The soundtrack to Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s new film uses 1980s pop singles and classical pieces to help tell the deliriously romantic story of lovers Elio and Oliver.

Various Artists: Call Me By Your Name (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

“Precious youth is short-lived as a dream,” wrote Mimnermus, six centuries before the birth of Christ, and he certainly wasn’t the first Greek poet to romanticize adolescence. Thousands of years later, artists have so thoroughly weighed down the teenage experience with wistful generalizations that it’s nearly impossible to tell stories about it without resorting to cliché.
Although it is deliriously romantic, the Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s new film Call Me By Your Name is too deeply immersed in the subjective experience of a singular 17-year-old, Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), to rehash conventional wisdom about youth. The movie spends so much time lingering on sensory details, from the taste of freshly picked fruit to the touch of a lover’s hand to the urgency of its dreamy, eclectic soundtrack, that it practically transport us into his skin. Set in Italy during the hottest months of 1983 and adapted from a novel of the same name by André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name tracks Elio’s affair with his first male lover, Oliver (Armie Hammer), from infatuation to consummation to their inevitable parting. A handsome doctoral student who radiates confidence, Oliver comes to live and work with Elio’s archeologist father (Michael Stuhlbarg) for the summer. For an introspective teenager who’s never truly been in love, and whose hobbies include playing and transcribing classical music, falling for this Adonis in a button-down shirt is like discovering a new language to communicate with the outside world.
What’s implicit in his story may be the only genuinely universal truth about adolescence—that it’s a time of blurred borders, when the innocence of childhood starts to chafe like shoes you’ve outgrown, but adult obligations still sound deadening. Identity is at its least stable in these years, when the books and bands you love become your mirror and it only takes a kiss to collapse your unformed self into someone else. The movie gets its title from a scene where Elio and Oliver literally exchange names, as though to annihilate any boundary between them. Its soundtrack translates that electricity, of worlds colliding, into music.
The soundtrack unites Elio’s internal life, with its piano compositions and sheet music, and the ’80s pop hits that represent the external reality he accesses through Oliver. Watching the film for the first time, a viewer lost in cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s overripe visuals might mistake the piano-driven instrumentals for a score crafted by a single composer. In fact, Guadagnino’s journey into his hero’s psyche is accompanied by works that span continents and centuries.
Like Elio—an American Jew living in Italy, who also speaks French with his sometime girlfriend (Esther Garrel)—this soundtrack has an international sensibility and an old soul. Canonical compositions segue into tracks by contemporary innovators like Ryuichi Sakamoto and John Adams. The Canadian pianist André Laplante, as well as the British and Hungarian duo of Valéria Szervánszky and Ronald Cavaye, perform pieces by Ravel. In one scene, Elio plays the gentle “Zion hört die Wächter singen,” from Bach’s chorale cantata “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” three times in a row for a mesmerized Oliver, tweaking each performance to simulate how a different famous composer might put his stamp on it. (The soundtrack features Italian pianist Alessio Bax’s delicate recording of the movement.)
Because their relationship is supposed to be a secret, the couple’s dialogue is often coded. There are secret messages in the music, too. “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” steals phrases from the Bible’s sensual Song of Songs. One of Sakamoto’s two contributions, the dreamy and then halting “Germination,” comes from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a strange Nagisa Ôshima film where the composer stars as a Japanese soldier in World War II who develops a homoerotic fixation on a prisoner played by David Bowie.
Eighties pop singles are scattered amid the classical pieces on a tracklist that looks haphazard but actually represents a thoughtful convergence of sensibilities—one that coheres even without the accompanying images. Most of the songs that blast from speakers at the bars and dance parties Elio and Oliver frequent are cultural hybrids. France’s Bandolero add Spanish phrases, maracas, rap verses, and a dash of English to their appreciation of one Miss Cha Cha Cha on the bouncy “Paris Latino.” Loredana Bertè, an Italian singer who’s known for her eclecticism, brings a throaty nightclub voice, a French catchphrase, and Gallic accordion sounds to her synth-pop gem “J’adore Venise.” You may remember Giorgio Moroder and Joe Esposito’s silky ballad “Lady, Lady, Lady” from Flashdance, which became a teen box-office hit in the spring of 1983. Here, though, lyrics like, “Dancing behind masks, just subtle pantomime/But images reveal whatever lonely hearts can hide,” sound as though they were written just for Elio and Oliver.
It’s Sufjan Stevens’ contributions—two new compositions, plus a remix of his Age of Adz track “Futile Devices”—that bring the soundtrack into a wiser, sadder present. Guadagnino has said the songs are meant to serve a similar purpose to voiceover narration in the typical literary adaptation. “We wanted [music] that wasn’t as close to us in first person,” he told an interviewer, explaining that he thought of Stevens because his lyrical indie-folk sounds poignant and elusive at once. His whispery voice first appears midway through the film, when “Futile Devices” plays soon after Elio and Oliver have acknowledged their mutual attraction. It’s a moment of reverie, set to a song that revels in closeup images of a relationship that transcends words. The remix elegantly translates the original’s rippling guitar into Elio’s emotional language: somber piano.
Guadagnino only asked Stevens for one song, but he wrote two, and including both is the sole misstep here. “Visions of Gideon,” which plays in the film’s final moments, is stunning. Over twinkling piano and dulled percussion, Stevens nails the surreal experience of reminiscing about an old love: “Is it a video?” he keeps repeating. But “Mystery of Love,” from a happier era of Elio and Oliver’s affair, comes across as twee onscreen and on the album. The rhymes are too neat, the phrasing (“Blessed be the mystery of love”) is too precious, a reference to Alexander the Great’s male lover Hephaestion feels pandering, and Stevens’ coo is so honeyed, it’s cloying.
The film’s most recognizable sync, Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” doesn’t just make for a delightful Armie Hammer meme. It’s also a better anthem for this romance—and a more inspired fusion of Elio’s internal and external worlds—than “Mystery of Love.” While the marimba melody burbles like a piano gone giddy, the lyrics sell a vision of love far more iconoclastic than the one in the first movie it soundtracked: Valley Girl. You probably don’t need Call Me By Your Name to introduce you to the song, but once you’ve seen how it liberates Elio, you may never want to hear it outside the context of this deftly constructed soundtrack.


The Arctics expand their sound with the help of producer Josh Homme (QOTSA) on this, their relatively relaxed, confident third album.

Humbug

The hype surrounding Arctic Monkeys’ 2006 debut album was so monstrous it threatened to swallow the band and its music whole. And a lesser band might have been swallowed, but it should be clear by now that Arctic Monkeys weren’t undone by a little media frenzy. It’s no surprise: They’re a skilled band that writes complex songs filled with unexpected musical turns, wit, and observational acumen. They have a level of musicianship that hasn’t been fashionable since the ’70s, but they employ it in a modern way, and everyone I’ve heard doubt the group changed their mind when I played them one of their records.
Humbug, the band’s third album, breaks ground in a few directions for the Arctics. It’s their loosest record yet by far, following on the heels of the hyperaggressive Favourite Worst Nightmare, which at times was wound so tight it felt like it might collapse from a heart attack on the next chord change. Part of this looseness can be credited to producer Josh Homme, who brings out the darkness that often underlies Alex Turner’s songwriting. The guitars in particular have a snapping, reverberant desert/surf tone that fuels the band’s descent into night. It’s an interesting look for them, and one that undeniably sounds much better on the third or fourth listen than the first. This perhaps reflects that the Arctics, having established and subsequently defended their place in the UK pop firmament, can now afford to make a record that grows on you rather than walloping you in the face repeatedly.
First single “Crying Lightning” is among the record's loudest, most aggressive tracks. Alex Turner’s Yorkshire accent and penchant for detailed writing—he catalogs the sweets the “you” in the song ingests almost obsessively (pick’n’mix, strawberry lace, gobstoppers, and ice cream) and the song rides its overdriven bass line to a theatrical horror guitar build-up. The song’s heavy hand is oddly off-putting and engaging at the same time. As an antidote, they’d do well to release “Cornerstone” as the follow-up single. The album’s highlight, the song is beyond lovelorn, with Turner delivering a swooning, dreamy vocal, possibly his best to date. He makes a somewhat hokey premise—a guy who keeps approaching women who look like his ex-girlfriend, only to strike out when he asks if he can call them by her name—actually work through clever turns of phrase and his usual flair with detail.
That song feels like a legitimate expansion of the band’s songwriting arsenal, but their usual territory offers its share of good stuff as well. Matt Helders’ drumming on the frenzied riff-fest “Dangerous Animals” is jaw-dropping, and it’s one of things that saves the song from its spelled-out vocal hook. “Potion Approaching” threatens to turn into a cover of Nirvana’s “Very Ape” on its opening riff, but the band instead opts for Zeppelin-ish start-stop passages that read like “Achilles’ Last Stand” recast as a Britpop tune before it shifts completely into a seesawing, mildly psychedelic mid-section.
Their riffier tendencies can get the best of them, as on “Pretty Visitors,” a progged-out song that gets lost in heavy metal thunder, choral vocals (not an actual choir, but the band built up into one), and creepy organ interludes. The balance between songwriting and excess seems to hold across all three of their albums, though, and it’s never undone them yet. Humbug isn’t better than either of its predecessors, but it expands the group’s range and makes me curious where it might go next. It also demonstrates a great deal of staying power for a band that could have imploded before it ever got this far.


For his catchy but charmless second solo album, the pop singer offers a loose-concept record that explores every angle of a breakup through the most pitiful of conversation starters: the weather.

