and rapper pay homage to urbane Black cool with leisurely collages of neo-soul, jazz, and rap. It’s a nice vibe, but the vision wears thin.

B. Cool-Aid / Pink Siifu / Ahwlee: Leather Blvd.

Pink Siifu and producer Ahwlee named their group B. Cool Aid after brown Kool-Aid, a potion made by mixing so many flavors of the powdered beverage that the colors smear. “I was like, ‘Oh shit, that’s us,’” Siifu reflected in a Fader interview. “We mix everything together, and it’s Black too.” Brown Kool-Aid has no set recipe, but it is inevitably sweet and smooth, a standard he and Ahwlee aspire to in their fluid collages of neo-soul, rap, and jazz.

The pair are disciples of the Los Angeles beat scene, where they rubbed shoulders at Low End Theory shows and befriended each other at a Mndsgn party. They’ve remained in close orbit: Ahwlee has contributed to most of Siifu’s albums, and they run in the same underground rap circles. Inspired by hood movies, swap meets, and the Soulquarians, B. Cool Aid channel their artistic influences and overlapping networks into an homage to urbane Black cool. Their third album, Leather Blvd., is a light concept record about an imaginary thoroughfare where Black people live and shop in peace. “Leather Blvd. is the place where you can get it, even when you can’t afford it,” Awhlee told Okayplayer. “It is what America is supposed to be.”

As a mood board, the album works great. B. Cool Aid favor plush, leisurely arrangements that wind and billow like hookah smoke. Siifu does more crooning than rapping here, and his smeared melodies squiggle into odd pockets; even when he evokes Black pain, like on “Cnt Fk Around,” the vibe is decidedly relaxed, giving the record a dreamy and escapist bent. The crisp drums, vapory keys, and yawning vocal sample on “Streets Got Pages” bring out the swing in his hushed vocals. On “Cnt Go Back ( Tell Me ),” his raspy croak melts into the thick boom-bap bassline, singers Liv.e, Jimetta Rose, and V.C.R backing him as he delivers keep-your-chin-up reassurances.
B. Cool Aid reference a hearty swath of Black music—Coltrane, D’Angelo—and recruit an eclectic range of guests, including butter-smooth rhymer Ladybug Mecca of Digable Planets, genre-agnostic singer Fousheé, and acerbic backpacker Denmark Vessey. But the Black utopia theme wears thin as the album progresses. Many songs stretch past the 5-minute mark, and they often lack an identifiable concept, or even a verse or image that yokes all the voices together. ““Craxy”’!” erupts into a racing rap verse about Siifu’s sexual coming-of-age—“First time I seen porn outta nowhere thoughts coulda sworn I had porn dick”—and then fizzles into staid funk. “So Soft Salon” plays like three separate interludes: feathery vocal harmonies over background chatter, a woman’s monologue over spare piano, Siifu chanting “wassup with you.” He occasionally injects some urgency and personality into these meandering tracks, but he’s mostly content to coast along with the lethargic flow.

Pink Siifu is normally a skillful conduit of sounds and ideas. His albums ensley, Negro, and GUMBO’!, which are just as winding and feature-heavy as Leather Blvd., justify their sprawl through hairpin turns and artful contrasts. Leather Blvd. lacks the same sense of vision and proportion. It feels telling that the standout is “Brandy, Aaliyah,” one of the only songs where every performer has a clear prompt. After opening with a slowed-down flip of Brandy’s “Sittin’ Up in My Room,” the song glides through verses that channel the sample’s nostalgia: Siifu floats through memories of family and lovers, MoRuf relishes the physiques of past paramours, and Vessey rattles off wry punchlines about Brandy’s long-standing tiff with Monica. The rush of personalities recall conversations at house parties and diner booths, friends united in jabber. For a moment, the boulevard feels real.


The Melbourne punk quartet sift through the grubbiest entrails of politics and internet culture, but their perspective sounds stilted.

Braindrops

With their 2018 single “Soft Power,” Melbourne quartet Tropical Fuck Storm wrote a eulogy for a world addled and spent by toxic internet culture. The sluggish garage blues number cycled from nuclear arms to class inequality to the impending release of Top Gun 2, unable to bring anything into focus. By the time it was over, lead singer Gareth Liddiard was glitching, drowning in a sea of cultural ephemera: “Bye bye Richie, Chachi, Fonzie, Ralphy, and Joanie Cunningham,” he mumbled, finding final solace in thoughts of the Happy Days gang. It was a disturbingly visceral interrogation of the ways we distract ourselves.
But it’s hard to strike gold twice. On their sophomore record Braindrops, which arrives just a year after last year’s A Laughing Death in Meatspace, Tropical Fuck Storm are still sifting through the grubbiest entrails of politics and internet culture, but their perspective sounds stilted. Where once he came across as a kind of greasy, tweaking prophet, Liddiard is now, more often than not, an orator with nothing to say.
If anyone’s qualified to make music about all-encompassing terror, it ought to be Tropical Fuck Storm. As part of legendary art-punks the Drones, guitarist Liddiard and bassist Fiona Kitschin dissected Australia’s toxic nationalism; keyboard player and guitarist Erica Dunn leads punk trio MOD CON, whose 2018 debut seethed with anti-capitalist fury; and Lauren Hammel is the drummer of ferocious anti-colonial metal band High Tension. Liddiard and Kitschin recruited Dunn and Hammel in 2017, after deciding to retire their 20-year-old Drones project in favor of a band with more women involved. Less than a year later, they released Meatspace, a twisted polemic against asinine political discourse and self-destructive internet echo chambers.
But Braindrops isn’t animated by the same vigor and depth of thought, and Liddiard’s verbose witticisms now border on the insufferable. Lead single “The Planet of Straw Men,” ostensibly about the corruption of the Chinese and Russian governments, rambles abstractly about how states attempt to distract their citizens. It feels like tiresome galaxy-brain babble, itself an over-complicated attempt to distract from the fact that all points made are incredibly obvious. Even the satisfyingly irregular phrasing of Liddiard and Dunn’s twitchy yelps—“They’re always going for the coup de grâce!”—can’t make those words meaningful. Similarly, “The Happiest Guy Around” aims to make a point about the self-perpetuating nature of online arguments, but can’t find a greater conclusion than, “When you ever gonna learn to let things go?”
Liddiard has cited Captain Beefheart as an influence on Braindrops, and you can hear the angular, upsetting rhythms of Trout Mask Replica and Doc at the Radar Station in more upbeat tracks like “Straw Men” and “Happiest Guy Around.” But Braindrops is more interesting when it leaves this realm. Album highlight “Who’s My Eugene?”, written and sung by Dunn about the notoriously unethical psychotherapist Eugene Landy, rides a hypnotic industrial chug that eventually slides into a convulsing, fuzzed-out denouement. The record’s slow, quiet final stretch coheres in a way the rest of Braindrops fails to: The introspective “Aspirin” plods and clatters, vividly conjuring the discomfort of glimpsing an ex at the gas station.
Too often Braindrops’ commentary feels arbitrary or pro forma, but eight-minute closer “Maria 63” reconjures the album’s missing pathos. The song tells a fabricated story of Maria Orsic, a mysterious and, in Liddiard’s estimation, entirely fake Nazi witch exalted by online conspiracists. In Tropical Fuck Storm’s telling, Orsic is a trickster capable of duping even a keen-eyed Mossad agent. It’s not just a ham-fisted fake news allegory; like “Soft Power,” it’s an engrossing, haunted fable, a way to link society’s obsession with conspiracy to our basic needs for security and comfort. It’s proof that Tropical Fuck Storm are still clever when they want to be, able to channel obsessive rage into real insight. Braindrops could’ve used more like it.

