Positioning their alter ego Mhysa as a queer black underground pop star for the cyber resistance, the multimedia artist E. Jane constructs an elaborate alternate universe out of experimental club rhythms.

fantasii

The Maryland-born and Philadelphia-based multimedia artist E. Jane (who uses they/them pronouns) described their pop-star alter ego Mhysa in a recent interview with Rhizome as “a part of myself I think white institutions tried to smother. Now I keep her with me and bring her out when we’re safe to be, preferably in spaces where Black women can just be themselves.” It’s apparent even from the first few seconds of fantasii, Mhysa’s debut album, the extent to which Jane and Mhysa actively construct such spaces: Mhysa’s warped, pitch-shifted vocals beckon over twinkling notes, “Come with me/Come with me/To feel that we belong,” coaxing the listener into a fantasy world in which Mhysa puts her own aspirations, feelings, and experiences unapologetically at the center.
Jane is a prolific artist. Whether releasing music as one-half of the blistering performance and sound art duo SCRAAATCH (the duo’s other half, chukwumaa, aka lawd knows, produced three songs on fantasii) or exhibiting their solo work—a recent exhibition, Lavendra, explored the cultural legacy of black divas from the 1990s like Brandy, Aaliyah, and Whitney Houston—Jane seems most interested in constructing expansive utopian worlds where black femmes exist in all their complexities. Through Jane’s work as Mhysa, whom they describe as “a Queer Black Diva and underground popstar for the cyber resistance,” Jane seamlessly weaves together the various threads of their artistic practice, from twisted sonics to diva worship to Afrofuturist potentialities.
After releasing the haunting HIVEMIND EP via NON Records last year and five installations of the hyperactive “THOT FANTASY” mix series, fantasii finds Mhysa inhabiting a more focused conceptual space. An epic poem of sorts, fantasii narrates the multiple facets of Mhysa’s persona: “Glory Be Black,” which sounds like a spectral hymn, is in part a tribute to her grandfather, a gospel blues artist, while the bass-heavy “spectrum” and the propulsive “STROBE” are veritable club anthems. And while Mhysa sounds vulnerable on the R&B slow-burner and album highlight “Bb,” repeatedly asking if a former lover ever thinks about her, on the very next song poet Diamond Stingily freestyles over screeching, string-like synths and police sirens: “I’ll maybe text you in the morning/Good morning/But probably not.” This type of opposition is central to the album: Mhysa’s persona is at once soft (on the ringing “Siren Song”) and hard as nails (on the stuttering, glass-shattering “You Not About That Lyfe”), and she’s as inspired by the dulcet sounds of church choirs as she is the liberating rhythms of the club.
Epic poems traditionally chronicle the valiant tales of heroic figures, and fantasii also references pop culture icons, including Janet Jackson, Donna Summer, and TLC. Yet Mhysa concludes the album with a tribute to Doris Payne, the notorious, 86-year-old jewel thief who has allegedly used over 22 aliases to steal over two million dollars worth of jewelry over the last six decades. Payne’s lack of shame and defiant ability to actualize her desires, especially through her dynamic performances of identity, is precisely the spirit that fantasii’s 11 tracks capture. Constructing a space where antiheroes like Payne exist on the same plane as icons like Prince, fantasii is a fine showcase for Mhysa’s utopian vision.


The brilliant and unassuming debut from the young UK musician and composer is a benchmark in ambient jazz featuring outstanding players and delicately woven arrangements.

Space 1.8

Nala Sinephro learned to play the pedal harp in secret. She was 16 and studying jazz; in the evenings, when she was supposed to be practicing, she snuck turns on a stringed behemoth she discovered in one of her high school’s music rooms. Technically, it was off-limits, but Sinephro had a fascination with strings; she had grown up playing fiddle, learning folk songs by ear. The harp beckoned.
On Space 1.8, assisted by a rotating cast of musicians from the UK’s dynamic jazz scene, the Caribbean-Belgian musician still sometimes sounds like she is trying to evade prying ears. Whether jamming with her peers or multi-tracking solo compositions on pedal harp and modular synthesizer, she is a subtle presence, her tone liquid, mutable, mysterious—the cosmic background radiation to a galaxy of her own creation.
Recorded when she was just 22, Space 1.8 is the London-based musician’s debut album, though it sounds like the work of a far more experienced composer. On a suite of pieces that range from just over a minute in length to nearly 18 minutes, she weaves a loose fusion of jazz balladry, beat music, and the sort of beatless, synthesizer-centric whorls for which there’s no better word than “ambient.” Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz is an obvious touchstone; so is the otherworldly sound-shaping of Jon Hassell’s processed horn. Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders’ recent Promises is a tempting point of comparison, given the way Space 1.8 lays out soft, spongy electronics as the backdrop for emotive saxophone solos. Reed players Nubya Garcia, James Mollison, of the Ezra Collective, and Ahnansé—a saxophonist who has collaborated with a host of musicians including Garcia, Emma-Jean Thackray, and broken-beat icon IG Culture—all deliver standout performances. But Sinephro and her collaborators sound less concerned with precedent than possibility. Not so much interlocking as complementary, the album’s eight tracks—titled “Space 1” through “Space 8”—collectively map out a novel, singular terrain.
One sign of the strength of Sinephro’s vision is how well all the pieces fit together, despite their outward differences. The album opens in a blur, harp sparkling against bokeh-like splotches of synthesizer; distant crickets and what sounds like a rain stick lend additional scene-setting. Recognizable shapes come into focus on “Space 2,” a gentle sextet recording led first by Mollison’s tenor and then Lyle Barton’s piano. (Guitarist Shirley Tetteh, drummer Jake Long, and double bassist Rudi Creswick round out the diaphanous, dreamlike track; the whole ensemble breathes like a single organism.) Edges sharpen on “Space 3,” a 75-second excerpt from a three-hour session with drummer Eddie Hick (Sons of Kemet) and synth player Dwayne Kilvington, aka Wonky Logic. Each track sketches out a different space: different dimensions, different light, different air. But these are rarely static spheres. “Space 4,” a showcase for Garcia’s lyrical playing, begins with a kind of dewy, dawn-lit optimism, but as Barton, Long, and double bassist Twm Dylan lean into the changes, the mood intensifies; soon Garcia sounds like she’s scooping up fistfuls of dirt with every low note. It’s one of many powerfully cathartic moments on the album.
Sometimes Sinephro plays in broad strokes, tossing out lustrous glissandi like fairy dust. Sometimes she processes her harp so that it sounds like steel drums—an echo, perhaps, of her Caribbean heritage. Sometimes, she overdubs synths upon synths upon synths, and sometimes she’s barely there at all: In “Space 2,” she only becomes audible around three-quarters of the way through the song, when the other instruments fall away to reveal her softly glowing chords that pulse and change color, dimming and Dopplering, across a 90-second slide into silence. In moments like these, she feels less like a player seated at her instrument than a source of light.
Marked by an abiding calm, the album is quiet until it isn’t. “Space 6,” another trio piece with Mollison on sax and Long on drums, opens with flickering hi-hats and tightens like a pit in the stomach, snare and sax trading sharp retorts, until the whole thing seems to spin off its axis. Sinephro’s synths thicken and then change in pitch and timbre: grinding, almost serrated. The electronic suggestion of a heavy-metal pick slide scrapes across the stereo field. For the first time on the record, the music turns heavy; swirling in the turmoil are intimations of grief, confusion, anger. It is a brief outburst, one whose extremity is tempered by the closing “Space 8,” an 18-minute meditation in which Ahnansé’s tender saxophone is cradled within dozens of layers of processed harp, synthesizer, and guitar. But the force of “Space 6”’s impact lingers.
Sinephro wrote and recorded Space 1.8 in 2018 and 2019, in the wake of her recovery from a serious illness, and she has described the process of making the album as “medicinal.” You can detect a hint of that medicine in the music, particularly when her synths and strings pool into a warm bath of light, or focus their energy into a cutting beam. Where the music of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders can tap into spiritual transcendence, leaving one’s body and reaching a higher plane, Space 1.8 feels more grounded, more interior. Even its most abstract pieces, like the long, amorphous closing track, are not really cosmic in scope. “Space 8,” despite its considerable duration, is less about journeying great distances than finding solace in one’s own bones, one’s own being. That deliberate smallness, that inner focus, is the source of much of this understated record’s outsized power. For all its overdubbed layers, “Space 8,” like the album itself, feels as simple and as steadying as breathing.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The singer-songwriter’s striking second album excels at a kind of subtle disclosure, relying less on power than it does texture and immaculately sparing detail.