Heartbreak Weather

In 2010, a wee Niall Horan decided to test his vocal prowess by auditioning for the British singing competition The X Factor. After performing a neutered rendition of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick,” the 16-year-old Irishman was met with skepticism from guest judge Katy Perry, who sagely warned, “Likeableness is not gonna sell records.” Nevertheless, she let him advance and Horan was placed in the group One Direction alongside four other baby-faced fellows. As 1D became the biggest pop group in the world, it was apparent that likability (alongside teenage sex appeal, many genuinely good bops, and a rapidly obsessive fanbase) actually sells a lot of records.
After One Direction announced an indefinite hiatus in 2015, Horan spun his role as the band’s guitar-playing Nice Guy into a pleasant-enough solo career. Three years after his folk-pop debut, Flicker, Horan’s biggest challenge as an artist is to harness his ordinariness into being an exceptional everyman à la Ed Sheeran and Lewis Capaldi. So for his second record, the golf-loving, Eagles-obsessed wannabe boomer turned to a loose-concept album that explores every angle of a breakup through the most pitiful of conversation starters: the weather. Parting clouds, rising suns, cinematic rainstorms, Heartbreak Weather has everything, except soul.
It’s quite a let down from the promise of Heartbreak Weather’s lead single, “Nice to Meet Ya.” Borrowing some strained swagger from former bandmate Liam Payne, Horan entices an elusive would-be lover over a dancey British alt-rock vibe. While the track employs some heavy-handed horniness—“I’m gonna take you somewhere warm, you know J’adore la mer,” Horan purrs because French makes everything sexier, oui?—it’s an easy guilty pleasure that is as charming as it is uncool. Unfortunately, the rest of the record never recaptures this little spark.
On the title track, Horan posits that love has a magical, transformational power that can shift the cosmos and make lonely boys feel complete. He follows this disclosure with “Black and White,” a soaring declaration of eternal devotion. “I promise that I’ll love you for the rest of my life,” Horan belts, in between weepy visions of their wedding day and homely golden years. It’s difficult to feel moved by the stakes of these grandiose statements because their meanings are so cliché, and not in the way that feels refreshingly familiar.
After these blasts of sunshine, storm clouds gather. Across the rest of Heartbreak Weather, Horan is stuck in two mindsets: bereft or coltish, either haunted by the memory of a lover, or desperately trying to scrub her away. There’s no explanation for why the relationship worthy of celestial exaltation dissipates other than that the music starts to move from generic anthems into a confusing mix of bleeding-heart ballads and Fleetwood Mac-indebted pop-rock. As on Flicker, Horan is a co-writer on every song and he is joined by Teddy Geiger, Tobias Jesso Jr., Greg Kurstin, Scott Harris, and 1D regular Julian Bunetta. Horan’s songwriting seemingly works only in unwavering extremes. When he’s blue, like on the painfully maudlin “Dear Patience” or the piano-driven breakup ballad “Put a Little Love on Me,” it’s as if the sky is falling. When he’s hurt by a lover, as on “Bend the Rules” he is the picture of gentlemanly restraint. “I pour myself a glass, it won’t be the last/Just our medicine for now,” he forlornly rumbles. (Confusingly, Horan has referred to this song as his “Streets of Philadelphia” moment, a song written in response to the AIDS epidemic.) When he’s frisky, as in say, “Small Talk,” he invokes feral wolves and roaring flames. Over and over again, he goes through the motions without ever really looking inward.
In an interview with Apple Music, Horan said that despite his intention to cover a variety of perspectives, the songs will “probably still sound selfish.” It’s not exactly that Heartbreak Weather is selfish—Horan sounds too adrift for true narcissism—but it’s superficial. The women in his songs are painfully one-dimensional. Rather than defining them at all, Horan and his songwriters reduce them into faceless placeholders tasked with helping the singer move on. On the boogie-down track “New Angel,” a forsaken Horan craves a distraction from his lovesick psyche. “I need a new angel/A touch of someone else to save me from myself,” he croons, “....I’m hoping you get her out of my mind.” Horan repeatedly writes himself into similar emotional pickles, finding solace in the arms of a stranger while fixated with someone else. It’s a valid post-breakup experience, but it simultaneously limits the already narrow role women have on the record.
After all the sentimental rigamarole, it’s tough to come away from Heartbreak Weather feeling any closer to Horan. He spends too much of the record bouncing between sounds and songwriting concepts to feel distinct. But on the record’s closer, the acoustic ballad “Still,” Horan sounds like he genuinely wants, or even needs an emotional reckoning. It’s the realest, rawest moment on the record and a small bit of proof that Horan has the potential to make it on his own.


Since 1989, Oxbow have been releasing some of the most eccentric heavy music albums ever. On Thin Black Duke, frontman Eugene S. Robinson wields his voice as a vehicle for disorder and transcendence.

Thin Black Duke

Several months after Oxbow released their sixth album, 2007’s The Narcotic Story, frontman Eugene S. Robinson wrote a book about beating people up. It’s called Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking, and it offers tips for achieving what Robinson refers to as “Zen and the Art of Kick Assertainment,” the ecstasy of sweet aches and bloody noses. The guy’s no casual sock-em-bopper: between his stints as a bouncer and a security guard, his extensive roster of martial arts skills (boxing, Kenpo karate, Muay Thai, wrestling, jiu-jitsu), and his history of choking out hecklers onstage, Robinson’s amassed a resume to rival any career pugilist.
But it’s not Robinson’s fists you should fear. His vocal chords, rather, are unsettling, protean howls defiant of genre, convention, or common sense. The same goes for Oxbow, who’ve spent the past quarter-century or so churning out some of the most eccentric (and criminally underrated) heavy music albums ever made. Now, the Bay Area group are back for another genre-bending fight with their first album in over a decade, Thin Black Duke.
Chaos may be Oxbow’s calling card, but on Thin Black Duke, the insanity is a facade. In a press release, composer and producer Niko Wenner (who co-founded the project alongside Robinson in 1989, as a duo) framed the album as an exercise in “large scale coherence.” It undertakes the classical practice of populating mammoth soundscapes with leitmotifs (a melodic phrase, a lyric, a subject) that function like aural trail markers. Sometimes the details manifest as a chorus, like in the wailed refrain on “Letter of Note.” Other times, it’s with repeated references to the titular character himself—whose story proves nearly impossible to parse out when issued forth from Robinson’s venomous gut.
Robinson wields his voice as a vehicle for disorder, and by extension, transcendence. He doesn’t sing with the music, but against it. On the album’s most immediate song, the turbulent piano-rocker “A Gentleman’s Gentleman,” he traces the performative trajectory of a paradoxical couplet (“And when the Duke talks, he sounds like a mime/With his hands doing all the talking”). The phrase initially clambers out of the bluesy miasma as a rabid, incomprehensible whisper (“Andwhentheduketalkshesoundslikeamime”); it then gets thrown on the rack for some syllable-stretching (“His haaaaaaaands doing all the talking”) before emerging from the torture refreshed.
Lightyears away from the unpredictable, exhausting pacing of their early work, Thin Black Duke reflects a formalism that places it closer to Faith No More than Scratch Acid. Where past albums find Oxbow trapped in the eye of the storm with nowhere to run, Thin Black Duke’s tracklist contains a clear arc: a gnarled beginning, all clattering riffs and piercing screams, a dreamlike middle swath. And the six-and-a-half-minute closer “The Finished Line” is a satisfying climax, uniting the album’s scattered stylistic flirtations under the banner of carnal dramaturgy. With Thin Black Duke, Oxbow once again envision a world domineered by disorder, a carnivalesque arena where music’s most intimidating, grandiose genres (free jazz, high-concept chamber pop, noise, neoclassical, metal) can duke it out like gladiators one minute, and come together for a grotesque group hug the next. It may not be their definitive show of force, but it’s a dazzling spectacle nonetheless.


The North Carolina-via-Virginia guitarist Daniel Bachman’s seventh album is his first with a clear purpose and consistent direction. A set of seven unaccompanied guitar instrumentals, it reads like a private love letter to an old home, written and sent from a new one.

River

At their best and worst, solo acoustic guitar albums can feel like workshops, demonstrations meant to spotlight a player’s depth or breadth of knowledge and technique. A genteel folk shuffle cedes to a gnarly blues moan, or a ragtime ditty yields to an extended raga improvisation. Maybe there’s a banjo number, a fiddle tune, or a collage of field-recording abstraction, where crickets chirp or creeks trickle beneath incidental chords. This condition has seemed especially true for the large group of players that has emerged during the last decade. As though to keep stride with our genre-blending times, and to not be bound by old stylistic structures, these young instrumentalists (William Tyler, Steve Gunn, and James Blackshaw among them) have often embraced adaptability more than singularity.
Daniel Bachman has spent the bulk of the six albums he’s released during the last four years showing that, even at the age of 25, he can stretch. For 2013’s Jesus I’m a Sinner, he plucked a banjo on one track, picked meditative lines through a haze of eerie effects for the next, and then pranced and plowed alongside an old-time band. There have been little one-instrument symphonies and unadorned folk beauties, irascible strummers and blissful drifters. The variety has made for wonderful discrete moments and galvanized Bachman’s growing reputation as one of his form’s best new practitioners. But it’s also made for albums that were mostly fine—often dazzling but generally distracted, as if Bachman knew how to travel but not exactly where to go. River, Bachman’s seventh album, is the first with a clear purpose and consistent direction. To date, it’s the best work of his career.
Though Bachman is now based in Durham, N.C., where River was recorded, he is a native of the northern Virginia city of Fredericksburg, near where the Rappahannock River winds out of the Chesapeake Bay. A set of seven unaccompanied guitar instrumentals, River reads like a private love letter to an old home, written and sent from a new one. Named for another nearby town, the short "Farnham" is nostalgic but sentimentally vague, like a winsome feeling in search of the exact childhood memory that inspired it. The two-part, 17-minute suite "Song for the Setting Sun" conjures an array of emotions in one fluid listen. In part one, Bachman seems to express anxiety over the disappearing day in a place he loves but must leave; just before the three-minute mark, you can hear him nervously shuffle in his chair, perhaps even sigh. The nerves soon sublimate into contentment, though, as Bachman plays the sort of bright, gentle melody that suggests a hand-me-down folk standard, a musical home remedy meant to quell unease. At one point, Bachman’s busy, bustling strings imply he’s even throwing a backyard party. This material is like a survey of his experiences, not an overview of his abilities.
River runs so well as a unit that, unless you’re able to spot the tunes or sleuth the liner notes, you likely won’t detect that Bachman didn’t even write two of these numbers. Bachman undercuts the original sliver of menace in Jack Rose’s "Levee", turning what sounds like an ominous threat into a hopeful promise. His chords glow, and his pulse is quick, as if he’s reflecting on a hard place from a safe, removed distance. The same holds for his spry interpretation of William Moore’s patient, playful 1928 delight, "Old Country Rock". Bachman fills the spaces between Moore’s licks with brief notes and radiant overtones; he’s practically dancing with the source material. Though divided by nearly a century, Rose and Moore both lived in the riverine area Bachman extols here; Rose grew up in Fredericksburg, and Moore used to cross the Rappahannock for work. Bachman treats their tales with the same familiarity and fondness he treats the land and his own life there.
The Rappahannock is Bachman’s thematic thread, an animating and unifying concept that helps all of this material work as a set piece, not just a set of pieces. If he wants to keep his albums interesting, of course, it’s unlikely he’ll return to the same geographical feature often. But maybe that’s not necessary now. During the 14-minute opener "Won’t You Cross Over to that Other Shore", it’s clear something has shifted with Bachman’s composition and execution. There’s a little bit of raga and a little bit of ragtime, some rock'n'roll gusto and some bluegrass spirit. But all these elements feel connected and cohesive, like bits moving together with perfectly governed momentum. Even when the song swings from its darkest, slowest drags to its shiniest, fastest flourishes, the results feel more personal than professional, a demonstration of experience rather than education.