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Matt Kivel's patient, close-miked folk music opens up slowly, revealing painful secrets the more time you spend listening to it.

Fires on the Plain

On the surface Matt Kivel’s tastes seem familiar enough. The Los Angeles songwriter draws from more or less the same pool of consensus folk and lo-fi influences as countless other indie acts from the last two decades, but there’s something vaguely contrarian about what he draws from them. To judge purely from his solo albums, he’s the type of guy who prefers “Night Falls on Hoboken” to “Autumn Sweater,” “Fillmore Jive” to “Silence Kit,” Mount Eerie to the Microphones, The Velvet Underground to The Velvet Underground & Nico. He finds more satisfaction in exploration than payoffs. His least favorite part of his favorite song is probably the hook.
Fires on the Plain is Kivel’s second album of 2016, and given how his records demand more time than most listeners will ever give it, he probably hasn’t done himself any favors by releasing it so soon after the last one. It’s a doozy, too, weighing in at 26 songs and 82 minutes—for those keeping score, that means Kivel’s released more than two hours of music this year, much of it so understated that it can’t help but blur together. Yet despite the similarities, Plain often plays less like a continuation of its predecessor Janus than a reaction against it, walking back that album’s comparatively tight, brightly colored compositions with Kivel’s most muted, unhurried treatments yet. There’s actually more going on this album than on any other Kivel release—more horns, more intricate guitar passages, more outside collaborators and guest voices—but because it all unfolds so leisurely over such a vast pan shot, it feels like his most minimalist work. This thing breathes.
It seems as if after three albums that barely sold, Kivel has given up on making music for anybody but himself, but Plain does feature a modest sales hook in the form of appearances from Will Oldham and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, who respectively duet with Kivel on a pair of woodsy, close-miked duets with complementary titles, “Forgiveness” and “Permanence.” That’s smart target marketing, because fans of both of those artists’ more patient work will find plenty to enjoy if they stick around for the rest of the album. It’s a sign, perhaps, of how different Kivel hears music that Plain is seriously backloaded, with most of its highlights tucked away after an unflashy, mostly uneventful opening stretch.
But what a pleasure it is when the album finally opens up. The terse guitars of “Black” deliver a shock of classic rock. “Other Shore,” Plain’s prettiest number, is a vulnerable bossa nova that’s sent off, in the spirit of “Walk on the Wild Side,” with a gust of saxophone. And then there’s “Whirlpool,” which with its dizzy, sticky riff may be the closest Kivel has ever come to writing a big-ticket indie song. His voice even rises to the occasion, too, swelling from a timid Ira Kaplan whisper to an emboldened Win Butler croon.
The Butler resemblance is strong enough that I can’t listen to that song without imagining how Arcade Fire might have played it—doubtlessly, they would have sold the shit out of it. Kivel, of course, doesn’t go that big. After spending enough time with these songs, it becomes clearer why he plays them so close. Fragments of a non-linear story emerge: a suicide, followed by grief and at least a few regretful benders. These are the kind of details you don’t shout to the world; you keep them to yourself. One of these songs is called “Light Depression,” and that title could also double as an apt genre tag for much of Fires on the Plain. Whenever the emotions threaten to become too vivid, the volume returns to a calming mummer as Kivel retreats, seeking safety in softness and quietude.


The D.C. rapper Shy Glizzy—here rebranded as Jefe—offers  another tough-minded collection of street rap anthems, addressed to people struggling through poverty and the criminal-justice system.

The World Is Yours

As Shy Glizzy, D.C. native Marquis King has become the face of the rap crew Glizzy Gang, and one of the most consistent artists in the nation’s capital. He raps in a needling whine about gunfights and authority and the spaces where they intersect: neighborhood turf wars, exchanges with law enforcement, being strapped as a symbol of manhood, and using gunmanship as a means to gain control over one’s own life, to overcome poverty and unbalanced systems. Last year, he released his most compelling work yet, Young Jefe 2, a blueprint for his particular brand of confessional tough talk, half chest-beating bravado, half emotional plea for understanding (“I promise you that you gon’ feel my pain bitch”). The tape was the most comfortable he’s ever been, proudly taking up the mantle of local street benefactor and willing brand ambassador for his crew. Perhaps sensing a shift, King has dropped the Shy Glizzy moniker in favor of the mixtape persona: Jefe, which is Spanish for ‘boss.’ “I’m just rebranding myself. Reinventing on a whole higher level,” he told the Fader. “I earned the title Jefe ... From the get go I’ve been putting on for the city.”
His first offering under the new name is an EP called The World Is Yours. The eight-track project continues to explore the same ongoing themes in King’s music—using success as a window through which to reflect on humbler beginnings. Its message is encapsulated in the hook on “Love Me”: “How the fuck could you hate me when I came up from nothing?/I just want you to love me.”
This isn’t King at the peak of his powers. When he’s at his best, he can string several devastating phrases together to create complex models of what he’s seeing and feeling. Here, he mostly seems content to roll leisurely through verses, as on “Over the Hills.” There’s no sense of urgency, and, outside of declaring his city a war zone, the stakes are generally lower for Jefe than they are in most Shy Glizzy songs. But that doesn’t mean the songs are without consequence. On “Congratulations,” he assesses the envy of those close to his success. The cautionary tale “Give It Up” is an instruction manual for young street soldiers, ending with an inspirational testimonial, tracing a bleak journey from juvenile corrections to six-figure tours: “14 years old, I went to juvie for an O/16 years old, I stuck my dick in my PO/18 years old, I was whipping up the dope/ By 20 years old, I was getting 20 for a show.” The World Is Yours seems as much a personal memo as it is a Nas-ian aphorism.
For much of the EP’s running time, Jefe provides glimpses of what can, at times, make him a truly special rapper—as has been exhibited in the past on songs like “Funeral” and “Awwsome.” He’ll go through an entire verse only using one scheme (as he does on “Congratulations”), but other times he’ll take big cuts at syllables, at one point rhyming “fuck,” “New York,” and “Marshall Faulk.” Over one of the most vibrant Zaytoven beats in years, on “One,” he mixes off-balance slant rhymes with brief moments of criminal introspection. It’s a reminder of what he’s capable of. The World Is Yours is a fine introduction to Jefe. But it’s still worth getting to know Shy Glizzy first.


The electro-disco lead single to Gliss Riffer suggested that Dan Deacon's first LP in three years might bring hooks and lighthearted mania back to the fore, but the album mostly just feels like a pared-back, intuitive way of working. As on all of Deacon's albums, it's the moments where he seems to be discovering something new that prove the most exciting.