PAINLESS

Time can’t heal a wound you choose to leave open. All over PAINLESS, the second album by Nilüfer Yanya, the London songwriter lingers in feelings of heartbreak, dislocation, and rejection, and refuses to let them go. “Don’t like whenever I’m not in pain/Peeling back, not noticing/The blood and bones beneath my skin,” she sings on “midnight sun,” one of several disquieting lyrics about doing herself harm or inviting whoever hurt her to go ahead and grind her heart underfoot while they’re at it. The sting proves that this thing was once alive, even if she has to dig her nails under the scab to still feel it.
Yanya has always written such physical music. Her voice is a tender muscle; her songs have a sinewy twist, and her loud-quiet guitar can flood in as unexpectedly as cheeks flushing at the wrong moment. What’s remarkable about PAINLESS is how she whittles almost everything down—the near-monomaniacal emotional range, the abrupt, broken language, her palette reduced to smoke and ash and nerves—and makes even more of an impact. Partly that’s down to her beautiful melodies, which remain mercifully intact, looping in sync with her circular thoughts and fractal fears. “Troubled don’t count the ways I’m broken/Your troubles won’t count, not once we’ve spoken/What troubles me now if I tear this open/Some people won’t have the faintest notion,” runs the cracked lullaby of “trouble,” each line starting with the flicker of a chest heave.
Yanya could easily have followed her rollicking 2019 debut, Miss Universe, with an even more festival-ready record, but instead, this bold songwriter strands us with her in a state of alienation, where no touch or feeling works like it used to. If there’s an arrow from Miss Universe to PAINLESS, it’s in the former’s “Heat Rises,” a last-nerves gasp set to an insistent drum machine. That bristling electronic spine anchors many of these songs, supplying their desecrated foundations. Its tempos are terse, abrupt and unrelenting, mirroring the inevitability of time, a march Yanya can’t stop no matter how hard she tries. “the dealer” runs on a restless breakbeat that she attacks with loose-wrist, grimy guitar: “Patience there she goes/Cadence set in stone,” she sings in the spacious middle eight, as if standing on a cliff edge and watching it vanish. “L/R” observes a cold figure moving on autopilot over a cold, dubbed-out beat; meanwhile on “shameless,” she yearns to preserve a sad scene, questioning why someone’s touch is worth the humiliation it causes. The Sade-like beauty in her voice and the sweltering intimacy of the song’s fizzing beat tell you why.
PAINLESS excels at that kind of subtle disclosure, relying less on power than it does texture and immaculately sparing detail. When many of these songs appear to revolve around not knowing where you stand with someone, it’s a feat to give each one a distinct set of emotional stakes. The guitar playing speaks to Yanya’s emotional purgatory—right down to the knowing echoes of Radiohead’s anxious, spiraling arpeggios on “stabilise” and “midnight sun”; to the vaulting contradictions (the love-you-hate-you “belong with you” is intermittently as euphoric as Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180”), and the slumps of defeat daubed in classic, moody alt-rock blues on “chase me.” And she wields the immense expressive reserves of her voice with delicacy, as if diluting pigment to watercolor, writing with incredible economy. “Spit me out here/In the sunlight … Watch me burn/Night and day,” she gasps on “shameless,” while “stabilise” shapes a dismal inner-city scene in muttered vignettes. In the rare moments she reaches for poetry, it’s earned: She can’t tell whether the inevitable conclusion of “chase me” is coming, scarring, or already gone; whichever it is, “it heals like a cold setting sun,” a profound image of bloodless love. “try” finds her questioning what had seemed certain: “Silent leaves/I walked/In your forest/But there’s no roots/I am not sure I got this.”
Inevitably, time runs its course and heals the wounds for her. The end of PAINLESS blossoms into playful, springlike tones: “the mystic,” all melty and lilting, flirtatiously negotiates “red lines,” and “anotherlife” dips into the mellow ’90s groove that Lorde looked to on Solar Power, borrowing its ersatz chill to convince the departing party that she’ll be fine. Yanya’s voice, at its lowest range here, is bittersweet and conciliatory: You can’t quite tell whether she means it. But all of a sudden, you feel the warmth of the sun on her skin again.


The New York City quartet’s 4AD debut is an entrée to a world of scuzzy, lewd, electro-punk camp.

phantasea pharm EP

At a recent gig in lower Manhattan, local act cumgirl8 stood onstage like Day-Glo dominatrixes. Drummer Chase Lombardo sported assless chaps; guitarist Veronika Vilim, in hot-pink fishnet and marabou pasties, towered above fellow guitarist Avishag Rodrigues, whose bondage harness encased an acid-green top. Dead center stood bassist Lida Fox, with a slab of black bangs shrouding her eyes. “This song’s about our favorite punk girl,” Vilim said as her bandmates kicked into “cicciolina,” a dark disco tribute to the famed porn star turned Italian politician, which they perform partially on an Emergency Bigfoot novelty toy. The song leads phantasea pharm, a six-track collection of gothic pop and scuzzy dance-punk studded with horny prose. Like their titillating outfits, phantasea pharm is fun and eye-catching, but only half of its tracks live up to the band’s vibrant stage presence.
According to cumgirl8 lore, the musicians met years ago in a sex chat room. “We consider the internet a member of our band,” Lombardo told Vogue last year. Their raunchy moniker is a nod to Y2K-era screen names, but it also suggests an erotic force in search of orgasmic enlightenment. cumgirl8 embody this concept via sexually liberated lyrics and outré costumes. “We act like this because it makes us feel powerful,” the band has said. “There is nothing degrading about being in control.”
Fox, Lombardo, and Vilim split lead vocal duties, accounting for a lot of the EP’s incongruity. Tracks helmed by Fox (“gothgirl1,” “cursed angel”) tend to be darker, while Lombardo (“pritney llc”) and Vilim (“Picture Party”) spit out tart and energetic rhymes. On the sludgy “dead pixels,” Fox abandons her girlish falsetto for a stoner’s deadpan, droning over shrill guitar. It feels like a ’90s alt-rock castoff—and a real dud following the saucy “cicciolina.” Fox eventually flips a phrase worthy of cumgirl8’s cleverest tracks, like her colorful take on making out: “Swallow my tongue/Like chewing gum/So you’ll feel me/In your gut.” But this vivid scene gets buried in the song’s drab arrangement.
cumgirl8 may be lewd, but their best moments are derived from pure joy, not shock value. Vilim and Lombardo seem to be having the most fun; onstage, Vilim executed a series of dramatic poses in slow motion, while Lombardo briefly fled her drumkit to dangle from a ceiling pipe. The theatrics translate to tape, especially on “pritney llc,” an oddball pop singalong led by Lombardo. Per the lyrics, Pritney is a renowned “party slut”—beloved, but deviant. She’ll jack your pack of cigs. She’ll vom on your shoes. She’ll tear your designer dress to shreds. She’s… a Pomeranian. The song starts as a lullaby but ends in a cartoonish pileup of skronks, chimes, and robotic backing vocals.
Smutty electro-punk cut “Picture Party” is even better, spiked with a gritty spoken passage from drag provocateur Christeene. In the opening moments, Vilim recites a litany of hormones, supplements, and cosmetic enhancements—Botox, Juvéderm—before crassly admitting, “I just took a huge shit.” There is something delightful and rebellious about the clashing imagery, especially from the lips of Vilim, who’s modeled for Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs. Lombardo chimes in with her own contrasting couplets, rhyming “pirouette” with “my pussy’s wet.” These conflicting ideas—rigid femininity vs. unapologetic body functions—are at the heart of the cumgirl8 philosophy. But more than anything, “Picture Party” spotlights their sly, sleazy wit. The bawdier, the better.


The Virginia emo trio try to keep things as simple and accessible as possible on their fourth album.

Altogether

When they started, the Virginia trio Turnover resembled your garden-variety pop-punk outfit. Then, they morphed into dreamy emo, and then again into Pet Sounds-filtered surf rock; it seemed like they couldn’t stop evolving. Singer Austin Getz went from wallowing in dreary East Coast Decembers to whirling around beachside carousels in the final days of a Californian summer. He began to realize where he went wrong in failed romances instead of resentfully labeling his exes “meaningless lovers” in the same breath he fantasized about sleeping with them again. Like fellow latter-day emo torchbearers Joyce Manor and Touché Amoré, Turnover presented ongoing evidence of their adaptability while still remaining true to their core. On their fourth full-length, Altogether, they’ve remained loyal to producer Will Yip and label home Run for Cover; however, this record finds Turnover virtually unrecognizable.
“Chill” has always been an accurate descriptor for Turnover, but Altogether could be used in a D.A.R.E.-style campaign warning the risks of taking it too far. They’ve eviscerated any indication of their “emo-ish punk rock” roots, instead opting for a lackadaisical, stoned regurgitation of ‘80s new wave—like Talk Talk doused in CBD oil. Getz explained that in the making of this record, the band considered “people who don't have the time to delve into the niches and find fringe artists.” This album, he seems to say, is meant to go down easy, devoid of deeper implications—but Altogether winds up mostly just half-baked. In Turnover’s attempts to keep things uncomplicated and accessible, they sound anonymous and corny.
Take “Still in Motion,” a perfectly adequate album opener if it weren’t introduced with a wildly over-the-top trumpet solo. “Number On the Gate” could be a pretty good B-side to Good Nature; it pops up about midway through the record, as if to offer one last reminder of “oh, yeah, this is a Turnover album,” before the remaining bloodless tracks scrub your memory clean. The band can write hooks; At their gigs, Peripheral Vision highlights like “Cutting My Fingers Off” conjure mosh pits and singalongs even amid their relaxed atmosphere, while Good Nature opener “Super Natural” begs to be hummed while completing house chores. But hardly anything could be deemed catchy here, with refrains too monotonous to stick. Even when Turnover try spicing things up with congas, a violin, and a couple of ill-fitting saxophone features, Altogether tastes incredibly vanilla, like a playlist of department store slow jams.
This blandness would be excusable if Getz backed it up with compelling lyricism, but his words are typically underdeveloped at their best—at their worst, they induce eye rolls. He details his reluctance to going out on “Parties,” but once he sees his date’s “body move just the way that it should,” he’s suddenly fine with the shallow social interactions the party entails. On “Ceramic Sky,” he sings of “Waiting to feel the tingling of your lips/Sedative in your touch,” a line too nonsensical to be sexy. “Have you been through the things I have?/Did you lose your trust or feel betrayed?” he argues on “Number on the Gate,” sounding like the dude who complains about his “crazy ex” before ghosting you. Getz’s trifling depictions of women and inconsequential, clunky ideas—”I don’t mean to make you feel lonely/When I’m feeling like I have no reply”—amount to a record that hardly dips below surface level.
In their vision for Altogether, Turnover shot themselves in the foot at the get-go. They hoped for an album that was simple, but the banality that manifested instead was a pretty inevitable side effect. “We wanted to keep in mind...music for those of us who are busy with work or our families or whatever problems might be around,” Getz said. “Music is real magic that can change people's days and lives, and the more people listening and loving, the better.” Maybe he wasn’t planning to change lives with this album, but to make art catered to people who are presumably too preoccupied to fully digest it is a pretty careless and patronizing method of operation.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Apparat and Modeselektor's third album as Moderat absorbs a dark spectrum of postminimal electronic music—James Blake, Burial, The xx, Four Tet—and reflects it into spare, crystal-clear electronic soul.