The black metal musician Jef Whitehead has become infamous, his name forever linked to domestic assault charges. For some, he will remain a felon convicted of domestic abuse. For others, he’s a dark person caught in a darker situation. But the truth, at least as suggested by his new album, Scar Sighted, is something more complex.

Scar Sighted

If you don’t subscribe to the controversies engendered by heavy metal magazine covers in 2015, here’s a recap of the drama with Decibel No. 125: Four years ago, Chicago police charged and tried Jef Whitehead for allegedly choking, beating, stabbing, and raping his then-girlfriend and leaving her overnight outside of the tattoo shop where he’d been working. As reported, the incident seemed disturbing enough, but even more so because it actualized a decade-plus of Whitehead’s lyrical and musical malevolence.
Since the late ’90s, working under the name Wrest in one-man, aggression-and-obsession outlets Lurker of Challice and Leviathan, Whitehead had emerged as a pillar of black metal in the United States. He coupled severe misanthropy with idiosyncratic execution to create mesmerizing, barbed records that sounded like little else. Epitomized by song titles like "The History of Rape" and lines like "I will ruin your life... I will fuck you in the sun," Whitehead made his name documenting evil ideas. But with 34 charges leveled against him, it seemed that he had moved beyond simply detailing darkness and into enacting it. And that’s the guy that Decibel decided to put on its March 2015 cover, his seven-month-old daughter Grail cradled in his arms and his new album, Scar Sighted, in promotional tow.
The cover prompted, of course, a rush to judgment: Decibel was accused of rape apologetics, trolling, and using the prurient allure of a convicted felon to sell magazines and Orange Goblin flexi discs. Another, more ridiculous subset accused Decibel of going soft by putting a kid on the cover, since innocence isn’t metal or whatever. But defenders of Whitehead and the magazine—even Decibel managing editor Andrew Bonazelli—clamored to point out that 30 charges against Whitehead had been dismissed and that he’d been cleared of all but one of the remaining accusations. In what essentially served as an embarrassing advertorial for the issue, Bonazelli told Metal Sucks that "both [Whitehead] and Profound Lore label head Chris Bruni hotly dispute [that conviction]." So what? Are convicted felons generally in the business of "hotly endorsing" their verdicts?
But the real resonance of Whitehead and Grail as Madonna and Child is, in fact, a parable that does link up with heavy metal’s ethos. It’s the tale of the vanquished villain returning as the triumphant hero. Whether or not you "hotly dispute" Whitehead’s conviction or call his accuser a liar, as many of his peers have, the scenario turned his music into a morass. From its derisible name to its scattered mess of songs, True Traitor, True Whore—released eight months after Whitehead’s arrest and nine months before his conviction—represented a new nadir in his vast catalogue. "Things were very tenuous," he confessed to Steel for Brains in an interview late last year, "and I wasted a lot of time being as drunk as possible during that period."
Since his conviction, though, he’s moved to Portland, launched a new label and tattoo business with musician and new girlfriend Stevie Floyd, and had Grail. The family has its own Instagram account and a new band. Once infamously churlish with the media, Whitehead has been candid and even optimistic in recent interviews. "Inspiration and energy-wise," he again told Steel for Brains, "I feel like I’ve returned to a personal space where I can attempt to form what I hear in my head." At least for now, Whitehead seems to have salvaged his life—a heavy metal antagonist-turned-protagonist, beating back the bedlam of his existence to push toward something like redemption.
For the most part, Scar Sighted holds up its end of that deal. As strange and surprising as anything Whitehead has ever made, these 10 songs bristle with an exploratory energy that has long been his best (if rather inconsistent) asset. Though Whitehead has built his reputation as a nominal black metal player, his music is more compelling when that serves as its aesthetic core and not its outward bound. Scar Sighted presses hard against that past. Using uproarious blitzes of black metal only as dynamic peaks or plateaus, Whitehead commandeers the rest of the 64-minute record to create a stylistic phantasmagoria. Death and doom, musique concrète and noise rock, harsh noise and industrial sounds collide, bending into each other to create lurid new shapes.
Every few minutes, Scar Sighted takes another turn, but the moves rarely feel like detours here. In a 10-second window, for instance, "Dawn Vibration" pivots from a pneumatic black metal roar to a death metal stepdown to a bridge that sounds like a dying man screaming over a Nirvana demo tape. There’s momentum to the motion. Similarly, the beautiful title track marches toward low-tempo oblivion, ghoulish voices and creeping riffs haunting a funereal lurch. When Whitehead leaps suddenly into one of its most straightforward black metal spans, the move feels only like another part of Leviathan’s current whole, not the inchoate tangents emblematic of Whitehead’s recent letdowns.
Perhaps the most important element of Scar Sighted is the sense that Whitehead is again controlling chaos, rather than letting it control him. He is and has been something of a studio improviser, using the space of a room and a recording to create unique documents. Paired with real-life instability, that process has caused alternately brilliant and disastrous results. That carries over to an extent with Scar Sighted, as parts of these tunes can sometimes feel formless or flatulent. But many of these tracks are thoughtfully layered, so that you’re always peering through the melee to pick out the sound on the other side. "A Veil Is Lifted" is a stomping, stentorian monster, where a cavalcade of drums battles an army of guitars. But the rhythm fights against rumbles of alien bass and noise. In the background, a fluorescent second guitar riff runs counter to the lead. As "The Smoke of Their Torment" rumbles ahead, Whitehead slashes back and forth with counter-riffs that arrive at extreme angles, not unlike Gorguts’ most dense successes. The song exits through an instrumental comedown, where lumbering bass and discursive drums dance with Whitehead’s atonal guitar. Suddenly, you remember that the guy briefly shared a band with Thurston Moore.
Whitehead foregoes shock-value misogyny and tawdry invective here, but he hasn’t softened. Instead, Scar Sighted depends upon an apocalyptic worldview, where extra effort is futile and ruins are all that’s promised. At the start of "Within Thrall", a multi-tracked chorus of one sings about "the death of the gloaming"; at the close of "The Smoke of Their Torment", an extended reading from Revelation boasts of the wrath of god at the end of time. "All our righteous arts are like filthy rags," Whitehead bellows during the bridge of "Gardens of Coprolite". The song, mind you, is named for fossilized feces.
It’s easiest to think about Whitehead and the last five-to-15 years of his life in reductive terms: For some, he is a felon convicted of domestic abuse, and he may never be anything more. For others, he is a dark dude who was caught in a darker situation, and he’s worked to build a new life and to renew his band. But the truth, at least as suggested by Scar Sighted, is something much more complex. It’s not a record of penance, as it’s about as furious as Whitehead has ever been. But it’s not a record of provocation, either, where he’s calling names and making threats. It seems mostly like an imperfect but intriguing attempt to reorganize his life and reassert his craft, to not right his wrongs but to not repeat them, either.


Featuring members of Priests and Downtown Boys, the D.C. punk collective’s debut is a driving and tenacious record that never loses its feral appeal.

A People’s History of Gauche

Birthed from Washington D.C.’s punk scene like a manifestation of righteous rage, Gauche—which counts as members Priests’ Daniele Yandel, Downtown Boys’ Mary Jane Regalado, and Jason P. Barnett—emerged from the Mid-Atlantic bog in 2015 with a seven-song EP, coupling social commentary and new wave riffs. Four years later, the band debuts their full-length, with six reworked and re-recorded EP tracks plus five new songs that find the band sharpening its sound to a steely point. The studio gloss occasionally smothers, but A People’s History of Gauche is a swamp creature for modern times, a driving and tenacious record that never loses its feral appeal.
Dalliances with atonality and structural devolution evoke Devo or the B-52s, but lyrically, the record is a burn letter shoved in the locker of history’s victors. “Everybody tries to win/Look who gets away with sin…/White men get away,” Regalado snarls on the final track, “Rectangle.” The confluence of the personal and the political helps the record avoid abstraction and stay planted in specificity. This is not a “Schoolhouse Rock” of contemporary politics and colonialist history, but a fevered airing of grievances, a burning flag, a renunciation of respectability politics in favor of a more bracing alternative.
“Pay Day” rails against the ills of capitalism, repeating the phrase, “I know I can’t survive like this.” The wallop of the drums and the galloping bassline are as exhilarating as the lines, “Income, always think about payday/Always waiting on wages/Always think about systems.” Tell me about it, a freelancer somewhere sighs. “History,” the best song from the earlier EP, still rises to the top of the full-length, but it’s one instance in which all the studio bells and whistles might have been a distracting temptation: the driving bass that kicks off both versions finds a tamer counterpart in the cacophony of sounds, a mix that seems to put every instrument in competition with each other.
The album dips in and out of tempos, themes, and varying degrees of intensity without losing any of its urgency. “Boom Hazard,” an ode to implosion both nuclear and relational, provides a salve against the fury and sadness that bookend it. The avant-garde saxophone trills of “Dirty Jacket” lowers your adrenaline before the inevitable spike one song later. The spectrum of subjects covered, from economic disparity to surveillance, clearly defines an insidious and omnipresent “they,” the monolith of power and oppression against which Gauche beat their fists. It’s the government; it’s the bigots with money; it’s history writ large, the way there’s no erasing erasure.
Early on, “Cycles” addresses the ravages of white supremacy, Eric Garner (“Reading all about how/He can’t breathe/Or walk around at night”) and bodies piled at the border: “Lost in the desert/She is not alive/Cuz impunity lasts a long, long time.” The horn weaves around this human rot, and yet this is the paradox Gauche asks us to contemplate: the clarion call to bear witness to the atrocity of history while writing one anew. A People’s History is not the first musical rejection of modern ills, but it’s one of the most unflinching. It is the soundtrack to both a particular moment and the defiance that’s powered the proletariat since history began.