Gliss Riffer

It's been almost a decade since Baltimore singer/songwriter and electroacoustic composer Dan Deacon made his breakthrough with Spiderman of the Rings, but it feels like longer. The album recalls a time when flamboyance and uncouth goofiness was close to the rule in indie rock, and the possibility that Sade would be a frequent comparison point for new, buzzworthy artists felt remote. On subsequent releases, Deacon has put lustrous new coats of paint on the noisy and ambitious electro-pop sound he prototyped on Spiderman (and to a lesser extent, his earlier, more overtly experimental Carpark releases), shifting inspiration points and performing forces, but not his fundamental aesthetic.
That aesthetic unites elements of process music and primitively catchy pop, blending the two until you're not sure which is the main article. On 2009's hyper-complex, percussion-ensemble-driven Bromst and 2012's lush, electro-orchestral America, "songs" are less of a focal point: Deacon's heavily treated vocal melodies are simply kinetic layers in larger pieces. His recent return to a man-and-electronics approach—with a concise electro-disco lead single to match ("Feel the Lightning")—has suggested that his first LP in three years, Gliss Riffer, might bring hooks and lighthearted mania back to the fore.
However, this tidy narrative doesn't really fit. First of all, Gliss Riffer boasts few show-stopping choruses. Reverb and chorus effects dampen and blend his synth and 808 patterns, creating the illusion of organic space and gradation where, once, all was coarse, brittle and vacuum-sealed. More than a return-to-form album, Gliss Riffer simply feels like an exploration of a more pared-back, intuitive way of working.
One of the things which has always made Deacon's music divisive is the difficulty of knowing what, exactly, he's "going for." Crude summaries vary—is this rave music for the DIY-house-show set? Avant-garde electronica? Performance art? Minimalism? Maximalism? The confusion is a testament to how over-stimulating his music can be. It's hard to decide where to focus when listening. At his finest, most expansive moments, Deacon renders this dilemma beside the point, but on Gliss Riffer, it's hard to avoid it; the battle between song and arrangement is staged in too small of an arena. Sometimes both seem to be vying for the spotlight without either one seeming totally worthy, as in the robotic new-wave of "Mind on Fire" or the facile electro-punk of "Sheathed Wings".
As on any of Deacon's albums, it's the moments where he seems to be on the cusp of discovering something new that prove the most exciting. "Take It to the Max" sounds like Deacon coming out on the other side of Oneohtrix Point Never and PC Music. Opening like Steve Reich's Drumming: Windows 95 edition, the amazingly detailed and constantly mutating piece builds powerfully, its second half bolstered by synth-horn chorales, high, expressive woodwinds and glottal vocal noises. The Tangerine Dream synths interwoven through the decidedly funky "Meme Generator" create an unusually mellow atmosphere for Deacon, and "Steely Blues" is bookended by sections of glacial, arrhythmic synth ambience. He's not reinventing any wheel, but these road tests of new textures are enjoyable and occasionally exceptional.
By Deacon's own account, the phrase "gliss riffer" refers to his penchant for manipulating loops of layered glissando (rapid ascending and/or descending streams of sequential notes). The title functions as a self-effacing joke, but also evokes the album's straightforwardness of purpose: "This is what I do, I know what I do, and I have fun doing it." A more cynical interpretation would be "Look, more of the same." The latter characterization would be unfair, but by not making a point of challenging his instincts, Deacon nonetheless fails to climb to new heights.


On their second album as a duo, Detroit techno titan Robert Hood and his daughter Lyric sharpen their focus on the fusion of house music and gospel.

Supernatural

Robert Hood began his career with Underground Resistance, a Detroit collective known for its bold, anti-corporate vision of techno as a musical form by and for the black youth of a city left behind by a racist nation. Hood left Underground Resistance in 1992; today he lives in Alabama and works as an ordained minister when he is not touring or recording. But that core belief in techno’s revelatory potential resonates throughout his catalog. Hood pioneered minimal techno with early releases like 1994’s Minimal Nation, but his work as Floorplan sings with a joyous maximalism. He has made records under the alias since 1996, but over the past decade, it has become his main gig. Supernatural is his third album under the alias since 2013, and his second as a duo alongside his daughter Lyric; it is also the fullest expression to date of the spiritual dimension of his music. It is clear that his activities in the DJ booth and the pulpit share the same goal: the search beyond the self.
The core of Hood’s music is still techno: Opening tracks “There Was a Time” and “Dance Floor” are built on thunderous beats. As the album continues, the surface becomes more soulful; “Oasis” and “Brothers + Sisters” are rife with orchestral disco swells and reverberating piano riffs. The Floorplan sound is much warmer than Hood’s solo work, a shade more house than techno, and Supernatural contains the duo’s most enthusiastic work yet. “Song Like This” feels like genuine gospel music, not just a dance remix—a veritable tabernacle choir of joyous voices, organ licks, and cymbals crashing. For the less spiritually inclined, the album still functions as a full-bodied dance workout. Its most intense tracks, like “I Try,” are more jock jam than Joubert Singers, complete with literal whistles. The Hoods wind the record down with a more contemplative cut, “Generations From Now,” turning the album’s sights away from heaven and back onto the bodies of the true believers left in the last moments of early-morning light.
Previous Floorplan tracks like “We Magnify His Name” chopped up recordings of sermons and choirs, as does this album. But on Supernatural the duo goes beyond samples and delivers a full-fledged vocal gospel number: an uptempo techno take on the traditional hymn  “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” featuring Carol Otis. Covered by everyone from Marvin Gaye to Jessica Simpson, this Sunday-morning standard is a perfect expression of the ecstasy Floorplan find in dance: “Why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows come?” sings Otis over pounding organ stabs and flashing open hi-hats. “I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free.”
Kanye West’s recent embrace of gospel music has been linked to his mystifying rightward turn; Jesus Is King is laced with elements of Joel Osteen’s prosperity theology, and the admiration is apparently mutual. By comparison, the humility and sincerity of the Hoods’ message makes Kanye look like The Righteous Gemstones’ Uncle Baby Billy, a charlatan shilling shopping-mall snake oil. There’s room in the pews for everyone in the church of techno. Supernatural captures a moment of epiphany that isn’t confined to Sunday service: that holy time when the ravers go home and the churchgoers come out, side by side like lion and lamb, reveling in the glow of worship, doing the same dance for different gods.

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The debut EP from the Sudan-born, Twin Cities-based singer, poet, and activist reveals an artist with a warm, sophisticated sound and captivating presence on the mic.