III (Moderat)

What, exactly, traumatized Moderat so badly during their first recording sessions that they named their 2003 EP the German equivalent of "At the Cost of Health," and then took six years to follow it with a debut full-length? Though never really explained beyond allusions to fatigue and conflict, it has become such a part of the Berlin trio's lore that you'd expect a Pet Sounds-like work of self-immolating vision, not a modest EP of quietly propulsive bass music. But thirteen years later, at the end of a trilogy where tracks have almost begrudgingly given way to songs, Moderat's emotional expenditures have become more evident. III dissolves the group's diverse techno origins in crystal-clear electronic soul music that stands on a song-by-song, not moment-by-moment, basis.
It's actually not hard to believe that Moderat initially clashed; it was never the most natural fit. They were three musicians at the forefront of a developing minimal techno and performance scene, jamming together by linking their laptops with software they wrote, as it wasn't readily commercially available yet. Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary strung up heavy metals at high bpms as Modeselektor, muddling jungle, breakbeat, and glitch-hop. Sascha Ring, meanwhile, made fluttering, sculpted ambient pop as Apparat. Their merger could feel tentative or slanted on the first two parts of the Moderat trilogy, which were prone to instrumental tangents and guest vocalists. But it's apparent from III’s air of ease and consistency of style that they've finally gelled around one vision.
The album absorbs a dark spectrum of postminimal electronic music—the rococo bass and deep contrasts of James Blake, the windy knock and moan of Burial, the sultry lightness of The xx, the granular whir of Four Tet—and reflects it back. It reminds me most of Jamie Woon's underrated Mirrorwriting, from the committed vocal performances down to the new age incense wafting through the spare, softly thundering arrangements.  Though it's Moderat's strongest record, III isn't quite all killer. The very Field-like "Finder" bounces its vocal loop into the pocket, but it doesn't show off the songcraft found on songs like "Reminder," which might have sprung from a solo album by Thom Yorke. The three best songs allow the vocal performances to lengthen, open up, and gather weight. The best of them is "Eating Hooks," where low wobbles and glittering trills are strung together in a hypnotic equilibrium. It's closely followed by "Intruder," a sincere big-whoa anthem, and "Ghostmother" that could pass for The Antlers if they were ex-ravers.
The last couple of tracks are instrumentals that seem superfluous—on closer "Ethereal," III has run out of songs as well as titles. But the highlights make it a must-hear for sensitive electronic-soul lovers waiting in vain for Rhye to return. It's also a resounding realization of what Moderat is and can be: a band you can relate to, not just a beat you can bob to. Here’s to their health.


A new reissue of the Emeralds guitarist’s 2009 album captures his style in its infancy. Careful songcraft would come later; these wide-eyed jams are cosmic and sprawling.

A Pocket Full of Rain

While writing Prefab Sprout’s 1984 debut, Swoon, bandleader Paddy McAloon hatched a character named Green Isaac. “I was fooling around with the word ‘green’,” McAloon said later that year, highlighting his idiosyncratic writing process. “In English, ‘green’ means innocent. Then I came across the biblical figure Isaac, the epitome of innocence, and immediately I had a great song title.” Twenty-five years later, ambient guitarist Mark McGuire titled one of his earliest releases after a lyric from that Prefab Sprout song: “Isaac’s a soft name, it sounds like a pocket full of rain.”
McGuire’s album, originally released in 2009, landed amid a prolific run of early solo releases, mostly CD-Rs and cassettes that ran parallel to his work in the Cleveland noise and drone trio Emeralds. He had yet to develop the carefully crafted tact of the linear, song-oriented material he would become known for a few years down the line. The charm of A Pocket Full of Rain lies in its innocence—much like McAloon’s wet-behind-the-ears Green Isaac, it sounds wide-eyed and drunk on possibility.
The newly reissued album opens with “Extended Forecast,” a patient tapestry of overlapping guitar lines. Each has its own distinct pedal effects and patterns, but the way McGuire weaves them together makes it hard to trace an individual thread from start to finish without your ear latching onto another. When he’s in this extended jam mode, which also distinguishes “The Marfa Lights” and “Radio Flyer,” the effect is similar to a constantly refocusing camera lens that goes from crystal clear to bokeh and back again: a kaleidoscopic array of abstract and tactile textures. This gorgeous approach lends itself to blissfully zoning out, but it’s also obvious that these meandering improvisations—many of which were cut down from 20-plus minute takes—were the product of McGuire “getting stoned and jamming for a couple hours,” as he said in a 2011 interview, as opposed to his more recent attempts to “fine-tune” his music.
Although the shorter tracks on A Pocket Full of Rain offer snapshots of McGuire’s melodic capabilities, the album lacks the cohesion of later albums such as 2010’s Living With Yourself or 2014’s Along the Way. By that point, McGuire was concocting elaborate concepts for each release and allowing those narratives, memories, or moods to guide the music. Knowing what’s on the other side of A Pocket Full of Rain makes some of its extended tangents seem tantalizingly inchoate, but it also spotlights the youthful abandon that McGuire brought to his early home recording process.
“Radio Flyer,” in particular, conjures the same childhood nostalgia as Living With Yourself while roaming further afield. The opening melodies are buoyant and carefree, but midway through they all fade out save one contemplative line that’s laid bare. When the rest return, they’re lower, rumbling, following the lead of the lonely, persistent motif. The song brings to mind the classic Calvin and Hobbes wagon escapades, which use harebrained adventures as the unlikely setting for philosophical musings on mortality.
That aching beauty is a strange contrast with A Pocket Full of Rain’s queasier moments, which roll in like thunderstorms to disrupt otherwise tranquil scenes. “Sick Chemistry,” in particular, recalls Emeralds’ drones, a billowing briar patch of distorted, sustained notes that stretches on for miles. But for much of the album, McGuire plucks out single notes on an open tuning, allowing him to layer tracks atop one another without getting muddled by fatter chord strums. The technique gives the Cleveland native’s work a passing similarity to Midwest emo and explains why the title track sounds like an American Football cassette left out in the sun for too long. The more opaque sound of “Sick Chemistry,” the album’s penultimate song, offers a palate cleanser before stunning closer “Sun Shining Through the Open Barn Door,” a gentle, pastoral postscript that tones down the effects-laden Frippery in favor of acoustic bliss.
Although McGuire’s early recordings have drawn frequent comparison to kosmische works of the ’70s, particularly Manuel Göttsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar, McGuire insists in the Pocket Full of Rain liner notes that he hadn’t heard Göttsching’s work until “a year or so before” recording this album. There’s no denying the similarities of their delay-driven styles, but it’s also easy to see how McGuire arrived at this point on his own. For one, there’s something distinctly American, and more specifically Midwestern, about his sound. His approach to experimental music is earthy and humble, and not overly concerned with transcendence unless it’s to be found within its own surroundings.
There’s a certain sense of inevitability when you plop a restless creative in a room with nothing but a guitar and a bevy of effects to choose from. While McGuire would eventually learn to harness those effects with more specificity, and branch out to include other instruments and even lyrics, A Pocket Full of Rain is a captivating portrait of a green genius with his head down, surrounded by pedals, dreaming of possibilities.


Ex-Sunny Day Real Estate leader's third solo album locates emotional coherence in disjointed images and fragmentary phrases.