Beyoncé parlays her role in Disney’s The Lion King to put out a fine companion album that showcases today’s African stars.

The Lion King: The Gift

As Beyoncé’s art has grown outwardly political and pro-Black throughout the decade, she has increasingly called upon African-born artists to participate in and inform her work. She did this with Tofo Tofo, the Mozambican pantsula dancers who appeared in her 2011 “Run the World (Girls)” video. In her self-titled era, she sampled Nigerian feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on 2013’s “***Flawless,” and Griot vocalist Ismael Kouyaté on the Afro-inspired “Grown Woman.” The Lemonade film, which was threaded by excerpts of Somali British poet Warsan Shire’s work, featured ritual Yoruba body makeup work by Nigerian American artist Laolu Senbanjo. During her 2018 set at Global Citizen Fest South Africa, she recruited a local choir to add Zulu backing vocals to a performance of “Halo.” And later that year, her headlining Coachella performance interpolated Fela Kuti, which can be heard on the subsequent Homecoming film and album.
In her ongoing quest to both pay homage to a Black cultural history and contextualize herself within it, she took advantage of her role as Nala in the super-CGI remake of The Lion King and hired a swath of African artists and producers for a new album inspired by the movie. The Gift is an extension of Beyoncé’s work and its themes of ancestry, self-love, spirituality, and family. But its main purpose is to showcase today’s African musical stars, putting their sound on an enormous platform using the commercial reach of one of the world’s biggest pop titans and Disney’s highest-grossing franchise.
Similar to Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther–inspired album and other recent globetrotting works like Drake’s More Life and GoldLink’s Diaspora, The Gift is thrilling because of the diasporic connections being made through collaboration. African artists from Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and South Africa all display a wide range of regional genres and merge them with American styles. This works best on tracks like “My Power,” where rap weirdo Tierra Whack and Top 40 songwriter Nija join forces with South African gqom badasses Busiswa and Moonchild Sanelly for a searing DJ Lag–produced track about Black girl determination and resilience. Meanwhile, “Don’t Jealous Me” features a survey of different artists that fall under the oft-misused umbrella term of Afrobeat, as Nigerian stars Tekno, Yemi Alade, and Mr Eazi bring their own signature swagger to a sinister gqom-inflected banger. “Mood 4 Eva,” featuring A-listers Bey, Jay-Z, and Childish Gambino, flips a sample Malian artist Oumou Sangaré’s 1989 Wassoulou song “Diaraby Nene” into a buoyant, hedonistic flex track.
The album also nods to Africa’s influence in Caribbean music with “Already,” a track that draws out the rhythmic similarities between dancehall and Afropop by linking Ghanaian artist Shatta Wale with global riddim fetishizers Major Lazer. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed “African giant” Burna Boy warns against blindly following the crowd on his solo track “Ja Ara E,” a track that channels Fela Kuti with a laidback dembow groove.
But, as critics and artists were quick to point out, The Gift doesn’t completely cover all the regions and styles that Africa has to offer. There are no featured East or North African artists, which is particularly odd considering The Lion King’s setting is loosely based on Kenyan geographical features and the character’s names originate from the East African language of Swahili. Beyoncé does her best to rectify the lack of representation by including Swahili in the beginning of “Spirit,” the only Gift song that appears in the movie, and even sings in the language at the end of “Otherside,” a glowing H.E.R.-style ballad about the afterlife. But ultimately, The Gift’s emphasis on West African Afropop and South African house seems like a half-measure in an album that presents itself as extremely dedicated to some kind of authenticity, especially coming from the reliably meticulous Beyoncé.
Beyoncé is still at her best when she goes off-book and gets personal. “Brown Skin Girl,” featuring Blue Ivy, Brooklyn rapper Saint Jhn, and Nigerian pop star Wizkid, doesn’t seem to be tied to a particular Lion King plot point. And uncoincidentally, it’s one of the more touching songs on the album. After Blue Ivy sings the hook with growing assuredness, Bey sings directly to her and any other Black girl who might be judged or dismissed based on her appearance: “I love everything about you, from your nappy curls/To every single curve, your body natural… I never trade you for anybody else,” she sings in a truly heartfelt case for self-acceptance. Beyoncé takes care to dole these pearls of wisdom in a way that’s specific, but also universal to those of African descent. “Bigger,” both directed towards her offspring and anyone else who is of the diaspora, is a rallying call to aspire to greatness, because your life is connected to a greater Black legacy and history.
But not every track on the album shakes off the precious Disney vibes. The most lackluster songs don’t have a strong conceptual core, meeting the prompt of being “inspired by” The Lion King and not doing much else. On “Water,” Cameroonian singer Salatiel sings about meeting your love interest “by the river,” conjuring up images of Simba and Nala. But confusingly, Pharrell just chants lines about water wings: “Yes, we can make it far/Don't need inflatables.” “Spirit,” the gospel-bop ballad, makes a lot of sense in the movie when it soundtracks two incredibly realistic animated lions bounding through the desert, but it doesn’t fit well with the other, more loose and ambitious tracks.
Even though Bey has referred to The Gift as “sonic cinema,” the album stands in the shadow of a movie that stands in the shadow of the 1994 original. Though not fully comprehensive or that musically far-reaching (due to its prioritization of African genres that have already experienced crossover success), the album still succeeds in introducing a whole new musical universe to the average American listener. And for fans already familiar with genres on The Gift, it arrives as a crucial, all-too-rare example in which African music and culture are actually being presented in the American mainstream by the artists who make it. It’s an honorable feat for Beyoncé, who has repeatedly put time, money, and energy into recruiting African talents, broadening the scope of what pop can look and sound like. Only this time, it’s a soundtrack for a Disney movie about cats.


Morgan Geist and Mike Kelley’s first outing as a duo takes in a broad sweep of early-’80s reference points—disco, new romantic, sophistipop—that come together in an opalescent swirl.

Au Suisse

Morgan Geist and Kelley Polar (aka Mike Kelley) have been flouting dancefloor orthodoxy for more than two decades. Around the turn of the millennium, as producers on both sides of the Atlantic were stripping house and techno down to their essence, Geist and Darshan Jesrani’s duo Metro Area went the other direction, reviving the buoyant hallmarks of early-’80s disco and boogie—airy flute solos, pew-pew raygun drums, and sashaying Rhodes keys, topped with a splash of Kelley’s insouciant strings. Kelley, a viola prodigy and Juilliard graduate, went even further with his two albums that have inspired feverish devotion, while Metro Area helped lay the groundwork for Lindstrøm, Hercules & Love Affair, and the slowly building disco revival that would bring us, a decade later, to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. Who knew that a viola and some laser zaps were so revolutionary?
Aside from a fluke UK No. 1 in 2013, Geist has never matched the heights of Metro Area, though he’s remained active with short-lived affairs like the electro-funk side project Baby Oliver and the Jessy Lanza collaboration the Galleria, a freestyle-fueled ode to New Jersey’s shopping malls. Those records were charming if slightly hermetic—loving pastiches of outmoded sounds aimed primarily at fellow dance-music history buffs. But Au Suisse, Geist and Kelley’s first duo outing together after 30-odd years of friendship, feels like a major step: a cohesive and original musical statement that builds on their prior work while breaking new ground for both of them.
Behind the album’s aura of glowing tubes and brushed stainless steel is a carefully assembled tool kit of vintage synth patches, punchy electronic drums, and flickering funk guitar. Many sounds—the gaseous vox pads and trim hi-hat groove of “Thing,” the chugging arpeggios and white-noise snares of “GC”—could have come straight from a Metro Area session. But Au Suisse benefits from two extra decades of engineering know-how; Geist’s music has never sounded more sumptuous than it does here.
More importantly, widening their gaze beyond the dancefloor has allowed Geist and Kelley to expand their stylistic range, taking in a broad sweep of early-’80s reference points—disco, new romantic, sophistipop—that come together in an opalescent swirl. Like the best backward-looking art, their synth-pop amalgam is charged with an air of déjà vu: Here’s a bit of Pet Shop Boys, here’s some early Talk Talk, here’s a wisp of Scritti Politti. (One of the album’s best songs, the ethereal “Vesna,” brings to mind Tones on Tail’s 1984 single “Lions,” an ambient-pop masterpiece that far more artists ought to take cues from.) But thanks in large part to Kelley’s distinctive singing style, they sound, more than anything, like Au Suisse—no mean feat for a group so steeped in tradition.
Kelley’s unaccompanied voice is the first thing we hear, and he remains the album’s guiding force throughout. Often singing in falsetto, his tone is soft and supple, by turns swooning and arch; like the singers he emulates, he’s not afraid of affectation, even indulging in the occasional trace of a British accent. Yet his voice can be surprisingly sturdy when he wants it to be, and even at his most gossamer, he makes bold melodic choices. One of the album’s chief pleasures is the disorienting chord progressions that tilt songs on their axes without warning, and Kelley’s cool, centering presence offers a steadying hand through these moments of giddy upheaval.
He sings, mostly, about lost love, a topic that feels perfectly suited to the duo’s melancholy mien. Some lyrics consist of little more than stock phrases strung together—“All’s fair in love and war/So I ain’t gonna give up,” goes the chorus of the closing “AG,” a contemplative tone poem set to tick-tocking hi-hats—but the meaning of the words matters less than the way the phonemes perfume the air. The least successful songs, like the lilting “Eely,” are those where the synths, chord changes, and vocal tone fail to spark something greater than the sum of their parts. But occasionally, Kelley manages some striking lyrical turns.
In “Thing,” the closest thing here to a dancefloor hit, he distills a story of unrequited love down to a vivid image: “When she came to me I thought I knew enough to hold her/And she gave me pennies, just the little stuff/Not worth the time to add it up.” The opening “Control,” one of the album’s best songs, takes the torch from Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore, spinning power, religion, and sensuality into cryptic verses that are all the more seductive for their ambiguity. And “Vesna” sketches the story of a Serbian flight attendant who, half a century ago, fell to earth from an exploded airplane, the lone survivor of what was either a terrorist bombing or a military attack gone wrong: “Were her eyes closed or open? Clouds rushing past/Did she wonder how far? Did she wonder how fast?” sings Kelley, his voice as soft as cumulus formations, before the song’s meditation on fate takes a movingly empathetic turn: “And I wish I could ask her/Fading into the blue/Did you always know deep down, deep down/That it would have to be you?”
As striking as the lyrics of “Vesna” are, the real pleasure is in the way that Kelley’s hushed, reverberant harmonies gel with Geist’s pneumatic keys. The same goes for “Control,” where synths and voice dance in a graceful pas de deux. Despite the frequent harmonic maximalism, the album’s production is marked by a gratifying sense of restraint. There’s a beautiful moment around the three-minute mark where the music shrinks down to make room for Kelley’s voice; half a minute later, as Kelley sings his final “Hallelujah,” the song builds to a climax that’s unexpectedly reserved given the heart-in-mouth buildup. Even at their most emphatic, Au Suisse’s songs don’t so much explode as unfurl—gracefully, regally, like pennants announcing the anointed heirs to a long tradition of lush, emotive synth-pop: a little dandyish, at times even a little absurd, but still dazzling in their silken finery.