Nūr EP

Dua Saleh’s first language was Arabic, but they’ve been speaking English for so long that it’s begun to slip away. That detail is, simply, true; it’s also the kind of character note—specific and a little bit sad—that might pop up in one of their songs, which tend to deal with issues of social posture, identity, and heritage in short, impressionistic bursts. Their debut EP, Nūr—that’s “light” in Arabic, as well as a common gender-neutral name—is a superb show of control, lean except when it decides to lash out.
Saleh was born in Kassala, on the Eastern edge of Sudan, but moved to the Upper Midwest after a brief stop at a refugee camp in Eritrea. They’ve established themselves as an artist in the Twin Cities across a variety of disciplines: singer, activist, and poet. That sensibility is clear at times in their music, with its economy and densely-packed details, but what sets Saleh apart from similarly lyric-minded writers is that they resist the urge to make all the other elements of a song subservient to the writing. Nūr has stretches with compelling vocals that do not form words at all, and ones where the vocals are mixed so that the words are nearly masked. Saleh’s voice is powerful enough to contort into nearly any shape without losing its distinctive character.
None of which to say that Nūr is without lyrical flourishes. On the opening song, “Sugar Mama,” Saleh describes a doting, curious neighbor with a rich father and a “pussy melting like a glacier.” The power in the story snaps back and forth—the neighbor rambles about charity work and eats lobster in a romper with gold accent—and ends with the kind of climax that recalls that maxim: everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power. What makes scenes like these tick is that Saleh does not render them academically, and does not hold them at arm’s length—they’re experiential, full of rising heart rates and dilating pupils.
Nūr’s sound is sophisticated, warm but industrial. It’s helmed by the Twin Cities-based Psymun, who produces four of the EP’s five songs. (“Sugar Mama” was self-produced on Saleh’s cell phone.) Psymun’s contributed beats to albums by Future and Young Thug, and has worked with the Weeknd, but excels on smaller, more idiosyncratic stages, like as part of the St. Paul supergroup thestand4rd. He’s the kind of producer whose beats—the airy, sweeping ones or the ones that are small and tightly wound—feel as if they’re being constructed live in front of you on a drum machine, and are liable to spiral out of control at any moment. They never do. There are times on Nūr when Saleh elicits the same effect with their voice, like the way it’s doubled with slightly divergent takes on “Albany.”
Saleh’s live performances, even with the barest production design, are uncommonly intense. This effect comes partly from the spatial—small spaces meeting a massive voice—but more importantly from the way they stalk around the stage, exploding from time to time like a cobra uncoiling. This careful plotting is mirrored on Nūr, specifically on the way “Warm Pants” returns to center after unfurling into the biggest, boldest arrangement on the EP, or the way “Sugar Mama,” with its slowly crescendoing vocal performance, keeps circling back around its beat’s metronomic spine. The journey back is especially dramatic on “Albany,” which unspools in its middle section into a collage that includes minor-key piano and found nature sounds, as if you’re on a bus barreling deep into the woods as your phone is dying. By the song’s end, you’re being lulled to sleep by a lone drum pattern, everything back in equilibrium. It’s disorienting but tactile, confident in its forward motion even when everything else is murky.


This set of cozy, stripped-back rehearsal recordings, later broadcast in a 1997 special, finds Bowie in a valedictory mood.

ChangesNowBowie

David Bowie’s first greatest-hits set was called Changesonebowie, and the title has proven irresistible to his compilers: That collection was followed by 1981’s Changestwobowie, 1990’s Changesbowie, and 1997’s radio special ChangesNowBowie. Interspersing clips of a long interview with Mary Anne Hobbs with exclusive performances recorded during November 1996 rehearsals for his 50th-birthday concert at Madison Square Garden, ChangesNowBowie originally aired on BBC Radio 1 the week of Bowie’s birthday. Bowie was feeling valedictory at the time, a mood that came through in both the musing interviews and the laid-back performances, backed only by guitarist Reeves Gabrels, bassist/vocalist Gail Ann Dorsey, and keyboardist Mark Plati.
The Hobbs-hosted show circulated intact on bootlegs for years, and the official LP was initially slated as a Record Store Day 2020 exclusive. Thanks to COVID-19, the physical release was pushed back, but the digital version is here, and the sanctioned release differs from the fans-only versions in substantial ways. All the interview segments with Hobbes have been excised, as have the birthday wishes from his peers and acolytes, leaving a tight 32 minutes of music—nine songs that appear in a different order than they did in the broadcast.
In strict terms of listenability, all the edits are logical. Radio requires a different rhythm than an album, and the BBC Radio 1 broadcast sometimes bogged down in discussions, albeit many of them fascinating. The show hit its emotional peak with a greeting from Scott Walker, who thanked Bowie “for your generosity in spirit when it comes to other artists. I’ve been the beneficiary on more than one occasion, let me tell you,” a sentiment that left Bowie speechless and teary. It was the one time he let his guard slip in the interview. Throughout the rest of the broadcast, he was garrulous and charming, sounding utterly comfortable embracing his role as an elder statesman of rock.
The live performances have a similar spirit, sounding so relaxed they’re almost cozy. Tellingly, Bowie’s setlist avoids songs from both the dark, roiling Brian Eno reunion 1. Outside and the drum’n’bass-besotted Earthling, which would appear a month after his 50th birthday. These two records found Bowie wrestling with contemporary music, but apart from a version of “The Man Who Sold the World”—a nod to Nirvana popularizing the song a few years earlier on their MTV Unplugged—the modern world barely can be discerned on ChangesNowBowie.
Although Bowie conspicuously avoids the big hits, the songs are largely drawn from the early 1970s—even the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat,” heard here in a stomping version, was a staple in concerts by the Spiders From Mars—leaving just the Lodger deep cut
“Repetition” and Tin Machine song “Shopping for Girls” as the album’s surprises. Next to warhorses like “Lady Stardust,” “Aladdin Sane,” and “Andy Warhol,” these are comparative novelties and they catch the ear: “Repetition” receives a lanky acoustic rearrangement, and without the heavy thump of the Hunt Brothers, “Shopping for Girls” turns sprightly and lithe.
Save these two selections and the VU cover, ChangesNowBowie is built for comfort, not speed. Bowie understood that the audience for this BBC Radio 1 show was upscale and settled, perhaps nurturing a slight nostalgic bent, and he adjusted his performance accordingly, giving the people something close to what they want: old tunes—but not oldies—performed with skill and a burnished grace. Looking back, the live-in-the-studio set seems slightly out of step with Bowie’s adventurous 1990s, feeling more of a piece with the rock classicism he’d play at the dawn of the 2000s. It also feels slight. Unlike other Bowie live albums, this doesn’t document a specific tour or phase. It’s just a quiet, pleasant footnote to a busy era.

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On his hooky, appealing debut album, the young Londoner Oscar Scheller makes blown-out indie jams with magnetic melodies and an obvious British lineage.

Cut and Paste

Britain's indie scene has rarely felt more more low-stakes than it does right now. The UK albums chart is full of iconoclastic British acts—Radiohead at #1, Skepta, James Blake, Anohni—with very few of them plying their trade on guitar. Even trad-lad bands like the 1975, Catfish and the Bottlemen, and Blossoms have seen the smart money and embraced their boyband potential rather than doggedly committing to life in the indie trenches. Twenty years since Britpop's rot set in, and 10 years on from Arctic Monkeys' debut album, the path to indie success is codified, but a source of ever-diminishing returns; there's the sense of a generation with just enough education to perform, but not really to innovate the genre out of irrelevance.
Oscar Scheller's debut album, Cut and Paste, isn't going to do that either, though a decade ago it might have propelled him to the heights of, say, Jack Peñate, another British cheeky chappy with strong pop instincts. The young Londoner makes blown-out indie jams with magnetic melodies and an obvious British lineage: “Sometimes” echoes the melody of Blur's “Coffee and TV,” and his leaping baritone bears a strong resemblance to both Damon Albarn and Morrissey. (For the latter, see also, “But then I see your face and I want to die,” from “Fifteen,” which moves at the pace of a carnation's twirl.) He samples, or rather, for budgetary reasons, emulates samples of old school hip-hop and chintzy dub—“Good Things,” laced with his plaintive croon, sounds a lot like Saint Etienne's cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” The combination aligns him with a non-British Anglophile: Scheller's romantic, hotch-potch confections recall Jens Lekman's early records, and share a similarly endearing innocence.
His lyrics are also naïve, but lack Lekman's charm and wit. They're mostly underdeveloped portraits of youthful anxieties: over masculinity (not knowing which football team to support), the passing of time, and whether the promised future will come to pass. “Nothing's as it seems/There's a land where hopes don't meet with dreams,” he croons on the twinkling, dreamy “Gone Forever,” the record's sharpest song. “I feel scared of all the things to come.” As for his own future, Scheller has written for Lily Allen and short-lived Sugababes revival MKS. Cut and Paste is hooky and appealing; with a gear change, he could easily move into a realm where people are actually paying attention. For now, he's a very sweet stream in a cultural backwater.