OK Bear

The unique power of music is to give meaning to that which has no inherent meaning. A note, on its own, is just a sound. Same with a chord or the smack of a drum stick on a snare. But by organizing those sounds, music can give them incredible power, and it can do the same for words and phrases. OK Bear, Jeremy Enigk's third solo album and second since the break-up of his band Sunny Day Real Estate, offers quite a few examples of this phenomenon, making melodic sense out of puzzling couplets like "Crimson angel/ I live and plant there still" and "Morning arise/ Traced by surprise/ In an ocean wind the waves are lost." I'm not saying his lyrics are senseless on paper-- there's inherent power in a phrase such as "They got it all, but they ain't got emotion"-- but I am saying this album lives or dies on Enigk's ability to weave a bunch of disjointed images and odd, fragmentary sensory phrases into something that feels like a story or a coherent emotional statement.
Thankfully, the album mostly lives, and it's a small testament to the seemingly paradoxical ability of ethereal, bodyless music to affect us viscerally. To back up a bit, OK Bear is a confident modern-rock album, and Enigk spends considerably less time fussing with big arrangements and sweeping gestures than he did on 2006's World Waits. These songs are among his most direct, mature compositions yet in spite of their often oblique lyrics, and his delicately ragged voice is in fine form as he works to sell them. He controls the intensity of each song quite well--"April Storm" in particular benefits from a great deal of restrain in the early verses, and you really feel it when he opens up in the last verse and the guitars start to grind a little.
The album's most dramatic moment is also one of its weirdest, from a songwriting perspective. "Just a State of Mind" begins softly, with acoustic guitars and harmony vocals, and picks up with each verse, and then, at literally the last moment, he introduces a brand new, dramatic melody on the last two lines. It feels like the song is about to take off into some sweeping new section, but instead it just ends, leaving the listener hanging. "Sandwich Time" is more conventional, and probably the catchiest rock song on the album, with Enigk running his backing vocals through a Leslie cabinet (or a convincing approximation of one). In an unusual error, "Sandwich Time" and "In a Look" are flipped on the tracklist, both on the rear cover art and in the printed lyrics ("Sandwich Time" is actually track seven, while "In a Look" is actually track six). "In a Look" is a piano-driven song with a good 6/8 beat and some Eric Matthews-ish horns on the bridge.
The album's production aids Enigk's careful drama management, keeping every acoustic and electric guitar, Rhodes piano, bassline, and synth separate and strong-- all that space gives the dynamic shifts more power. OK Bear is a good album-- it won't blow you away, but I get the sense from listening that Enigk is confident enough in his music not to need to blow you away. Simply moving you a little is enough now, and sometimes it's nice to have an album that does that so ably and unpretentiously.


On their third full-length, the indie supergroup led by Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug sounds more unified as their songwriting voices bleed together.

Expo 86

Are Wolf Parade a supergroup? Google seems to think so: It returns some 70,000 results on the matter, including several from this very website. Certainly their lineup is stacked enough for the distinction. Between Spencer Krug, Dan Boeckner, and Dante DeCaro, I count half-a-dozen notable bands past or present, and drummer Arlen Thompson has put in work with Arcade Fire. But supergroups are rarely this prolific, nor this devoid of ego, and Wolf Parade have excelled at reconciling two increasingly distinct songwriting presences to make their music with-- rather than on top of-- each other.
This is especially true of Expo 86, the third Wolf Parade record in just under five years. Co-leaders Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug are both coming off of arguably their most successful self-led projects yet. Last year's Dragonslayer served as a culmination of sorts for Krug's Sunset Rubdown, and Boeckner's Handsome Furs made a huge leap from curios to contenders on 2009's Face Control. Both seem to have carried the strengths of their respective sorta-side projects into the booth for Expo 86. While Wolf Parade's self-produced 2008 LP At Mount Zoomer was a notoriously laborious record to make, Expo 86 is said to have come together quickly, with help on the boards from Howard Bilerman. Limber and focused, it sounds like a record made by a band without a bunch of other commitments, and more than the two Wolf Parade records that preceded it, like a unified statement from its two songwriters rather than a couple of strong voices working in parallel.
Krug takes Expo's first shot with the chatty "Cloud Shadow on the Mountain", a jumpy, almost paranoiac ramble that that feels closest to the scattershot bluster of his work on At Mount Zoomer. Boeckner's "Palm Road" follows, a fairly standard Springsteenian rattler that gets it done but fails to ignite. Each track is distinctly the work of its author, but it's at this point that the differences between the two songwriters start to blur. "What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go This Way)" is Krug's, but it rides a rawboned riff that feels far more like the work of Boeckner, with Krug keeping the flights of lyrical and vocal fancy to a minimum. Here, especially in the wake of Zoomer, Krug's songs feel very to the point, as though he's saving the weird stuff for the Rubdown records and just wants the Wolf Parade tunes to pop. Which they do. And while I rather like Krug in the streamlined mode he's in here, one could easily argue he loses something having his edges sanded down like this.
While Boeckner's contributions to the Wolf Parade catalog have been by turns dizzying and drab, Face Control established him as a force of casual cool, and he brings that vibe to everything he touches here. Whereas Krug seemed to dominate Wolf Parade's 2005 debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary-- despite a strong showing from Boeckner in that record's back end-- the balance seems to have shifted some, and Boeckner's contributions here are uniformly strong. His circuitous songs are by and large more memorable than Krug's, but even at his best-- "Little Golden Age," "Yulia"-- he never quite blows it out like he did again and again on Face Control.
Expo 86, if nothing else, feels like the realization of a Wolf Parade sound; the exquisite Apologies carried the long shadow of its producer Isaac Brock, and Mount Zoomer felt too often like two personalities careening off each other rather than finding some common ground. Solid and occasionally striking through it is, I do come away from Expo 86 feeling a bit unsatisfied. Apologies was such an exhaustingly cathartic listen, Mount Zoomer was a puzzle you had to put together, but Expo just kind of lays it all out there, and the takeaway just isn't what it was for its predecessors. It's quite a feat to get these two singular songwriters, both riding waves of creativity, to cohere in this way. But after the individual successes of Face Control and Dragonslayer, Expo 86 finds a nice comfortable spot somewhere in the middle, which feels more dependable than revelatory. Could be a little more supergroup-standard ego would do them some good.


At turns paranoid and explosive, Sister marks a climactic finish to the early albums that carved the New York band’s sound into punk and alternative culture.

Sister

In March 1987, when Sonic Youth headed into the studio to record what would become their fourth full-length album, they were looking for a “rawer, more immediate sound,” Kim Gordon writes in her memoir, Girl in a Band. If the sublime double-album apex of Daydream Nation, released the following year, signaled a new phase, a door broken open, Sister was an explosion, the last hinge popping off. It was a gloriously climactic finish to the quartet of albums that followed Sonic Youth’s eponymous debut EP: Confusion Is Sex, with its subterranean clang and drone; Bad Moon Rising, which, with a title lifted from Creedence Clearwater Revival, represented the band’s dark-side answer to the American ’80s of Petty, Springsteen, and Mellencamp; and 1986’s brilliantly plangent Mansonian excavation, Evol, which garnered this diss in a review by People magazine: “the aural equivalent of a toxic waste dump.” It was proof, anyway, that the mainstream was already tuning in. By Evol, the band’s lineup had coalesced, replacing drummer Bob Bert with Steve Shelley to complete the original lineup of Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo.
Already, Sonic Youth were wide-ranging miners of culture. When Sister came out, the cover collaged a Richard Avedon photograph and a snapshot from Disney’s Magic Kingdom (both were later obscured or removed). But the band best articulated their artistic identity in their obsessive reworking of sound. Since their debut EP they had been altering their guitar tunings and instrumentation, a practice of rewriting Ranaldo and Moore picked up in their days playing with Glenn Branca. On Sister, the band renders that vocabulary in a less free-form, more familiar context—their grainy, revved-up cover of Crime’s “Hot Wire My Heart,” though pure garage on the surface, still points to a politically subversive underground canon (in 1978, the San Francisco punk group memorably performed for inmates at San Quentin State Prison while dressed in uniforms identical to those of the guards). Sister deconstructs ballads, too: The epic “Cotton Crown” finds Gordon and Moore singing a rare harmony (“Angels are dreaming of you”) over quietly dissonant guitars. “We’re interested in pop song structures, so we’ll do something that you wouldn’t believe could be used in a pop song structure but we think it could be,” Moore told an interviewer a year after Sister’s release.
For the album’s recording, Sonic Youth found both channel and container within the walls of Sear Sound, the midtown Manhattan recording studio run by Walter Sear, a classically trained tuba player and friend of Robert Moog who had helped steer the synthesizer inventor toward making his instruments more portable. His studio, then located inside the Paramount Hotel, was a trove of vintage analog equipment, including Moog synthesizers (one of which appears on “Pipeline/Kill Time,” the band’s first use of a synth), vacuum tube microphones, and the 16-track recorder used to record the album. Though the acoustics were lousy, Gordon writes in Girl in a Band, Sear was “the fulfillment of our sound fantasies.”
The band was also reading the cultishly metaphysical science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose mordant, visionary works and traumatic life experiences were very much in the air during Sister’s creation. The opener, “Schizophrenia,” alludes to a short story Dick wrote about his twin sister, Jane, who died in infancy; Dick felt her loss keenly for the rest of his life and was buried beside her. Both that song and “Stereo Sanctity” also reference Valis, a novel inspired by a mystical epiphany Dick had when a woman wearing a Christian fish-symbol necklace delivered a drugstore prescription to his front door; it was one of many messages he received from what he called the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a kind of life force that communicated to him in an AI voice. In the novel, the Valis inserts itself in the brains of humans, reordering the world through their splintered psyches. “Sister was record of the month in the newsletter of the Philip K. Dick Society,” Moore told Creem, but you don’t have to know Dick’s work to apprehend the paranoia and duality of experience that suffuses the album from the first racing heartbeats of Shelley’s drums to the beautifully discordant guitar crescendos.
“Schizophrenia” would remain a staple of Sonic Youth’s setlist, a song that still summons the band’s cathartic essence. Keanu Reeves recently sang it to a GQ writer at the Chateau Marmont. Who can blame him—Sister contains some of Sonic Youth’s most up-tempo and trenchant songs: the brutal annihilation of “Stereo Sanctity,” with a dystopic sentiment lifted from Valis (“I can’t get laid ’cause everyone is dead”), the brief blitz of “White Kross,” and one of their most classically punk songs to date, “Catholic Block,” where Shelley’s time as a hardcore drummer recieves full expression, underscoring lyrics sung by Moore: “I cross myself/It doesn’t help.” “When Dick wrote in Valis that ‘the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum,’ he was anticipating Sonic Youth’s lyrics,” Erik Davis wrote in a 1989 profile of the band published in Spin.
At its core, Sister plays with the duality of appearances. “Pacific Coast Highway” returns to the shadowy Los Angeles underworld of Evol and Bad Moon Rising, evoking the naive trust of a girl thumbing a ride to Malibu. Chillingly, Gordon takes on the voice of the predator who picks her up. The song shifts into a deceptive lull, a tranced-out California dream of an instrumental, which is then rebroken by a wave of feedback and the return of Gordon’s menacing refrain: “I won’t hurt you/As much as you hurt me.” A rock album rooted in underground surreality offers a kind of twisted reassurance: How boring would it be if the world were simply as it appears on the surface? Sister is about “the line between reality and dreaming—if there is any,” according to Ranaldo, who sings “Pipeline/Kill Time.” If there’s dystopic annihilation elsewhere on the album, that song serves up the last-ditch shot of noir (“I think you know the place that we should meet/Don’t worry if it’s dark and I’m late”). A conspiratorial, fatalistic sense of liberation embeds itself in the idea of killing time till the end of the world. The song and the album dissolve into a corrosive storm of feedback, wordless and transcendent, delivering.