London bedroom producer follows a slew of excellent EPs and remixes with his much-anticipated Ghostly debut LP.

Lucky Shiner

The debut album from British electronic producer Gold Panda is immersed in nostalgia. It's a go-to emotion for every era, but, thanks to the eternal memory bank known as the Internet, this is a particularly fruitful time for looking back. But not all remembrances are created equal. The majority of today's cultural nostalgia is dominated by a cheap, remember-that-show quality that ultimately infantilizes its audience into submission. Shameless nods to yesterday's TV/music/movies are fine for a quick escape, but they can also make tomorrow that much more daunting. Still, when approached with more care, peering into the past can be invigorating. Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig summed up the two sides with characteristic eloquence on this year's Contra, singing about how we're "nostalgic for garbage, desperate for time." Koenig is one of the good guys in the current Nostalgia Wars, and so is Gold Panda.
The London-based producer's main instrument is an Akai MPC2000XL sampler, which allows him to rearrange, repurpose, and recycle previously recorded sounds at the touch of a button. By nature, it's a nostalgic machine. And he uses it to push things forward; he's not just sampling what we know already on Lucky Shiner, he's using sounds that mean something to him-- a tapping keyboard, a sped-up or slowed-down recording of someone saying the word "you," exotic-sounding instruments unfamiliar to a Westerner's experience-- and attempting to universalize them. This process is something of an internal challenge, as the beat maker told me in an interview last year. "I usually find stuff that I hope no one really knows or cares about," he said, talking about his sample selection. "If I'm ripping off something that's already brilliant, what's the point?" Because of this, the dusty melancholia of Lucky Shiner feels earned and lived-in. It's a far cry from just naming your new bedroom-pop band Double Dare.
While this is the first Gold Panda long-player after a slew of EPs and remixes over the last couple years, he just turned 30. Not to get all "respect your elders" with it, but the Londoner's relatively advanced age probably adds depth to his stoic reminisces. As a hushed acoustic guitar/found sounds track, "Parents" is a telling anomaly on the album. The song is introduced by some heavily-accented words from the producer's grandmother, after whom Lucky Shiner is also named. It's an interlude that offers little on its own but offers an irrefutable bit of personalization early on and is invaluable to the album's homespun wistfulness as a whole. Even if you can't understand what she's saying, the voice has the unmistakably kind lilt of a grandmother; it draws you into the instrumental elegance elsewhere.
In sonic terms, Gold Panda breathes the same kind of life into his work as Four Tet. His beats are mechanical but also intensely human. But Gold Panda's trigger finger is a bit itchier. His signature tic involves short, unique samples that burst in rhythmic repetition. So on opener "You", the words "you and me" are sliced into individual pieces and then tapped in brain-screwing succession as a bulbous beat makes the song all too ready for the club inside your head. And "Before We Talked" rides on a quicksilver pulse made up of tiny squelches and glitches that are Aphex-like in precision and scope. Oftentimes, plinking notes from various unique, piano-like sounds add a spotlit solemnity underneath or alongside the drums. A sense of well-thought-out album-style completeness is evident throughout, too, with the two aforementioned tracks coming with their own sequels later on in the form of "After We Talked" and a closer also named "You". But the last track isn't a reprise as much as a hard-won ending point; whereas the opener is fast and friendly, it's "you"s popping quick, Lucky Shiner's finale is noticeably more contemplative with the sampled "you" now stretched-out and slowed. It's always about "you," but perhaps not the same "you" as before.
In some ways, the idea of nostalgia is averse to growth. Mourning the loss of time (even good time) can be intoxicating and stagnant. That's not what Gold Panda is doing. He's recognizing that loss, articulating it with a multitude of finely-placed sounds, and then coming to grips with his place in the here and now. He's making nostalgia work for him without consuming him. "I'm just really happy to be happy for the first time since I was about 20," he said last year. "It's nice to just do my hobby and be able to live." It's easy to hear his joy through those rejiggered memories.


After two fine EPs, the experimental hip-hop project helmed by former Digable Planets leader Ishmael Butler steps out with a brilliant full-length debut.

Black Up

Shabazz Palaces emerged two years ago with an air of carefully cultivated mystery: Two EPs appeared, identified only by the Arabic patches on their covers. The music was some of the most exploratory hip-hop of the year, an enticing batch of fragmented raps and woozy, disorienting beats. You could find precedents for this stuff-- the amorphous wanderings of cLOUDDEAD, the jazz rap of the early 1990s-- but these EPs were largely on some sui generis shit: Nothing else out there sounded quite like Shabazz Palaces.
The Shabazz Palaces and Of Light EPs featured an MC going by the name Palaceer Lazaro, and he introduced an alternately glittering and gritty urban noir taking place in the unlikely setting of Seattle. That the reedy yet resonant voice behind Palaceer's raps was readily identifiable as Ishmael "Butterfly" Butler of downtempo rap collective Digable Planets (and, later, Cherrywine) did little to lift the shroud. Butler declined interviews and dodged photographers, and when he did speak, his answers were as evasive as his raps were richly, if obliquely, illustrative.
His reticence was an attempt to let the music speak for itself and avoid comparisons to his previous acts (adding some alluring intrigue didn't hurt). And some comparisons are inevitable: The EPs continued the darkening trend that occurred in between Digable's unlikely breakthrough Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) and thornier follow-up Blowout Comb, and which developed further with the sinister funk of Cherrywine. But if Shabazz Palaces' first phase was about building a mystique, their Sub Pop debut is the product of opening up. Black Up lets some sunlight in, breathes fresh air, and finds Butler returning to an occasionally lighter flow, the most unburdened he's sounded since the world first heard him. Which is not to say that these are easy, uncomplicated songs. Butler continues to eschew traditional verse-chorus structures in favor of tracks that unpredictably diverge and then pool into lone, evocative words or concise chants. And if some of Butler's rhymes and sonics are breezier than before, his tracks still retain their moody, hard-thudding, and sometimes psychedelic atmospheres.
Most of these tracks end somewhere very different from where they begin. "Free Press and Curl" opens the album with a down but defiant rap ("Musically and bitch-wise, too/ I lost the best beat that I had") delivered over stuttering crunching drums and bass vibrations. Three minutes in, the tempo slows into a kind of galley song, a murky drift over which Butler fires off a couple of final, biblically imperative ("thou shalt...") verses. "An echo from the hosts that profess infinitum" (the album's track titles throughout are fascinating) begins as a playground chant stretched and smeared into a queasy loop over muffled kick and grainy snare. But then after a minute, everything drops out for a spooky mbira solo from Shabazz sideman and percussionist Tendai Maraire. "Youlogy" starts as a busy, druggy swirl-- a heaving bass, a synth wobbling in one ear, voices cut and pasted, echoing asymmetrically, everything dropping out on the word "high" in "to get you HIGH"-- and then breaks for some jazz trumpet and snippets of stylized dialogue, before proceeding as an altogether different, relatively cleared-out, bass-and-drum track.
That Shabazz Palaces' songs follow such inscrutable routes makes it all the more striking when they coalesce around a repeated word or phrase. "Free Press" builds up to the rousing chant, "You know I'm free!" over a ghosted gospel chorus. On "Are You... Can You... Were You? (Felt)", Butler exclaims, over ringing piano notes, wafting strings, and one great tinfoil handclap that swings in just half a beat later than expected, "It's a feeling!" "Recollections of the Wraith" glides in on two of the album's most effortless choruses, Butler first proclaiming/promising, "Tonight!" over a swooning, oohing female vocal, and then requesting, "Clear some space out/ So we can space out." That last one is about as involved as any chorus here gets-- these are hooks boiled down to their most essential.
Even forays into traditional structure end up typically idiosyncratic. The album's lone loverman song comes out a treatise-- well, actually, "A treatease dedicated to The Avian Airess from North East Nubis (1000 questions, 1 answer)". It's birds and bees rendered as bop poetry, working up to an insistently smooth come-on line that turns from astral to anatomical with the addition of one little two-letter word: "I want to be there/ Let me be in there." The record's dis track, "yeah you", snarls and bites but it also laments and ends as a breathless, headlong exorcism. All this is both in keeping with Butler's track record and indicative of his status as a hip-hop elder, an MC with some well-earned gray in his goatee. And it's deeply refreshing to hear an artist who exudes such depth and consideration.
Still, Butler is hardly yelling the kids off his lawn-- in fact, two of Black Up's best moments come from young guest stars THEESatisfaction, a similarly "afro-eccentric" female duo with whom Shabazz Palaces have been collaborating for much of the past year. Cat Satisfaction lends her rich singing voice to the dusty, repurposed jazz of "Endeavors For Never (The last time we spoke you said you were not here. I saw you though.)", while partner Thee Stasia raps over the hard, roboticized boom bap of album closer "Swerve... The reeping of all that is worthwhile (Noir not withstanding)". That the last sound you hear on the album is one of THEESatisfaction's voices echoing out into the ether feels like an anointment and a look ahead (news that Sub Pop signed the duo leaked back in February).
For all his recent (relative) forthrightness, Butler is still fascinated by art's ability to communicate what conversations cannot. "I can't explain it with words/ I have to do it," he raps on one song; on another, he delivers one of the album's catchiest, most motivating maxims: "If you talk about it, it's a show/ But if you move about it, then it's a go." Beyond the "just do it" swooshing of these lines is a meatier paradox: that Butler uses a lyrical form to decry the limitations of words and exalt the meaningfulness of action. In Shabazz Palaces, Butler enacts the union of these opposites-- words as action, action into words-- and it's no exaggeration to call this transmutation what it is: magic.