Tough-talking Buffalo rapper, signed to Eminem’s Shady Records, offers ruthless rhymes and a stubbornly old-school sound on his latest album, featuring Raekwon, Prodigy, and more.

G.O.A.T.

Not every artist could take a bullet to the back of their head and make it work in their favor. In 2012, doctors told the Buffalo rapper Conway he might never walk again after surviving gunshots to his head and neck. He recovered, mostly, and although the injury left half his face paralyzed, he’s learned to use it to his advantage: It lends a distinctive slur to his authoritative rasp, and suggests an echo of a previous Eminem signee’s origin story. “OK, I get it, my face is twisted/But considerin’ my facial image, what nigga spit it the way I spit it?” Conway brags on G.O.A.T., his third and most substantial full-length project of 2017. It’s no throwaway; immediately following that line, he pauses his verse for a few bars to let listeners consider the question.
That G.O.A.T.’s title stands for grimiest, not greatest, of all time says as much about where Conway’s heart is at as does the album’s guest lineup. Features come mostly from New York warhorses like Raekwon, Lloyd Banks, Styles P, and the late Mobb Deep legend Prodigy—veterans who have remained faithful to a ’90s ideal of hardcore rap, no matter how far out of fashion it’s fallen. Though he hasn’t been on the radar nearly as long as those guys, Conway is in his early-thirties, not all that much younger than them, and he’s fluent enough in the ways of throwback Mafioso rap that he could easily pass as their peer. Rapping in a ruthlessly methodical spray of violent images and internal rhyme, he sets out to upstage each of his guests, and more often than not succeeds. “Look, click clack, and this big ratchet I clap it/Six pack, I heard his ribs crack/And splash the wall with wig fragments,” he fires on the album’s opening verse. “Every day where I’m from, it’s yellow tapes and zip plastic.”
In interviews, Conway has talked a big game about representing his native Buffalo, a city that has never sired a genuine rap star of its own. Given Eminem’s mixed track record with protégés, local fans in Conway’s corner can be forgiven if they had mixed emotions when he and his brother Westside Gunn signed to Shady Records last year. Thankfully, if G.O.A.T. is any indication, this won’t be like the time Eminem signed Yelawolf only to A&R him into the trash bin. There isn’t a trace of Shady’s fingerprints on this one. If anything, the album could have benefited from a little more of Eminem’s promotional muscle. With little fanfare, it was dropped online just a few days before Christmas, a rare downtime for the internet, and it can’t be found on most of the major streaming services. For an album that Conway had talked up as his most accomplished work to date, its release has been strangely low-key.
It’s possible that was by design. Conway seems to understand he’s a niche artist, and shows little interest in wooing the unconverted. Save for a crackling, slow-burn Alchemist beat on “Trump,” one of the few tracks that bothers with a hook (the title refers to the verb, not the president), G.O.A.T. was produced entirely by Conway’s in-house producer Daringer, a ’90s devotee whose tastes tend toward the subdued. The producer seems to delight in period details: The Prodigy feature “Rodney Little” conjures the dizzying thump of RZA’s most extreme Liquid Swords creations, and Daringer offers a decent DJ Premier impression, scratches and all, on “Mandatory.” But unlike those legends’ beats, which packed a consistent element of surprise, Daringer’s can be static to the point of tedium. The wailing, one-bar loop on the Raekwon collaboration “Th3rd F” is almost tortuously repetitive. Conway seems to bank on the miscalculation that if the rapping is sharp enough, you don’t need showy production.
He boxes himself in by leaning this hard on vintage styles. Most of rap’s greatest works sprung less from homage than invention, yet Conway treats the genre the way many contemporary blues musicians do the blues—as an art that’s already been perfected, one that can be mastered and replicated but never improved upon. Conway has the talent to make real waves, and with Shady Records’ backing presumably the resources, too, but by limiting himself to these overmined sounds, he’s working under too low a ceiling.


The 18-year-old Baton Rouge rapper’s debut album is packed with allegories on power that illuminate but don’t apologize for his well-publicized history of violence.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again: Until Death Call My Name

Until Death Call My Name

Until Death Call My Name, the debut album from 18-year-old Baton Rouge rogue YoungBoy Never Broke Again, is a meditation on violence, the pangs of conscience, and the ways anticipating an early grave can tint perspective. “I ain’t no bad person, no,” he says in the opening seconds of the record, on “Overdose.” “I ain’t no gangster, ain’t no killer/I ain’t no gangbanger, I’m me/Like everybody make mistakes, that’s life… I just know, shit, until I’m dead I’ma be me.”
This is, at least in part, an attempt to reconcile the concept of being “bad” with a childhood plagued by cruelty and self-destruction, which has led YoungBoy to multiple run-ins with the law—including a harrowing alleged assault on a girlfriend that was caught on camera. If his introduction to the album isn’t exactly contrite, it at least offers a moment of clarity. The tracks that follow are packed with allegories on power that lack the emotional depth of his previous work.
YoungBoy is a teenager who uses the violence he has suffered as a justification for perpetuating violence. He presents paranoia and angst as causes for his (sometimes retaliatory, sometimes preemptive) attacks, and those emotions also fuel his songs. Some rappers can cite artistic license as an excuse for the brutality in their lyrics, but YoungBoy merits no such concession; the darkest aspects of his music are a direct and intense reflection of his real life. Throughout Until Death Call My Name, he shoots first and asks questions after.
His sing-song verses, performed in a nasally, aggressive, adolescent whine, bring a raw quality to his depictions of the brutal cycle of poverty and violence plaguing his hometown—a cycle YoungBoy has failed to fully escape. Last year, he was charged with attempted first-degree murder for opening fire on a crowd. In February, he was arrested on assault and kidnapping charges in Florida. On more than one occasion on the album, YoungBoy characterizes himself as a demon or a devil or a reaper, as if to acknowledge the all-consuming darkness that lives within him. In sound and deed, he is a younger Kevin Gates: an unquestionably talented artist who lets ferocity and fury dictate who he is, stewing in his own toxicity to avoid reckoning with it.
Until Death sometimes reads like a last will and testament. Because YoungBoy sees the prospect of death around every corner, he sets out objectives for his remaining time on Earth: to stunt on his haters, to outlive his enemies, and to leave behind a nest egg for his kids. He is as fixated on being untroubled as he is on never being broke again.
Previous YoungBoy tapes covered similar ground, exploring themes of adolescent rage and internal conflict, but there is less variety in his delivery and melodies on Until Death. The raps here aren’t as punishing or as personal as the ones on AI YoungBoy, a 2017 mixtape that pushed the limits of his trap-country blues. But he remains capable of creating seismic jams, as on “We Poppin” and “Right or Wrong,” even if they don’t feel as visceral as his earlier work. There are moments of probing acuity on the album: When he isn’t invoking Gates at full throat, on “Astronaut Kid,” he’s making sense of his past in the new context of his celebrity with songs like “Public Figure” and “Rags to Riches.”
A conscience-stricken but unapologetic batterer, YoungBoy hasn’t yet become the same lightning rod for discourse as alleged or convicted abusers XXXTentacion, Kodak Black, and 6ix9ine, perhaps because he has a smaller profile and has spent less time in the public eye. Like Kodak, he’s a preternaturally gifted rapper, which may lead some to ignore or apologize for his transgressions. Spending time with his songs—in a world of his making, where every tale is told from his perspective—creates what critic Wesley Morris calls a “luxury conundrum”: The listener ends up carefully considering YoungBoy’s work without granting equal weight to the suffering of his victims.
Rap made by abusers often illuminates the ugly histories behind their most notorious actions, drawing out their most disturbing behavioral patterns, uncovering their personality flaws, and exposing the misery they’ve dealt, all while granting the perpetrator additional power over his victims and their narratives. There shouldn’t be any easy or guilt-free way to engage with YoungBoy’s music, and it’s entirely fair to avoid him on the basis of his alleged crimes.
At the very least, though, Until Death provides plenty of insight into the perilous environments that condition young thugs. “Villain,” in which he embraces his inner demons and violent nature, is immediately followed by “Traumatized,” which chalks up his actions to PTSD. “I swear I’m traumatized, caught in that fire/Lot of bullets flying, whole lot of people dying,” he raps. “I swear I’m traumatized, I’m hypnotized/Like I’m a reaper, I see blood when I open my eyes.” At moments like this, it’s hard to tell whether he’s haunted by the people he’s lost or the people he’s hurt.