The California rapper is a nimble and versatile vocalist with an impressionistic, occasionally stilted writing style. Is it enough to make him TDE’s next big star?

Porches

If Reason’s inherited anything from his erstwhile TDE labelmate Kendrick Lamar, it’s a bone-deep exhaustion. Across good kid, m.A.A.d city and To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar’s weariness underscored his subjects’ dim horizons: bright-eyed boys lapsing into sullen machismo, the insidious catch-22s facing Black men in American cities. On his second album, Porches, Reason forgoes the assiduous context of Lamar’s opuses, stitching familiar themes and settings into an impressionistic patchwork. In bypassing conventional setups and origin stories, Reason attempts a more diaristic urgency, but the abridged framework also dulls the record’s emotional reveals.
Porches’ weightiest monologues cluster together, concentrating their idiosyncrasies. “Call Me!” is a cogent, kinetic meditation on envy, an accomplished vocal performance in spite of clunky exposition (“Niggas look at me like I’m a dream, that’s only because I reached this/Fictitious place that people call success, and now they need it”). An interlude links the song to “Gang Shit!,” which volleys between first- and second-person perspectives to dramatize the divergence of childhood peers. The immediacy is reminiscent of Lamar’s proven tactics, but Reason is overreliant on jump-cuts; it’s like listening in on a phone conversation halfway through.
Though the dense songwriting rewards repeat listens, Porches is clouded by atmospheric window-dressing: raspy admonishments from neighborhood elders, voicemails from hectoring girlfriends, squabbles over territory and perceived slights. These tropes would be haphazard if they weren’t the sort of thing that appeared on Kendrick and YG albums a decade ago (not to mention Xzibit and Jayo Felony albums 15 years before that). Even the album’s overarching concept—a liminal-space metaphor positing the front porch as a portal between the streets and interior life—feels like a stilted take on “Swimming Pools” and “Money Trees.” It’s gesturing at something it’s not, suggesting discomfort with the record’s modest competence.
“A Broken Winter Break!” is the early standout, a gnarled slice of West Coast funk that wouldn’t be out of place on a Schoolboy Q or ICECOLDBISHOP project; “Send You 2 the Afterlife!” is a fluid drive-by narrative heightened by fantastic production and vocal engineering. From there, the album shifts to a half-hour of somber keys and treacly chipmunk soul, songs burdened with labored similes (“I’ve gotta cover home like umpires”) and finger-wagging platitudes (“That’s the fucking problem with our people/Sometimes we don’t dream enough”) befitting a LinkedIn post. Porches spotlights Reason’s nimble delivery across a breadth of knotty, lopsided rhyme patterns, but rather than showcase his versatility, the survey course renders him chameleonic.
It’s worth revisiting There You Have It, the 2017 mixtape that attracted Top Dawg’s interest in the first place. Assembled with YouTube-sourced beats, it’s deeply felt if not quite profound; the label’s resources might’ve secured producer placements and sharpened Reason’s vision. There is, needless to say, a Kendrick-shaped hole in the TDE lineup. But on Porches, Reason raps like the daylight’s behind him, falling prey to the narrative inversion that plagues so many of J. Cole’s disciples—the supposition that a label’s investment ensures artistic triumph. A record deal is surely a climactic event, but to the audience, it’s an offscreen prelude. The action belongs between the opening and closing credits.


The English singer-songwriter makes her full-length debut with a charmingly melodramatic set full of earnest writing and kinetic, multi-dimensional production.

Holly Humberstone: Paint My Bedroom Black

Paint My Bedroom Black

Holly Humberstone had a whirlwind 2021. Around the release of her debut EP, The Walls Are Way Too Thin, she earned touring spots with Olivia Rodrigo and Girl in Red, collaborated with fellow British success story Sam Fender, and won the Rising Star award at the BRITs. Her success was unsurprising, considering how squarely her work fit in the zeitgeist, indebted to Taylor Swift’s confessional pop writing and Phoebe Bridgers’ snarky folk music, married to vocoders and intricate synth programming straight out of a 1975 song (Matt Healy even co-wrote a track). Accordingly, her debut full-length Paint My Bedroom Black has all the angst of a young-star-dealing-with-fame record. Humberstone took the time to define herself as an artist outside the hype cycle: an endearingly wordy songwriting voice elevated by expansive, kinetic production.
Like her contemporaries, Humberstone excels at melodrama, but hers is more deliberate in its execution. It’s one thing to feel remorse for being a bad partner; it’s another to call yourself the Antichrist while the backing track plays homage to Kanye’s “Runaway.” You can want someone you shouldn’t, or you can declare, “You’re the center of the universe, my sorry ass revolves around you.” Humberstone lands a careful balance of pop theatrics and earnest emotion that might be overbearing if she wasn’t equally adept at more intimate expressions. She’s a strong enough writer that it’s disappointing when songs like “Kissing in Swimming Pools” end with stark lyrics like, “I just want to be alone with you.”
Humberstone’s music works just fine in stripped-down acoustic settings, but her producers—primarily Phoebe Bridgers’ collaborator Ethan Gruska and former Dog Is Dead frontman Rob Milton—turn every song into a holographic, immersive environment. Even the relatively conventional R&B ballad “Girl” is full of piano stabs, distorted synths, and Gruska’s murky rubber bridge guitars. “Flatlining,” one of several songs produced with Jonah Summerfield and Noah Conrad, is the most surprising experiment, with a manic backing track that nods to Jersey Club as much as it does Lorde.
The only outright misstep is “Cocoon,” where a generic 2010s-indie rock arrangement flattens some of the record’s most intense lines (“I’ve become a taxidermied version of myself”). Throughout the rest of the album, the production only elevates her writing. Even on minor tracks like the vocoder interlude “Baby Blues” or the stiff duet with TikTok star D4VD, “Superbloodmoon,” there’s a lovely narrative or an unexpected vocal effect that saves things from becoming too mundane. At the end of electro-country ballad “Ghost Me,” the drums fall away, and Humberstone includes a goofy voice memo of a friend (the Lauren of “Lauren”) comparing herself to a scene from SpongeBob. It’s undeniably silly but oddly relatable, getting by on sincerity once the novelty wears away.


On her third solo album, North Carolina guitarist Sarah Louise Henson steps beyond her vivid acoustic work and into a realm of glowing studio experimentation and layered vocals.