Ygg Huur isn’t as punishingly loud as 2012’s Years Past Matter, which only make it easier to notice that this is the densest Krallice material ever, with all those hyperactive and coordinated guitars tucked inside sub-seven-minute windows and accompanied by a rhythm section more audacious and commanding then ever. Most everything works as a wondrous, complicated blur.

Ygg Huur

Near the end of the last decade, Krallice and Liturgy were often mentioned in the same sentence as two New York bands changing the face of black metal. They both arrived at around the same time with provocative, fresh-faced takes on the sometimes-stiff sound. The specifics of exactly what they did were, of course, very different. Where Krallice favored long-form dioramas built from two tessellated guitars and a bedrock rhythm section, Liturgy favored shorter, screeching numbers that hinged around the band's ability to make time seem flexible, as though it might be expanded and contracted at will. Still, they were members of the same promising freshman class.
In the seven years since Krallice and Liturgy issued their debut recordings, though, the distinctions between the two have only grown. Liturgy have, as if by design, emerged as the flashpoint, pairing their radical ambitions with a soap-opera-like tendency for drama. Krallice, meanwhile, have become a workmanlike squad, steadily releasing albums that have increased the complexity and scale of their sound without ever recasting it completely. There have been no breakups, no public feuds, no manifestos and no grand announcements. But when Krallice delivered their first album in three years late last month, the riveting and delirious Ygg Huur, the six songs arrived as a simple Bandcamp download, sans all advanced notice. Ygg Huur is by far more nuanced and developed than Liturgy's unsteady The Ark Work—a byproduct, it would seem, of Krallice's steadfast, head-down evolution.
By Krallice standards, Ygg Huur is a tiny album. It's about half the length of each of Krallice's four previous records and short enough to fit on a single LP when it gets a physical release from Gilead Media later this year. Ygg Huur isn't as punishingly loud as 2012's Years Past Matter, either, an album on which all of the instruments seemed pushed firmly against some invisible volume ceiling. Those changes only make it easier to notice that this is the densest Krallice material ever, with all those hyperactive and coordinated guitars tucked inside sub-seven-minute windows and accompanied by a rhythm section more audacious and commanding than ever.
Despite including the dazzling technicians Colin Marston and Mick Barr, Krallice's past releases could seem, if not simple, easy enough to follow, even during 16-minute marathons. But most everything on Ygg Huur works as a wondrous, complicated blur. Lev Weinstein's drums sometimes switch tempos so that you barely notice at all and sometimes redirect the momentum to the point of whiplash. The guitars and Nicholas McMaster's bass spiderweb around his beats, moving up, down and around central riffs so quickly that they appear forever suspended in motion. The switchbacks toward the end of "Tyranny of Thought", for instance, are impossibly precise and precarious. During "Idols", the four pieces slide in and out of sync with one another, gliding past each other only to reconnect like the separate strands of an automated cat's cradle.
Krallice named Ygg Huur for a three-piece suite by late Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, remembered most for his creeping, miniscule movements around a single pitch. His original Ygghur suggests the slow, barely wavering drones of Yoshi Wada's earth horns or Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies, except limited to a single cello. It is a fitting reference point for what Krallice has become. On these six songs, they de-emphasize the rock'n'roll role of riffs to the point that this music works as sets of ever-shifting rhythms, gilded by slight fluctuations in pitch. "Wastes of Ocean" scans like a competition to see who can navigate constant changes of pace the best; even the vocals are forced to slip between the stop-and start volleys. During "Over Spirit", Barr, Marston, and McMaster move so rapidly and exactly between each note that the guitars and drums trade places; the drums provide the movement as the amplified strings provide the more stable framework. A colossus, Ygg Huur reflects the accretion of a thousand minute decisions, not unlike the microtonal work from which it takes its name.
Liturgy's The Ark Work and Krallice's Ygg Huur do reveal one new connection between the fellow former upstarts, however unintentional. In their return to the studio and stage, Liturgy have insisted they are not playing black metal, a point reinforced by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's strained rapping. And though Krallice have made no special effort to say as much (in fact, their Bandcamp page still describes this and every previous album as black metal), Krallice don't, either. Sure, these six songs examine oblivion and apocalypse, arriving at McMaster's closing proclamation that "No matter what, it ends this way/ With me taking your body to the fire." But there is little atavistic rage here, and there are no grand, horn-lifting moments. Instead, these six songs have as much to do with modern composition and prog rock as they do with the black metal mold from which they came. It's been three years since the release of Krallice's very good last album, the longest gap ever in their otherwise clockwork catalogue. It was time well spent, at least: Ygg Huur is more vivid, vexing, and meticulous than most of what the band's old peers still call black metal—a sentence Krallice no longer need to share.


Clearing the lo-fi haze of her previous work, the Los Angeles-based songwriter’s third album reveals astral Americana hymns that hover somewhere between the dirt and the stars.

Metal Bird

Though she tends to sing softly, Eve Adams has never been one to mince words. On her first two records, the Oklahoma native sounded like a natural-born torch singer cocooned in a cloud of smoke, her straight-from-the-heart serenades wilfully corrupted by all manner of lo-fi abstraction. Still, the album titles—2017’s In Hell and 2019’s Candy Colored Doom—provided a crystal-clear indication of where her head was at, and when her words did occasionally cut through the textural haze, they were liable to leave scars. “Loving you is driving me mad/Just like murder/Like a good homicide,” she sang on her debut’s “Good Homicide,” before blithely admitting how desire so often leads to disappointment: “We got married at 23/He left the next year/And I felt nothing.”
Adams’ third album bears a more oblique title than its predecessors, but its inspiration is no less fraught. Metal Bird is the product of a tumultuous period beginning in 2018, when Adams uprooted herself from her homebase in Montreal and relocated to Los Angeles to be with family in the wake of a tragedy, while also traveling to Vancouver to convene with producer Bryce Cloghesy (a.k.a. avant-pop soundscaper Military Genius, and a member of art-punk collective Crack Cloud). Throughout that city-hopping experience, the airplane—the proverbial “metal bird”—came to represent a lot of different things to Adams: a link to familial obligations in a time of sorrow, a getaway vehicle transporting her the studio sanctuary where she could process that grief, and an aerial waystation where she could feel at home at a time when the concept seemed undefined.
Accordingly, Metal Bird feels blissfully unmoored from any sense of time and space, its astral Americana hymns hovering somewhere between the dirt and the stars, between a bygone golden age and our tense present, between raw intimacy and dreamlike splendor. It marks the moment when Adams boldly liberates herself from the off-the-cuff, obfuscating qualities of her previous work to deliver her words with radiant, broadcast-worthy clarity. But while Metal Bird is deceptively spare—only three of its 10 songs feature any sort of percussion—it retains the artful consideration of her earlier recordings, albeit in radically different form. In lieu of her past dream-pop reveries, bedroom beats, and musique-concrète drones, Adams pits her songs against a distant skyline filled in with exquisite strings, psychedelic twang, and subtle saxophone shading: the weightless waltz “You’re Not Wrong” conjures the floating 1940s fantasias of Mercury Rev circa Deserter’s Songs, while the title track cradles its electric psych-folk finger-picking in a hypnotic organ hum like a stripped-down busker version of Spiritualized.
Metal Bird is a nocturnal album, and the further you go, the darker it gets. On the chilling “Woman on Your Mind,” Adams gives voice to the Other Woman who’s no longer content with her secondary status, and is practically hoping her lover’s wife discovers the scent of her cigarettes on his clothes: “Did I say that the smoke will come right out?” she taunts. “We can close the blinds as tight as you like, but the neighbors already know.” For the most part, however, Adams isn’t engaging in dramatic dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning so much as savoring the dead-of-night stillness to reclaim some peace of mind. Over the circular refrain of “Butterflies,” she stretches her syllables out in a series of extended sighs, yielding an all-verse, no-chorus confessional that’s part breakup song, part meditative breathing exercise. By contrast, “Blues Look the Same” is all tough-love therapy, a matter-of-fact lament about lost innocence and cruel twists of fate rendered in sepia-toned Mazzy Star guitar slides.
But with the closing “My Only Dream,” Adams arrives at something resembling inner harmony. Atop cinematic strings, she dispenses a stream of Kurt Vile-style zen philosophies: “It ain’t nothing like what you been watching on the movie screen, and it ain’t free, and you ain’t going to find it on late-night TV,” she confides, before adding, “It’s not a word that I’ve ever heard, it’s my only dream.” She never reveals what that “it” is exactly, but the message is clear enough: happiness can be yours too, if you let go of your traditional conceptions of it.

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The young Detroit DJ and producer Kyle Hall makes good on his promise with his latest album From Joy. A three-LP set featuring eight expansive tracks, From Joy is ambitious but warm and approachable, blending the ensemble feel of jazz with the 4/4 drums of house music.