This art-punk collective’s utopian first LP illuminates the joy, camaraderie, and compassion that can exist in even the most unforgiving, isolating circumstances.

Pain Olympics

The video for “The Next Fix”—the first single from Crack Cloud’s first LP, Pain Olympics—takes its title and subject matter at face value. In it, the Vancouver-based collective roams among an array of troubled characters trying to survive another day of squalor, violence, and sheer boredom on the streets. Their outsider existence is personified by one woman who renders her physical withdrawal as an interpretive dance, gesticulating wildly in a train station where passing commuters pay her no mind, highlighting society’s cruelest paradox: those in the most obvious need of help are so often easily ignored.
It’s a life this group knows intimately—some of its members are former addicts themselves, and they founded Crack Cloud as both a recovery tool and an artistic extension of the harm reduction and mental healthcare work they do in their East Vancouver neighborhood. As such, they use “The Next Fix” video not to deliver a PSA, but to foreground the humanity in those who’ve fallen into the spiral of substance abuse. Partway through the video (around the point where the song goes from sounding like a scratched-up 12-inch of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” to a tear-jerking, trumpet-smoothed chorale), all of its seemingly doomed subjects congregate in a park—not to score, but to laugh, dance, and frolic together in the leaves. It’s a deeply affecting denouement, illuminating the joy, camaraderie, and compassion that can exist even under the most unforgiving, isolating circumstances.
That philosophy has been the driving force behind Crack Cloud’s dramatic evolution over the past four years. Initially the solo project of singer/drummer Zach Choy, Crack Cloud has blossomed into a seven-piece band—and that’s not counting the supporting network of multi-disciplinary creatives (many of whom also work in social services) who push the collective’s membership well past the double-digit mark. And as their ranks have swelled, so too have their musical ambitions. On their first two EPs—bundled together on a self-titled 2018 compilation release for Tin Angel—Crack Cloud’s brand of post-punk leaned more heavily on the latter half of that equation, recalling the terse agitation of Wire’s Pink Flag and the disjointed rhythms of Gang of Four. But if those pioneers showed us how deconstructing rock music could serve as a metaphor for dismantling institutional power structures, Crack Cloud provide us with a glimpse of the wondrous world that awaits after the dust has cleared. Not since These New Puritans has a modern post-punk band so eagerly embraced the “post” aspect of the genre, erecting dramatic new structures atop historic foundations like the glass pyramid shooting out of the courtyard of The Louvre.
Pain Olympics includes a handy yardstick to measure just how far Crack Cloud have come in the form of “Bastard Basket,” a track that first appeared on their 2016 eponymous EP. In its primordial form, the track is a grave meditation on life and death set to an ominous circular bass riff and needling guitar pricks; the Pain Olympics version retains that rhythmic cadence, adding sustained sax drones and a ghostly vocal delivery from Choy that lend it a more absorbing, haunted intensity. However, Pain Olympics represents a substantial upgrade not just in terms of arrangements and fidelity, but vision. On the album’s astonishing opener, “Post-Truth: Birth of a Nation,” Crack Cloud resemble a typical, guitar-stabbing post-punk band for all of 44 seconds, at which point the song triggers its phantasmagoric swirl of Eno-era Talking Heads, industrial pummel, cavalry trumpets, glockenspiels, and operatic Disney-soundtrack flourishes—a fitting analog for a song that wades into the murky, chaotic waters of modern news and social-media consumption. Meanwhile, on “Favour Your Fortune,” Crack Cloud drop any pretense of being a rock band altogether, reframing their grim street narratives in a manic noise-rap banger that could pass for a Death Grips remix of a BROCKHAMPTON cut.
And yet as much as Pain Olympics deals in difficult subject matter and sensory overload, the overwhelming feeling you’re left with is, remarkably, levity. Choy can be a stern, authoritative mouthpiece as per standard post-punk practice, but he also boasts the playful flamboyance of !!!’s Nic Offer and the melodic graces of The Clash’s Mick Jones. From his seat behind the drum kit, though, Choy is less the frontman than a conduit for the band’s collective strength: the angelic group-chorus refrains of “Post-Truth” and “The Next Fix” suggest Crack Cloud’s true spiritual antecedents aren’t late-‘70s British post-punk groups, but the utopian multi-headed Canadian indie-rock collectives of the early ’00s.
However, the biggest surprise on an album loaded with them arrives with the closing “Angel Dust (Eternal Peace),” a discordant dream-pop ballad whose dying moments are overtaken by a field-recording conversation with a man espousing the therapeutic virtues of accepting Jesus. Crack Cloud may not bible-thumpers themselves, but they’ve seemingly taken this man’s most salient point to heart: “When judgment is coming around,” he says, “what’s going to be judged is the heart and the kidneys—you can’t fake the funk, man.” With their documentarian dispatches from the meanest streets, Crack Cloud could never be accused of faking it. But the strange beauty of Pain Olympics is that it fills your heart even as it’s kicking you in the kidneys.

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Released to accompany the documentary of the same name, this compilation tells the story of Peep’s evolution through his collaborations.

EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING

It’s pretty much impossible for a posthumous album—usually an unwieldy approximation of a musician’s style assembled from leftover scraps and second-choice stems —to stand apart from the passing of the artist. This is especially true for Lil Peep. Revisiting the work recorded in his lifetime is already a particularly vulnerable experience; listening to words like “Took her to the crib and I show her how I die…/Lord why, Lord why, do I gotta wake up?” is made harder when you know the person saying them got what they asked for.
This compilation, released to accompany the documentary of the same name, collects recordings from various points in Peep’s career, from unheard collaborations with Rich the Kid and Diplo, to earlier tracks never formally released on streaming services, as well as all three songs from the recent GOTH ANGEL SINNER EP. As someone who blasted “Beamer Boy” for weeks after Peep died, last year’s Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2 hardly left an impression; this compilation makes up for the sanitization and sanded-down edges of that album by leaving everything mostly untouched. Few polished pop flourishes are found here, mostly just the looped guitars, trap drums, and aching vocal fry that made Peep an angel to so many.
What EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING shows is an artist beyond his sadness; more than a portrait of Peep alone, it tells his story in collaborations. Featured here are most of the regular producers who helped shape his polarizing blend of genres, like Nedarb, Fish Narc, Bighead, Smokeasac, and fellow GothBoiClique member Cold Hart. Though Peep obviously wrote and recorded “Moving On” before he passed, it’s hard not to hear that song’s role call of the GBC roster as shout-outs sent to old friends from beyond.
Three tracks—“Fangirl,” “LA to London,” “Rockstarz”—feature Gab3, formerly of the duo Uzi (whose Eiffel 65-flipping, rave-inflected raps are highlights of the SoundCloud rap era), maybe better known as the lo-fi cameraman behind Kanye’s “Famous” video. These songs, apparently intended for a “summer EP,” are considerably brighter than most of Peep’s work, more pop-punk than emo thanks to upbeat guitars and Gab3’s nasally flow.
The weakest song is unsurprisingly the oldest:  “Keep My Coo,” posted to SoundCloud in 2014 but deleted at some point after. It’s one of Peep’s few straight-up rap songs, with bars about blowing gas and playing Madden, more indistinct than bad. Peep’s monotone ad-libs sound so clearly influenced by BONES, whose hazy, haunting raps were all the rage online around the time “Keep My Coo” would have been recorded. It is the work of a kid still determining his creative identity, and the best part of EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING is how it shows him figuring himself out through his work with others.
Most essentially, this album writes a key collaborator back into Peep’s narrative: Lil Tracy, his self-described “twin” and a vocal critic of the appropriation of his legacy. The album concludes with four of their most iconic duets: “white tee,” “cobain,” “witchblades,” and an unreleased acoustic version of “walk away as the door slams.” Their songs together belong as much to Tracy as they do to Peep; on “witchblades,” Tracy sets up the shot—“Cocaine, all night long/When I die bury me with all my ice on”—and Peep brings it all the way home—“When I die bury me with all my ice on/When I die bury me with all the lights on.” There’s a deep feeling of brotherly love in the agony they share together in song, two spirits brought together by shared illnesses and anguish.
Tracy and Peep recorded “white tee” on the first day they met, back when Tracy went by Yung Bruh. That “Such Great Heights” flip is maybe the most obvious sample in Peep’s catalogue, but there’s something in the Postal Service’s practice of recording Give Up—Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard sending demos back and forth through the mail—that speaks to Peep’s life and legacy. A boy in Long Island becoming a star by retreating into his bedroom, linking with like-minded artists in Seattle and California on Soundcloud, his most devoted fanbase in countries he’d never dreamed of going to, his spirit given life again online by his loved ones and acolytes.


On their second album this year, the hardworking Southern rockers pair The Unraveling outtakes with songs written during lockdown, taking advantage of the record’s looseness to show off their range.

The New OK

The stage, rather than the studio, is the Drive-By Truckers’ natural habitat, and the place where they leave their deepest mark. Working without a setlist and drawing from an inexhaustible catalog that goes back more than 30 years, they tear through songs about the South, about America, about resistance and rebellion, very few of which sound settled or pat. After the global pandemic shut down the tour behind their first 2020 album, The Unraveling, the band spent the rest of the year hunkered down in their homes like the rest of us, missing the catharsis of the rock show as well as the financial security of touring. For months Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley alternated Wednesday-night livestreams, which allowed them to dig into their trove of songs and recount old war stories. It made for compelling streaming, but it wasn’t quite the same.
Their new pandemic record, the surprise-released The New OK, is a direct product of this frustrating predicament. In addition to songs they recorded in Memphis during the Unraveling sessions, it includes two new songs written by Hood during lockdown and recorded by the band members at studios near their homes. The result is a patchwork quilt of an album, stitched together from scraps gathered here and there—but then, those quilts are often the warmest, the most comforting. In fact, for a band that typically grounds its albums in a sturdy conceptual or thematic framework, the Truckers have always done well with a certain amount of raggedness and sprawl. Over their nearly 25 years together under that admittedly “bad” band name, they’ve mastered a wider array of styles and sounds than the “Southern rock” label might suggest, and The New OK is a chance to show off more sides of themselves, from the R&B horns of those Memphis sessions to the old-school punk of their Ramones cover to the more post-punk sound of Hood’s newly penned songs.
Having lived through traumatic upheavals throughout the 2000s, the Truckers evolved into a tight, adaptable quintet in the 2010s—a decade that saw them pivot from Southern band to American Band, from “the duality of the Southern thing” to the duality of the American thing. This current lineup is the most stable in the band’s history and arguably the best, despite lacking a third songwriting talent like Jason Isbell or a vocal powerhouse like Shonna Tucker. The New OK showcases the contributions of every member of the band: Multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez adds a lush organ intro to “Tough to Let Go” that recalls Automatic for the People, and drummer Brad Morgan puts some stealthy funk into the breezily poignant “Sea Island Lonely.” Bassist Matt Patton even sings lead on two songs, hollering his head off on “The Unraveling” and unspooling a tragic conspiracy on “The K.K.K. Took My Baby Away.”
Cooley takes only one song on The New OK—the least he’s contributed to a Truckers album since their 1998 debut. But there are few artists who would care to write a country song about Sarah Palin’s legacy of batshit politics and fewer still who could make you want to hear “Sarah’s Flame” more than once. He’s more of a sideman on these songs, but he remains an ingenious guitar player, mixing bluegrass runs with punk rawness to approximate classic rock cockiness. Hood, always the more prolific of the two, doesn’t address the pandemic explicitly, but allows it to add poignancy to “Sea Island Lonely” and “The Distance,” two songs about the emotional drift of touring.
Five years ago, Hood and his family left Athens for the Pacific Northwest, about as far from Georgia as they could get without leaving the continental United States. Their new hometown of Portland, Oregon, as well as its recent experiments in self-governance and dissent, inspired “Watching the Orange Clouds,” about his fatherly fears while watching unrest in his city and wildfires just beyond. “I'm trying really hard to find a way to help to make it all better,” he sings on the chorus, a promise to his kids asleep in the next room but also to listeners who’ve come to expect political engagement from the band. This isn’t a song about outrage but about the frustration of not knowing what to do or how to act, which makes Gonzalez’s synth squelches on the coda sound like a paranoid ’70s thriller, bending the song into a question mark.
In a bold bit of sequencing, The New OK ends with their version of the Ramones’ “The K.K.K. Took My Baby Away,” which has been a live staple for a few years now and was a last-minute addition to their Memphis sessions. Theirs is a fairly straightforward rendition of a song whose timeliness is self-evident, heavier than the original while losing some of the girl-group harmonies. It’s an odd, weirdly poignant, righteously angry exclamation point at the end of the album, as though the Truckers are psyching themselves up for an epic ass-whuppin’. Especially after the unrelenting darkness of its predecessor, The New OK sounds all the more affecting for not being quite so dire. Rather than bemoan the new normal we’ve all been forced to accept, the Truckers celebrate our adaptability and our fortitude, subtly promising there will be better days and more rock shows ahead.