Deeper Woods

Deeper Woods, the third solo album by North Carolina-based guitarist Sarah Louise Henson, picks up where her previous work left off and lingers there for all of 60 seconds. Opening track “Bowman’s Root” begins with the intricate, fingerpicked 12-string acoustic that fills the two previous full-lengths she released as Sarah Louise and the high, clear singing that marked last year’s self-titled debut of House and Land, her duo with multi-instrumentalist Sally Anne Morgan. But, as the first minute of the song winds up, Henson begins harmonizing with herself, and an alto recorder traces out hidden threads. Soon, feedback and drums float up, and the harmonies rise even higher, as if sung from a cloud.
Sarah Louise hasn’t gone electric on Deeper Woods—though there are both drums and electric guitar on the album—so much as broadened her ambitions. A gifted and expressive solo guitarist, her instrumental work (like that of other great guitar soloists) has always relied on a keen sleight-of-ear vocabulary: She has the ability to conjure worlds between notes. Her instrumental 12-string guitar album for Vin Du Select Qualitite, 2016’s VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12, conjured jeweled landscapes that unfolded in constantly renewing wonder.
A bold step forward for Henson, these new compositions underscore both the uniqueness and the expansiveness of her musical voice. Some solo guitarists (like Steve Gunn) have transformed into the centers of high-energy rock bands and others (like Ryley Walker) have assembled groups to follow their jazz-prog muses, but Henson’s new album holds on to the hushed glow of the previous Sarah Louise releases, a sense of nighttime quiet far from the city lights.
While traditional folk harmonies sometimes appear in the overtones, the album is filled with thoroughly modern surprises. The rural kosmische-pop track “When Winter Turns” features a hypnotic rhythm section and Henson’s own Crazy Horse-style electric six-string guitar jags. The closer, “Fire Pink and Milkweed,” is entirely a cappella, a vivid sound poem made of layered voices. In a previous critical epoch, Deeper Woods might have been called “freak-folk,” but to use any derivative of “freaky” to describe it is to ignore its careful construction.
Nearly every song enchants. Linked by images of natural forces and the swarming growth of a living Earth, the album luxuriates in organic sounds that complement Henson’s words. Only the electric-piano-and-synth-driven “The Field That Touches My House and Yours” feels out of place, as though the sky has turned some unsettling color and the laws of physics have shifted. Everywhere else, the music is unified, as if the pieces were grown in the same flower bed, from seeds of unknown plants, each one blooming in a different shape. No matter what Henson adds, her guitar remains at the deepest center of the songs.
“Pipevine Swallowtails” offers the album’s most intricate flowering. Sally Anne Morgan’s fiddle and the warm, vibraphone-like tones of an electric piano wrap around the hypnotic acoustic guitar melody as Henson’s voice stacks itself and jumps octaves. Nothing on Deeper Woods is predictable; Henson creates no musical formulas to follow, choosing instead to follow a vaguely defined path that might not be a path at all. Overflowing with first-person narrative and ecological parable—and often without obvious choruses—the lyrics feel well-tilled, too, borne by music beguiling enough to listen to until the words take root.
If the record exchanges the uncompromising, diamond-sharp eloquence of VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12 for a more complex and sometimes imperfect vision, it also enhances the singularity of Henson’s previous work, marking Sarah Louise as a musician who’s bound to keep moving. Deeper Woods is a new place she has found. “There I sat in wonder/There I sat listening,” she sings on “Bowman’s Root”—and, while those lyrics are certainly an invitation for the listener to do the same, it’s also easy to see why they’re in the past tense. The deeper woods are right here waiting, but Sarah Louise might already be gone.


The sequel to There Existed an Addiction to Blood extends the trio’s bristly noise and gory horrorcore rap with a sense of terror that’s more academic than frightening.

clipping.: Visions of Bodies Being Burned

Visions of Bodies Being Burned

Do you like scary movies? clipping. likes them so much that while recording 2019’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood, the group amassed enough songs to fill a second album. Built from the same blueprint of bristly noise and gory horrorcore rap, Visions of Bodies Being Burned continues where its predecessor left off, again indulging the trio’s love of horror. The sequel suffers from the same dryness as its predecessor, but clipping.’s collages remain richly textured and packed with slick allusions to film, rap, and politics.
The album’s title is lifted from “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” expanding Scarface’s anguished recap of a nightmare—“candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned”—into a cinematic universe of horrors. Single “Say the Name” uses the line as the centerpiece for a house ode to Candyman, rapper Daveed Diggs’ voice screwing into a demonic growl as dark synths strobe in the background. “’96 Neve Campbell” reimagines the Scream star as a slasher’s worst nightmare, guests Cam & China the foils to Billy and Stu. clipping. digs through the rap and horror archives with unrestrained delight.
Diggs is especially giddy. “Say the Name” nods to “What Da Hook Gon Be,” “Shimmy Shimmy Ya,” and “Still Not a Player,” songs only a fan could link. “Check the Lock” nods to “Sleepin’ in My Nikes” by late Oakland rapper Seagram; the apocalyptica of “Something Underneath” channels sci-fi author N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and shouts out OutKast’s “Hey Ya.” Diggs isn’t as enamored with his influences as, say, JPEGMAFIA, but he’s clearly having fun.
The album falters when these hints of personality get snuffed out. Though Diggs is an animated performer, he isn’t a strong orator; his verses lose color when he raps in triple-time, which is his go-to mode when producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson dial up the intensity. That detachment is intentional, of course. One of clipping.’s foundational rules is the avoidance of first-person perspectives, a restriction they believe frees them from authenticity. “Our beats are more aggressive and scarier than Daveed’s actual personality,” Hutson has said. “And the way that the band works, we couldn’t have him pretending to be someone he’s not.” Sure. But third-person perspectives are not inherently impersonal and distant. DOOM’s whole career is rapped in third-person. Open Mike Eagle has rapped from the perspective of a building and community. Aesop Rock has used a dog and a gopher as muses.
clipping.’s self-erasure rubs up against the self-indulgence of their project. Though there’s plenty of stagecraft to their compositions—the echoing jungle breaks and EFX on “Pain Everyday”;  the scratchy percussion and whispers of harp on “Eaten Alive”; the “200 years of rust” on a witch’s gate on “She Bad”—no matter how much detail Diggs, Hutson, Snipes pour into their elaborate hellscapes, their frights feel vacant. There’s plenty of mood to clipping.’s horrorcore, but no theater, no ham, no cheese.
Acts like Geto Boys, Gravediggaz, Three 6 Mafia, Kool Keith, and Eminem paired the occult with sex jokes, action sequences, and boasts. Visions of Bodies Being Burned, like There Existed an Addiction to Blood, is a clear homage to the horrorcore canon, so it’s necessarily a pastiche. But it’s disappointing how academic the record’s sense of terror is. Horrorcore isn’t some ancestral custom lost to history. It flows through the bully raps of 21 Savage and ShooterGang Kony; the crime sagas of Maxo Kream; the cartoonish villainy of Sada Baby; Ronny J’s caustic low-ends. clipping. never present themselves as resurrectors of horrorcore, and Visions’ songs are livelier than those on TEEATB, but the way the group embraces the style feels archaeological. Put differently: What would Vision of Bodies Being Burned sound like if clipping. made scary movies rather than just liked them?

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The debut album from the virtuosic duo is undeniably accomplished, a smooth but frenetic set aimed at bringing jazz fusion to a new hyper-brained generation.