From Joy

Through no fault of his own, Kyle Hall landed in the somewhat precarious position of having Detroit's hopes pinned to him. Since the young DJ and producer debuted in 2007 on fellow Detroiter Omar S's FXHE imprint, Hall has been viewed as the great hope for the next generation of Detroit dance music. Hall kept up his end of the bargain, fostering the potent Wild Oats label, throwing parties in the city and, crucially, not absconding to New York or London or Berlin. Kyle Hall is doing it all, and his 2013 debut album, The Boat Party, sounded like it, anxiously flitting between a host of styles: electro, ghetto tech, filter disco, beat tracks.
It's against this backdrop of fervent activity that Hall's second album, From Joy, stands out so fully. A richly melodic exploration that expertly balances astral reverie with rhythmic heft, it's the kind of fully realized statement no one was really expecting Hall to make. Not because he didn't have the talent, but because, well, he seemed busy. A three-LP set featuring eight expansive tracks, From Joy is ambitious but warm and approachable. In its openness, imagination, and sense of history, From Joy feels like the child of Detroit's legendary exploratory radio shows. The concept is simple: jazzy pianos, walking basslines, and probing synth explorations welded to house music's 4/4 drum templates.
Jazz has always been valuable in house music—as source material and as a thematic link to another form of (largely black) outsider expression—but From Joy uses jazz a little differently than usual. Hall doesn't sample much here, instead borrowing from jazz its ensemble nature, the sense of unity achieved when the elements of a track lock together just so. Where most dance music feels sequenced, From Joy feels played. Where most machine music employs randomizations and swung notes to remind you of its human nature, From Joy just kind of flows.
Hall is able to achieve this in part because From Joy sounds fantastic. You will pass entire tracks—five- and six-minutes long—zeroing in on the richness of one tone or another. For all of a synthesizer's endless possibilities, it's easy to remember that many of them were conceived with the more conservative purpose of emulating traditional instruments. And From Joy is conservative in this sense, dialing up exquisite, harmonically rich synth basslines—see opener "Damn! I'm Feeln Real Close"—and sonorous leads. One of the album's least dance-y tracks, the contemplative "Wake Up and Dip," is a showcase for a squelchy solo as expressive and felt as any old vanguard. Hall does all this without betraying his dance music bonafides, as side-long tracks such as "Dervenen" and "Strut Garden" offer DJs and dancers ample acreage. The latter track improbably lives up to its name, a whole lawn of little jukes and swaggers. Its bassline makes all the familiar moves, freeing you to make the unfamiliar ones.
From Joy effortlessly functions as both dance music and a home listening experience. Kyle Hall, an artist who has built his young career around doing it all, has made an album that does it all. From Joy, imbued with the past but not overly reverent of it, is Hall cashing in on the prodigious talent glimpsed in his prior work. It's tempting to hold it up as a capital-letter statement, a totem of his hometown. It's equally tempting, and probably healthier, to spin it back and delight in its abundance.


The spirits of repetition and improvisation color the latest from this guitar, pedal, and analog machine-loving symphonic band.

Vision Swim

Laptop composers often reference the arc of the symphonic music, with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Bands like Growing-- who favor guitars and pedals and analog machines and leave a tail of patch cords dragging behind them as they move from town-to-town-- seem like they're always tinkering, listening to each other, and deciding in the moment what comes next. This analog-based live approach can lead, oddly enough, to heavy use of repetition. Sometimes Growing stay with a certain effect, holding it and letting it spin in place until they figure out where they're going to go next.
Such repetition is key to their latest album Vision Swim, as is the sense of in-the-moment discovery. Here Growing often seem like they're tending a sound garden more than composing. "Morning Drive" begins with a throb of acidic feedback drone that never lets up, giving the tune the 4/4 pulse of mid-tempo techno. And when guitar sounds gradually come in, they're unstable notes flying all over the place, circling and tearing off like flies trying to dodge the tail of an angry cow. Whether or not it was all planned out in advance, the track sounds like something created by listening as much as playing, as if bassist Kevin Doria and guitarist Joe Denardo didn't know themselves exactly where it was going and after eleven minutes just decided to wind it down. This looseness gives "Morning Drive" a nice sense of unpredictability, its emotional ambiguity and zig-zag direction helping to reinforce repeat plays.
Vision Swim makes clear that Growing are at their best when their music has these frayed edges. The pure drone of 2004's* Soul of The Rainbow And The Harmony Of Light* on Kranky, for example, was solid but had nowhere near this amount of personality; a more restless music, away form the quest for the perfect harmonic sequence, is where Growing's strengths lie. Sometimes, as on the 15-minute "On Anon", the various guitar delays, crunching distortion and squiggly notes assemble into a torrent of sound that's loud and frightening with a molten core of beauty that even a kindergartener could appreciate. Here they approach the sublime tension perfected by Black Dice on "Endless Happiness", where they manage to be simultaneously both fuck-you obnoxious and warmly ingratiating.
Nothing else on Vision Swim quite approaches the knockout power of "On Anon" but all of it is at least pretty good. "Emseepee" also creates a bedrock bass rhythm off which playful bits of distortion pivot, "Lightfoot" turns white guitar noise into a wave pool, pushing forward with discrete surges of feedback. I haven't heard quite enough Growing to call this their best record, but it sounds to me like they're thinking hard about what goes where and why, finding new ways to get the most out of their varied sound palette.


Lil Baby’s official debut is technically impressive: polished, efficient, but also kind of nondescript.

Harder Than Ever

One of Lil Baby’s things is that he wears normal clothes, I guess. “Real dope boy I ain’t nothing like the weirdos/Never seen me putting on no weird clothes,” the Atlanta rapper states upfront on his debut Harder Than Ever, though by most accounts he owes his career to some of those same weirdos. Baby came up watching Young Thug and Migos in the studio, and it was Thug’s eager cosign along with the backing of Migos’ label Quality Control that put him on the national radar last year, mere months after he picked up a microphone—an incredible stroke of fortune for someone who’d spent the previous two years “sitting in prison getting no mail,” as he puts it here.
Baby’s rapping isn’t any flashier than his fashion sense. He rhymes in a tuneful, half-sung stream of thought, sort of like a more nuanced Rich Homie Quan. On a purely technical level, he’s impressive. His words are vivid, his emotions pronounced, and his flow is frictionless; he hovers just over every beat like a puck on an air hockey table. In a rap scene suddenly dominated by eccentrics and self-proclaimed rock stars, there’s room for a rapper this grounded, even if that isn’t the most exciting stake to claim. His practical, melodic flow is an alternative to Migos’ staccato patter or the indifference of SoundCloud rappers like Playboi Carti—a respectable option for listeners who like the general sound of Atlanta right now, but find some of those other guys over-the-top.
Harder Than Ever is mostly of a piece with the mixtapes that preceded it, it does flaunt some of the privileges of Baby’s rising stature. The beats are a little better this time, more voluptuous and, yes, harder. Baby leans particularly on producer Quay Global, whose work is a bit like Baby’s delivery: polished, efficient, and kind of nondescript. And most prominently, Baby has landed a Drake feature, the ultimate score for any rapper looking to take their regional act global.
What a debacle their collaboration turns out to be, though. While Drake does just enough to make sure “Yes Indeed” charts, Baby completely flubs his verse, inexplicably adopting a quirky flow that cuts against his entire persona. Pitching his voice somewhere between Young Thug at his whiniest and Pharrell’s deliberately dopey Swae Lee impression from “Chanel,” he even tests a dead-on-arrival catchphrase: “Wahhhh wahhhh wahhhh, bitch I’m Lil Baby.” It’s a complete misrepresentation of what he stands for, an introduction to a far more insufferable rapper than the one who’s been building heat for the last year.
The album’s other features fare better, especially the ones from some of those aforementioned weirdos. Lil Uzi Vert and Young Thug both sweep through their tracks with the crazed velocity of untied helium balloons, and Offset absolutely crushes “Transporter,” sending volts through the track. Lil Baby takes his verse after Offset’s, and dexterous as it is, it’s a bit like trying to follow an incredible magic act with a PowerPoint presentation about fuel economy—highlighting the challenge of being a rapper as low-key as Baby. In a thrilling world of weirdos, it takes more than just showing up to make an impact.

Quality Control / Motown / Capitol / Wolfpack Global


The Australian composer weaves ambient music and banjo strums into a meditative record, one that gazes upon the natural world with whimsy and joy.

Fleeting Adventure

Andrew Tuttle might be Australian, but there’s a sun-drenched tint to his work that calls to mind the American West. Over the course of five releases, the banjo player and electronic producer has mastered a sound that melds gossamer synthesis with dusty organic tones. While his first albums occasionally leaned into familiar musical tropes, by the time 2020’s Alexandra and 2021’s A Cassowary Apart dropped, Tuttle’s work had become a beast of its own: Imagine grubby old outlaw country instrumentals, injected with an ample dose of new-age zen. Yet Tuttle has managed to keep a relatively low profile compared to many of his peers in the cosmic Americana scene. His latest album, Fleeting Adventure, showcases a newfound knack for creating musical worlds. It’s one of his most ambitious projects to date, pushing a well-honed formula into rugged yet fresh emotive terrain.
On paper, an ambient banjo record might sound absurd, pretentious, or maybe even a little silly. But in execution, Tuttle blends these disparate influences smoothly and cinematically. To flesh things out, Fleeting Adventure enlists a slew of seasoned post-country musicians—including Steve Gunn, Chuck Johnson, and Luke Schneider. The final product plays like an alternate version of the earthy soundtrack to director Wim Wenders’ heartfelt 1984 neo-Western film Paris, Texas. On “Correlation,” vast washes of pedal steel smear melancholic streaks atop Tuttle’s intricate plucking. “New Breakfast Habit” weaves subtle slide guitar flourishes and wispy electronics, recalling a muted winter sunrise over a pine tree-surrounded northern lake. “Freeway Flex” is more ethereal and reserved, centered on droning synthesis and fluttering, ephemeral string work. Avant-garde legend Lawrence English mixed Fleeting Adventure, and his impact on the record is palpable throughout, but especially on this airy track.
Fleeting Adventure is effective at world-building, but things aren’t always as temperate as advertised; some of the more contemplative pieces here are reminiscent of smoke, fog, or rain. With eyes closed, it’s easy to picture snowy mountainside campsites and glistening bodies of water. The chillier edges are especially apparent on the subdued closer “There’s Always A Crow,” as well as on the rustic “Next Week, Pending.” But no matter what climate it evokes, there’s a surreal hominess to Fleeting Adventure, like bluegrass musicians taking a shot at Steve Reich-esque minimalism. This singular weirdness is one of the album’s most charming qualities, locating it in the same world as recent instrumental folk standouts from artists like North Americans and Yasmin Williams.
Art often channels a preoccupation with looming devastation instead of hope or awe. In the realm of ambient music, several recent releases (such as Tewksbury’s Brutes, or the Anushka Chkheidze, Eto Gelashvili, Hayk Karoyi, Lillevan, and Robert Lippok collaboration Glacier Music II) have taken a direct approach at grappling with sociopolitical turmoil. But Fleeting Adventure does the opposite. It is the increasingly rare piece of environmentally inspired music that makes a point of distancing itself from collective uncertainty and dread. If those aforementioned records feel spiritually indebted to Andreas Malm’s cult radical text How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Fleeting Adventure more closely echoes the philosophical escapism of Henry David Thoreau. It navigates balmy highs and murky lows, but throughout its peaks and valleys, it radiates wonder and joy. Tuttle and his backing band reconnect with the naturalism of the energy around them, harnessing an ever-present whimsy. Sprawling and varied, Fleeting Adventure uses instrumental music as a way to convey imaginative transcendentalism.