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Known for elaborate handmade instruments and stage costumes, the veteran Congolese eco-punks commit their frenetic, highly collaborative sound to record for the first time.

Ngbaka EP

Founded in 2003 by Piscko Crane, the “eco-friendly, Afro-futuristic” Congolese punk collective Fulu Miziki have amassed an international following for their industrious take on the region’s “rumba”—guitar-driven big-band music inspired by Afro-Cuban sounds. In response to a waste-management crisis in the country’s capital, Kinshasa, the group crafts their own instruments and full-body stage garb out of discarded junk—hence their name, which roughly translates from Lingala as “music from the garbage.”
Until now, the band has been content to focus on their futuristic onstage pageantry, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought them into the studio for the first time. While their debut EP, Ngbaka, is first and foremost a party record, it’s tinged with an undercurrent of urgency, imploring the listener to shake their ass in one breath and proclaiming “the end of the world” in the next. The juxtaposition reflects the crossroads at which Fulu Miziki operates: rooted in the celebratory rumba music of their hometown but influenced by the experimental, EDM-inspired Nyege Nyege scene thriving in Uganda, where the band moved in late 2019.
The foreboding atmosphere of tracks like “Lokito,” which teems with rusty, mechanical snarls, is the product of Fulu Miziki’s recent embrace of electronic production. Isolating and refining samples of each jerry-can drum or repurposed PVC pipe enhances the plasticity of their already-plastic instruments. The process recalls the upcycled sound design on Matmos’ Plastic Anniversary, though Fulu Miziki is more interested in rhythmic ingenuity than in manipulating their sources to create unearthly timbres.
Opting for electronic arrangements highlights the complexity of the band’s work, especially on Ngbaka’s instrumental cuts. “Mokili Makambo” plays like a one-to-one recreation of a Fulu Miziki live jam, but the clean mix allows for more room between moving parts. Twangy guembri—a traditional three-stringed bass guitar, which Fulu Miziki fashion out of computer casing—pinballs between a gauntlet of competing percussion before giving way to a stuttering brass melody. Tension builds as more drums shuffle into the fray. By the song’s conclusion, each measure is so densely packed that it blurs into a delirious reverie.
Without an audience’s energy to feed off, Ngbaka’s more vocal-driven songs aren’t always as engaging as they are onstage, where band members volley call-and-response verses. In the studio, Fulu Mizki’s isolated vocal takes can’t quite capture the hypnotic effect of those rich, serpentine rounds. “Toko Yambana,” which draws imagery from apocalyptic flood mythos, is skeletal to a fault, decorating a frugal four-on-the-floor kick with a fluttering tom loop and nebulous synth pads.
“Bivada,” Fulu Miziki’s ode to the laborers who keep the markets of Kinshasa running, overcomes studio limitations by toying with as many vocal effects as possible. Arpeggiated synths knot together as echoing chants emerge from all angles within the stereo field, Auto-Tuned choruses flickering wildly. It’s here that Fulu Miziki look furthest into the future, while still holding firm to their frenetic, highly collaborative sound. They’ve spent nearly two decades molding trash in their own image; Ngbaka extends their sculptures to a new medium. Though digitally processed and precisely arranged, their reanimation of the immaterial sounds as ramshackle and scrappy as ever.


On his third release in less than six months, the New York rapper is at his sharpest, offering a nostalgic but refreshed taste of the city’s so-called Rotten Apple rap era.

Paranoia 2

Dave East doesn’t rap as though he’s still in the streets but like he’s eternally haunted by the experiences and playing them back in his mind. He can recall every detail of every dirty deed; every mood and regret just burned in his brain. Though the Harlem rapper has never been short on ways to translate these sentiments on wax, with Paranoia 2—his third release in less than six months—he’s much closer to the ideal formula of beats and writing that makes his music that much more effective.
Building on the themes of the first Paranoia, feelings of suspicion and preoccupations with mortality topped with introspection (and, of course, women and money) are sustained throughout. However, relies less on skits to create scenes, and the production has the vibrancy of live instrumentation that elevates it well above its predecessor. “Powder,” for example, features a horn and drums that inject lushness into the song; the Illmind-produced “Thank You” is driven by buoyant piano chords that East adapts well. Contemplative album closer “Grateful,” which is lifted by a beautiful assist from Marsha Ambrosius, is a heavenly juxtaposition of sacred and profane.
In the way of his label-head and mentor Nas, East has come to be known for his striking storytelling, but he has an identity all his own. His visceral lyrics play out over, sometimes, 20- and 30-bar verses, as he works out his immorality with the benefit of hindsight. “Is dying worth everything you done lived for?” he questions on the hook of the reflective “Prosper.” Probably not since the very next song, “Woke Up,” is a bravado-laced track featuring Tory Lanez in full Swae Lee-falsetto. It’s shallow on its surface as East basks in the financial success he’s found—he deserves a victory lap or two, after all—but even when he’s boasting, he’s anchored by the fact he’s “just a nigga like you.” No matter how it’s cut, P2 makes it clear he knows the outcome he has is better than one he was facing.
Even with bangers in tow (“Annoying” features a particularly swaggerful T.I.), the crowd favorites, will no doubt be the two tracks which feature his strongest asset. On “Corey,” he builds out a lucid narrative centered on a friend from whom he's grown apart due to their divergent lifestyles—East trying to chase his dreams while Corey remains largely stagnant. But in all its specificity, the theme is universal. It highlights how, when priorities shift, pride and envy can drive wedges between even the tightest relationships, and while East doesn't necessarily treat his subject with the most empathy, the song is arrestingly detailed. Later, “I Found Keisha” follows up the single “Keisha” from 2016’s breakout mixtape Kairi Chanel. The latter was a cinematic account of a woman who robs him after he passes out following a drunken hookup. In the sequel, he introduces Tim and his cousin James who become the primary tools in this revenge plot: Tim as the initial target and James who carries out the work. The beat is menacing and builds suspense as East plants a movie in the mind.
Across P2, it feels like listeners are granted entry into the mind of Dave East. He doesn’t vary his flows as much as he could—it almost comes off like he’s numb which bares its own implications—but the production and emotional weight of his lyrics push the EP forward, and the grittiness in his voice adds immediacy. The style of New York street rap he represents, full of vivid imagery, hasn’t had a prominent stage in popular music of late. He offers a nostalgic but refreshed taste of the city’s so-called Rotten Apple rap era at a time when bonafide tales from the hood come watered down by syrupy melodies. East has only released mixtapes and EPs to this point—14 over eight years—and P2 shows a man who is patient and relentless in honing his craft, getting closer to the debut with each track.