NOT TiGHT

There’s a video of Thundercat performing “Them Changes” with Ariana Grande, and two youngsters sit behind them. One has a baby blue sweater and plays keys. The other is mounted over drums, forehead cased in a fuzzy raccoon hat. The two play casually at first, then run amok and start wigging out, so fast and dense it’s almost excruciating—meanwhile, Ari is vibing, nodding her head. Taken at Adult Swim Festival 2020, it’s one of many YouTube clips that have helped catapult the zoomer jazz prodigies Domi Louna and JD Beck to internet fame. The comments radiate adulation: The future of jazz! Two alien miracles from outer space!
Domi (22, keys) and Beck (19, drums) communicate preternaturally on their debut record, sculpting blocks and chains of rhythmic architecture for the other to link with. DOMi weaves intricate melodies of bass and piano played ambidextrously. You could mistake Beck for a cyborg; his drums rattle with the controlled ferocity of jungle breaks. Like many young online stars, the duo’s fame outpaced their output. Frenetic live sets and sponsored jam sessions garnered them a sizable fanbase and the respect of folks like Thundercat and Anderson .Paak, who signed them to his Blue Note imprint Apeshit. They had the cosigns. The virality. The skills. All they were missing was an album, or any kind of release at all.
A key part of Domi & JD Beck’s online appeal was the live-time thrill. NOT TiGHT doesn’t try to replicate the magic of a haywire improv experiment pushed to the brink of delirium. It’s undeniably virtuosic but optimized for smooth listening to dazzle the widest possible audience, like a 44-minute display of the brightest neon-shell fireworks on the market. Based on NOT TiGHT’s cover, where the duo appears like doll-cute indie poppers, it feels part of their project is to bring jazz fusion to a new hyper-brained generation. It’s an impressive but fatiguing listen, like nu-jazz-hop played by savants typing 250 wpm, that doesn’t really cohere into something more meaningful than the sum of its very busy and skillfully imbricated parts.
The amalgam of influences and stylistic echoes—from Squarepusher and video game music to ‘70s jazz-fusion like Chick Corea and Weather Report and LA’s beat scene—can be overwhelming. For jazz heads and trained musicians, there’s a treasure trove of inventive drum and keyboard patterns and time signature mayhem to unpack. For the virgin ear, swaths of sweet texture: the dreamy vamp wash of “Duke,” the skittish yet serene pulse of “Moon” with Herbie Hancock on vocoder. “Space Mountain” reminds me of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon music reimagined as hyper-jazz. Everything comes alive here rhythmically: The keys somersault and distort, a cheeky pizzicato peeks its head in every now and then. Beck unleashes a deluge of fitful kick patterns and snare flams that sound like armies of Spirited Away soot sprites scrabbling across floorboards.
As a comic counterpoint to their technical poise, the duo also became notorious for inane antics. At the top of one live set, for instance, Domi broadcasted airhorn and fart noises into the mic. These hi-jinks obviously don’t translate to the record, but a trace of the puerility lingers in the track title “Sniff,” which was originally called “u can sniff my butt.” All of which strengthens the idea that they’re the 100 gecs of jazz. It’s like when you’re so good, you can afford to goof off. That silly side hardly appears on NOT TiGHT; just the odd fleck of folly, like the meandering “Bowling,” where Thundercat drops a Big Lebowski reference and entreats someone to go bowl.
Mostly, though, it's nuanced and mature, with a slickness that sometimes drifts into banality and makes you crave a reprieve in the form of surprise gastric sounds or cavalier testicle jokes. Ignoring the implied imperative in its title, “Take a Chance” stars silky verses from Anderson .Paak and comes across like gratingly inoffensive streambait, while “Louna’s Intro” evokes the sort of milquetoast movie soundtrack you’d hear at a Disney job orientation. It’s in these moments when the project can start to taste like gentrified coffee shop fodder, or two students trying so hard to impress their professors they write something robotically pristine.
Partly the album can feel this way because it’s, well, an album and not a live video. Without the visuals, you might forget Beck’s a human being and not a drum machine, and the drum-key clashes aren’t as cool when you can’t peep them nodding or smiling at each other across the room—micro-movements and quirks (see: pretzel overload) that lent emotional lightness to the matrices of harmonic madness. But the best songs successfully convey that telepathic synergy and friendship, like two humans knotted in such deep sync they dissolve into a single musical organism.


Referencing writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti in heavy music is not a necessarily novel concept, but Raspberry Bulbs' new Privacy successfully transposes the intangible dread of these influential horror authors into a salvo of cold, sharp jolts to the psyche.

Privacy

The success of HBO's True Detective—and the plagiarism charges that dogged the show’s first season—sent thousands of viewers scrambling for books by authors that most of them had never heard of before. Those authors included the contemporary horror writer Thomas Ligotti (the alleged victim of True Detective’s plagiarism) and Robert W. Chambers, whose 1895 book The King in Yellow is referenced often throughout the show. Naturally, H. P. Lovecraft—whom Chambers influenced and, in turn, who influenced Ligotti—also casts a shadow. Like a squirming colony of worms underneath an overturned rock, that niche literary continuum found itself suddenly thrust into the spotlight. Privacy, the third album by Brooklyn blackened-punk outfit Raspberry Bulbs, also draws from that continuum, according to frontman Marco del Rio, who began the project as a solo affair following the demise of his black metal duo Bone Awl. There’s nothing novel in that connection; counting the number of rock bands that have cited Lovecraft alone would take ages. But what Privacy does so well, regardless of the listener’s familiarity with del Rio’s cult inspirations, is transpose the intangible dread of Ligotti, Chambers, and Lovecraft into a salvo of cold, sharp jolts to the psyche.
Raspberry Bulb’s last album, 2013’s  Deformed Worship, was a strong step in this direction, but it also marked the project’s transition into a full band. The no-fi spew of Bone Awl had morphed into a murky howl, and that distance slightly blunted the record’s impact. On Privacy, though, del Rio and company—including Rorschach’s Nicke Forté and Les Savy Fav’s Andrew Reuland, both on guitar (and reunited two decades after their joint band Radio to Saturn)—don’t leave an inch of space in which to flinch. “Lionhead” staggers intrepidly into new dimensions of punk ugliness, set at a tempo too fast to be sluggishly grungy and too slow to comfortably mosh to. Forté and Reuland, old partners at guitar interplay, splinter their riffs into each other, leaving a nasty mess everywhere. The fully-rocking instrumental “Nail Biting” doesn’t justify its lack of vocals, but it’s a nerve-jangling exhibition of lacerated harmonics makes del Rio’s absence a little less glaring. But when “Finger Bones,” prickly and abject, gives del Rio room to chew out his own tongue while the band marches over the top of him, his pinpoint application of chaos congeals into a sickening, misanthropic logic.
Del Rio has denied any hint of black-metal allegiance when it comes to Raspberry Bulbs, but there’s no mistaking his blood-gurgling, Quorthon-circa-Under the Sign of the Black Mark grunt-screech, particularly on “Behind the Glass” and “Hopelessly Alive" which embody an awestruck disgust in the face of grotesque eternity. It’s almost religious, if such a thing as Raspberry Bulbs could be considered a creature of faith. There’s a perverse piety at play on “How the Strings Are Pulled", a Venom-meets-Negative Approach hymn to debasement and moral powerlessness. When the woah-woah-woahs in the chorus come deliriously close to comprising a pop hook, it seems for a second as if Privacy might pierce its own veil and reveal its squishy humanity. But every time the album builds up a lick of sympathetic momentum, it’s cruelly defused by one of the brief, ambient interludes that break up the proper tracks—six numbered asides constructed of treated noise, distorted spoken-word, strangled strings, and eerie keys that help elevate Privacy’s fractured, labyrinthine torment above Deformed Worship’s more straightforward assault
In The King in Yellow, Chambers writes of “the blackness that surrounds me”—a trite phrase to 21st-century readers, but one that carried far more existential weight in the author’s own time. Is Privacy’s “Light Surrounds Me” some kind of response to Chambers? The song itself certainly sounds as if it could be: del Rio slurs its title in spasms of loathing, as if light were twice as horrifying as the alternative. Yet Privacy as a whole is vivid andwide-eyed, with del Rio sounding more swaggeringly confident than ever about his utter lack of confidence. Doubt and fear as cleansing ecstasy: That cognitive dissonance is part of what makes del Rio’s literary antiheroes so cryptically enduring, and it’s what makes Privacy so hideously hypnotic. “Big Grin", a skeletal, garage-goth dirge that drags its carcass across five unforgiving minutes, feels like del Rio’s ultimate exorcism—only instead of a release, it’s a spiritual implosion. Unlike most bands that seek to probe the notion of a malevolent cosmos, Raspberry Bulbs aren’t trying to cheaply translate cosmic awe into a stomping, grandiose melodrama. Privacy is small, pitiful, tinny, messy, and emaciated, and it dares to demand that mankind doesn’t have the right to feel any differently. When punk stares into the abyss, this is what stares back.


Chief Keef fittingly teams with trap architect Lex Luger for his daring new 17-song tape, which is weird and expansive. It reintroduces many of Keef’s most compelling quirks.