On her dazzling solo debut, the Toronto multi-instrumentalist proves herself a musical Swiss Army knife, capable of anything and reveling in her multiplicity.

Number One

Over the past decade, the cluster of Toronto artists involved with Meg Remy’s project U.S. Girls has become its own cottage industry. Carlyn Bezic found a spot on bass and vocals in Remy’s latest touring band meant to support her 2020 album, Heavy Light, pre-COVID, but she has been a crucial component for much longer. Bezic first made waves as one half of electronic pop duo Ice Cream, before joining Remy in the hard-rocking quintet Darlene Shrugg. On her dazzling solo debut as Jane Inc., where she plays a Prince-like array of instruments and handles co-production, Bezic proves herself to be a musical Swiss Army knife, ready to be deployed for whatever task is needed.
The cheekily titled Number One initially came together as Bezic layered guitar, bass, synth, and vocals on top of pulsating samples and deeply funky drum breaks. Yet despite her versatility , she is best known as a guitarist, laying down scorching solos on songs like Ice Cream’s “FED UP” and Darlene Shrugg’s “First World Blues.” In interviews, Bezic has explained how this riff worship dates back to her teenage band Golden Ticket (now seemingly scrubbed from the internet). “I spent most of high school learning how to play Jimi Hendrix songs,” she laughs.
Bezic’s songs as Jane Inc. use the building blocks of rock, pop, and dark disco to construct shimmering structures with mediums intertwining like the landmarks of Antoni Gaudí. Alongside co-producer Steve “Tone Ranger” Chahley, the album features thunderous drums from Evan Cartwright (U.S. Girls, Tasseomancy) and a squealing sax solo from Nick Dourado (Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Aquakultre, BUDI) in the back half of “Bloom Becomes Me.” On “Faceless, Bodiless,” Scott Hardware drizzles Wurlitzer keys over Jane Fonda’s dialogue from the 1971 thriller Klute, creating a fractured funk sound reminiscent of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts.
Fonda’s monologue about the many roles women are forced to play and her desire for anonymity is key to unlocking the themes of Number One. As Bezic has explained, “I think a lot of the songs on the album deal with how we form ourselves and how that gets fragmented and complicated by the societal structures we interact with.” Propelled by a burbling bass line, the stunning six-minute opener “Gem” is about surrendering to the identities we form online and how they manifest IRL. “Honey, I know that modern life is just a drag,” she sings dreamily, “but you can choose a you that never feels that bad.”
Gazing beyond her black mirror, Bezic tackles various collective struggles. “Steel” is about the mounting pressures of living as an artist in a city like Toronto where rent prices continue to skyrocket. “If I don't leave this town I'll burn it to the ground,” she warns, before peeling off another incendiary solo. “Dirt and the Earth” shares conflicted feelings of frustration and an admission of her complicity in the devastation of the environment. By the time she reaches the melancholy groove of “Obliterated,” Bezic has accepted that forms of digital expression will one day outlive her physical body. “Tell my loved ones I'm gone,” she sings. “All my photos and comments will live on/Obliterated by a speeding wave of information.”
Alongside her partner in Ice Cream, fellow U.S. Girls member Amanda Crist, Bezic has handled every aspect of the duo’s creative output down to wardrobe and styling since their earliest videos in 2014. On their latest album, FED UP, Ice Cream explored the tension between wanting attention and subverting the male gaze. “It’s a real mindfuck to be dealing with those ideas while being a performer and also feeling as if the music is sensual in a way,” Bezic explained. “Not wanting to be subject to that gaze but also playing within it.” As Jane Inc., she wields more control than ever before, finding freedom in multiplicity while remaining brazenly herself.

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The solo debut from the least attention-hungry member of Migos proves what many have long suspected—he is the trio’s best rapper, with the most promising career prospects outside of the group.

The Last Rocket

If you have only casually watched the rise of Migos, Takeoff is the trio’s most anonymous member. Quavo is the most recognizable thanks to his pop instincts and constant cameos; Offset’s relationship with Cardi B has boosted his profile. But Takeoff has kept his head down. Still, the crew’s youngest, least attention-hungry member is also its most talented rapper. His abilities have been clearly visible since at least No Label II but were perhaps most obvious amid the bloat of Culture II. On songs like “Too Much Jewelry” and the original edit of “Motorsport,” he was the most assured and reliably energetic performer. In the run-up to that record, Quavo was happy to admit his nephew was the superior Migo. Offset agreed.
Takeoff’s solo debut, The Last Rocket, arrives on the heels of Quavo Huncho and just ahead of an Offset album next month. His kinfolk are correct: With a tight 12 tracks, Takeoff’s record is significantly more economical than Quavo’s, revealing more of his personality through a diverse set of strongly rapped songs. The lack of an obvious enormous single likely won’t raise his general star, but The Last Rocket helps to demystify the group by clarifying their explicit connections to Southern rap predecessors from Gucci Mane and Big K.R.I.T. to UGK. Many of the Migos’ best songs have been their biggest hits. The Last Rocket, like its creator, is most compelling at its most offbeat and introspective.
“None to Me” is the first track here to display these qualities, as Takeoff raps about his lack of interest in a mere flex. He begins with a simple boast—“Like looking at my money stacked/That’s why the whip I ain’t bought one”—but inverts it, transforming into an opportunity for reflection. “Not that I can’t get one, or not that I don’t want one/So booked, if I even got it, I wouldn’t have time to drive one,” he continues. These bars exemplify the upside of a solo record: More time to fill means more time to muse, and Takeoff is an interesting person to spend time with. He weds Migos’ slashing digressions to quirky thoughtfulness.
The most endearing and bizarre example is “Casper.” Takeoff is lyrically all over the place atop a gauzy beat from Nonstop Da Hitman. “I want to look at the stars today,” he injects with childlike wonder into a hook that would otherwise seem rote. He shouts out his grandma and requests that those he share dinner with say grace. The cosmos, his elders, an abiding religiosity: These are recurring motifs for the rapper born Kirshnik Khari Ball, and this earnestness even makes the album’s title seem like more than a cheap joke about his pseudonym.
Though he hasn’t quite developed the focus to tell full stories, Takeoff does have the most narrative skills of any of the Migos. “I Remember,” one of the more evocative songs on the album, shows signs of something greater, as he uses each verse to think back to winters trapping, summoning them with vivid details about flushing drugs down the commode or breaking new product down in his mother’s basement. The bludgeoning hook is something of a misstep, and Takeoff generally lacks refined pop instincts. Even Quavo can’t help make “She Gon Wink” stand out. “Infatuation,” which features the relatively unknown but very intriguing rap&b singer Dayytona Fox and opens sounding like a lost Toro Y Moi B-side, has its charms. But it’s also one of the few times on the record that Takeoff sounds sluggish, finally warming up when he’s almost done with his verse. At least the beats, supplied by usual suspects like DJ Durel, Murda Beatz, and members of the 808 Mafia, are always perfect, offering plenty of negative space for Takeoff to experiment.
And whoever chose the record’s lead single, “Last Memory,” did right by Takeoff, ignoring clumsy radio stabs for a song that shows the best of what he can be. Takeoff has a rare combination of skills in that he’s both versatile and unmistakable; he can switch up his flow or register and remain instantly identifiable. Through his continual willingness to reveal himself, Takeoff grants depth to the Migos’ constant rags-to-riches narratives. He’s not haunted, merely human, burdened by the past but optimistic about the future. During closer “Bruce Wayne,” Takeoff confesses to his nervousness about first getting on stage and provides a perfect analogy for his relationship to the rest of the trio: The Last Rocket is the closest we’ve been yet to seeing one of the Migos with his mask off.


The Australian beatmaker has an ear for silky West Coast sounds, and his debut evokes Roger Troutman, P-funk, and G-funk with wide-eyed sincerity.

Sheeesh

MXXWLL might hail from Sydney, Australia, but the beatmaker has a taste for the same vintage favorites that West Coast legend Dâm-Funk trades in: 1980s R&B, synthetic soul, electro-funk. In his work, you can detect classic P-funk, the spirit of Roger Troutman, “West Coast Poplock,” and the G-funk music those sounds inspired. The video for the single “Light Turn Green,” from his new album Sheeesh, even featured a tour around L.A.’s palm tree-studded streets, as if there could be any doubt where this music is spiritually set.
The album packs 17 tracks into about 30 minutes, giving the record a skittish beat-tape feel (his previous full-length Beats Vol. 1 was precisely that). Sometimes this means tracks cut off abruptly: The sensual “Slow West” taps out just as the temperature starts rising. The impression is that MXXWLL wants you to know as much about him in as little time as possible.
Sheeesh kicks into life with the 8-bit blips of “Player 1 Start,” summoning the spirit of an old Nintendo. It’s a hit of nostalgia that sets the retro tone. MXXWLL has fun making synths squelch on post-disco bop “CRZN”; the wailing key riffs that underpin weed jam “Rollitup” gestures towards West Coast hip-hop before building into a meaty funk-rock jam. In an era of Spotify algorithms and subpar copycatting for licensing purposes, any genuine attempts at retro revivalism must be extremely on-point. MXXWLL brings not just musical chops, but a feeling of wide-eyed sincerity, sliding him next to Thundercat and Anderson .Paak as a modern soul of old-school persuasions.
For all there is to admire, Sheeesh doesn’t quite hold together. The guest vocalists, mostly in the early stages of their careers, don’t always distinguish themselves. Guapdad 4000’s vocals on “Relax” sound slightly strained. Rapper John Givez mirrors Q-Tip’s flow a little too closely on “Light Turn Green,” even parroting the lyric, “What’s the scenario?” Ditto on “Things U Do,” which harks back to Prince’s most slithering sex jams (the abbreviation of “you” in the title doesn’t feel coincidental) with the pretty but perhaps unsuitably delicate falsetto of singer Kyle Dion. These, though, are small grievances in a greater scheme. If you don’t peer in close enough to see the flaws, Sheeesh showcases a rising talent with great taste.