Two Zero One Seven

There’s something fitting about Chief Keef and Lex Luger collaborating in 2017. Luger, one of the architects of modern trap production, broke out with eight Top 20 rap hits in 12 months (beginning May 2010) and has had only one since (Wiz Khalifa and Travis Scott’s “Bake Sale”). Today, Luger has more or less been forgotten by the rap industry at large, washed away amid a sea of imitators and surrogates. His sound was explosive and opulent, and it was wholly singular—until it suddenly wasn’t, first becoming recyclable, and then disposable.
Keef, meanwhile, should be considered nothing short of a prodigy. In 2012, at 17, he released the drill opus Finally Rich, and in the years since he’s continued to grow bolder and more daring, experimenting without concern for who likes what and distancing himself further and further from the sounds that made him so popular in the first place, losing two deals in the process. Keef’s refusal to produce a proper sequel to what may forever be hailed as his masterwork has caused interest in him to wane. Chief Keef is now just 21 years old, at least a year younger than current it-rappers Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage—contemporaries Keef inspired when he was still in high school, who have already been tapped to succeed him. Both Keef and Luger are hugely influential, with elements of their sounds and aesthetics still impacting radio today, yet demand is down for both, just for different reasons. Rap is one of few genres where artists can be deemed obsolete before turning 23. It churns out new models fast.
But with someone as mercurial and talented as Keef, moments of brilliance can materialize in an instant. They’re likely to happen when no one is looking. This is the case on his latest mixtape, Two Zero One Seven, where Keef proves he can produce more dynamic songs than any of his progeny while sleepwalking. And instead of attempting to reclaim lost territory, he dares to venture even deeper into open space.
The 17-song tape is weird and expansive, and it reintroduces many of Keef’s most compelling quirks. On some songs, he’s almost deadpan; on others, he’s excitable. His sing-songs can scan as theatrical: near the start of “Fix That,” he warps his vocals into something resembling a cartoon voiceover, but by the end he’s unleashing a creaky falsetto. “Running Late” presents a rousing rendition of the creepy lullaby from Nightmare on Elm Street. Sometimes he mumbles, sometimes he chants. He often uses his voice as another instrument in his productions—it can be percussive or melodic or even amelodic in service of structure or flow.
No matter how they’re delivered or what their purposes, his raps are packed with refreshingly bizarre non sequiturs and stream-of-consciousness one-liners. His flows sputter, stagger, or just flat out drill. He’s a much better writer than his heirs, dropping gems like “My watch tried to take your bitch from me” (“Empty”), “Bitch, I’m still with the street shit/Clip longer than a selfie stick” (“Falling on the Floor”), and “the diamonds in my ear giving me a brain freeze” (“Trying Not to Swear”). He seems uninterested in honing the skills he already has, opting instead to try and figure out new ones. With every passing song, he moves onward.
Luger produces a handful of tracks on Two Zero One Seven, and the best, “Control,” is like the audio version of a miniature Tron light cycle race. But it’s Keef himself who produces the majority of the project, and it’s this aspect of his creative repertoire that’s grown the most. Earlier beats were unhinged, but these do more than just move in unorthodox ways; they pop and glow. Keef seems to have little use for traditional “bangers” and he’s no audiophile (the quality of his sounds can vary dramatically), but he is willing to try just about anything and he has remarkable instincts. He isn’t afraid to induce sensory overload with busy arrangements, but he’ll also strip sounds bare and leave them exposed.
One minute he’s tinkering with piano chords, the next he’s making minimalist 8-bit trap, the next he’s channelling late ’00s Shawty Redd. He’s impossible to predict. On “Trying Not to Swear,” the beat bottoms out and the sample gets muffled and distant, lined by the sound residue from the hum of a vibrating 808 kick. “Knock It Off” and “Dope Smokes” utilize keyboards with different intentions—the former as a pulse, the latter as an accent—and both have bite, cacophonous but never discordant. These songs on Two Zero One Seven are microcosms of the artist who made them. They can be difficult to read and sometimes even harder to understand on a functional level, but they’re quite exhilarating.


After co-writing several tracks with Kanye West and hits with Crookers, Kid Cudi releases his long-awaited debut album.

Kid Cudi: Man on the Moon: The End of Day

Man on the Moon: The End of Day

Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak was undoubtedly a divisive record, but a rare one where it felt like both sides were essentially making the same argument: We care about it because it was made by Kanye West. It's a backhanded compliment, acknowledging that everything he does is a vital listen but also that it would be tougher to overlook the LP's glaring flaws had it come from someone who hadn't built up a decade of goodwill through his musical work and personal transparency. No wonder Kid Cudi threatened to retire before he even put out Man on the Moon: The End of Day-- his debut essentially exists because of a record that drew most of its power from a singular cult of personality, and that's a lot to live up to.
Cudi co-wrote several tracks on 808s (most notably guesting on "Welcome to Heartbreak"), and combined with hits in Drake's "Best I Ever Had" and Cudi's own "Day 'N' Nite", the commercial resiliency of that album proved that fad or not, this sadsack backpack stuff is here to stay. But whereas 808s was a record about a very public figure attempting a retreat he'd be incapable of sustaining, Man on the Moon uses quotidian, lonely stoner turmoil as a means of introduction.
Now, I still check for Atmosphere projects and I've got a functioning knowledge of the Get Up Kids' discography, so I can't knock Man on the Moon for skewing emo. And we won't play the hipster card, since this record lives and dies by its lyrics as much as any document of spit-these-bars formalism. The problem is how these two impulses feed off each other in all the wrong ways, with Cudi inverting the songwriting process so that a supposed pursuit of honesty is rendered predatory and manipulative. "I got some issues that nobody can see," goes the hook to "Soundtrack 2 My Life", and it's a boast as grandiose as you're likely to hear in 2009. Throughout, Cudi's issues could not be rendered in a more clumsy or obvious way, blowing up every slight perceived or real ("had mad jobs and I lost damn near all of them") into trials of such mythical proportions that it needs a bogus four-part "plot" (Cudi is sad, does mushrooms, starts to get famous, is still sad) and narration from Common.
Cudi also slathers his verses with a flat warble that Auto-Tune was made to salvage. It would be numbing enough on its own, but nearly every 30 seconds there's some terrifyingly underwritten lyric to jolt you into sharp pangs of embarrassment. He's referred to as "our hero" throughout Man on the Moon, and his superpower is managing to convey unlimited amounts of :-( while staying firmly in his vocab-stunted "sorrow"-"tomorrow"/ "room"-"moon" wheelhouse of rhymes. "Look at me/ You tell me just what you see/ Am I someone whom you may love/ Or enemy," goes a particularly Brandon Flowers-like line of the otherwise effectively spare "Mr. Solo Dolo (Nightmare)". As far as rap metaphors go, Cudi is Katrina with no FEMA: "I live in a cocoon/ Opposite of Cancun/ Where it is never sunny/ Dark side of the moon," or, even more pointedly, "Gray clouds up above, man/ Metaphor to my life, man."
But what's most frustrating of all is that Cudi can make Man on the Moon feel like a missed opportunity instead of a non-starter. His hooks have a way of burrowing into your brain-- you already know the deal with "Day 'N' Nite", and "Simple As..." bears a strange resemblance to "Semi-Charmed Life" but damn if I'll be able to forget it any time soon. He's also got a really keen ear for sounds: "Mr. Solo Dolo" nods to the warped Orientalism from Silent Shout's quieter tracks and you almost wish the tangible warmth emanating from the strings on "In My Dreams" would reveal itself in something other than a somnambulant intro. Cruelest of all, the album goes a long ways towards redeeming itself with its final two tracks-- "Hyyerrr" nods to the haziest productions from DJ U-Neek while "Up Up & Away" unabashedly makes its alt-rock intentions known with jarringly optimistic acoustic guitars.
It makes you think things could get better if Cudi manages to cheer up in the future (and why not? Man on the Moon is the rare record in 2009 that's beating sales expectations), but then we might just end up with more songs like "Enter Galactic" and "Make Her Say", the "Poker Face" remake where Cudi, 'Ye, and Common play misogynistically against type for laughs and somehow make you feel bad for Lady Gaga. Even with "Stapleton Sex" and "Gihad" making the rounds recently, it's probably still the most noxious sex rap I've managed to hear in some time.
Cudi would like to think this record is critic-proof, or at least that's what I cull from his decision to paraphrase the "there will always be somebody who will shoot down any dream" line from Kanye's "Bring Me Down". But that number up there isn't a judgment of Cudi's pain, as much as it is an ability to express it-- being misunderstood in the Midwest and lost in the big city will never fail to inspire phenomenal art in twentysomethings, but Cudi too often assumes some sort of higher ground even though his self-pity is flaunted no differently than any other tacky rapper accessory.

Universal Motown / G.O.O.D. Music / Dream On


Ten years after her last live record, Live in London feels like a valedictory statement.

Live in London

Arriving roughly ten years after Mavis Staples’ last live album—and not to mention just a few months shy of her 80th birthday—Live in London can’t help but feel a bit like a valedictory statement. Recorded over two July 2018 nights at the Union Chapel, Live in London caps a decade where Staples seemed to be a presence in pop culture in a way she hadn’t been since at least the 1970s, when the Staple Singers were scoring number one hits with some regularity. Hit singles weren’t in the cards for Staples in the 2010s, but that didn’t mean she rested on her laurels. Signing with Anti- in 2007, she cut We’ll Never Turn Back with roots maven Ry Cooder at the helm, then proceeded to make a series of records with indie rock stalwarts, singing songs by Nick Cave and Merrill Garbus while Jeff Tweedy and M. Ward sat behind the mixing board.
Live in London deliberately dodges a few of her signatures—“I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself,” the Staple Singers enduring crossover hits of the early ’70s are nowhere to be found—to focus on the four records Staples made after We’ll Never Turn Back. The journey begins with the Tweedy-produced You Are Not Alone—the 2011 Grammy Winner for Best Americana Album—and the end of the road is 2017’s If All I Was Was Black, the album she was plugging while on tour in the summer of 2018.
Skewing the songbook in this fashion does help showcase Staples as a continually evolving working artist, placing the emphasis on music over the message. This is a bit of shift for the singer, who has been at the forefront of melding music and politics since the 1960s and whose passion for justice has been undiminished in recent years. If All I Was Was Black felt pointed when released in the thick of the Trump years, while Live: Hope At the Hideout, her 2008 live album, was designed as a celebration built upon the unspoken sentiment that Barack Obama’s impending election was a culmination of the civil rights movement.
Politics never surface on Live in London. Perhaps “Slippery People” could be read an allusion to the slithery creatures populating the Trump White House, but that’s a stretch: the Staple Singers covered the David Byrne song in 1984, when Speaking in Tongues was still fresh. In this context, surrounded by songs written by Tweedy, Justin Vernon and Ben Harper, “Slippery People” acts as a reminder that Mavis Staples never resisted incorporating the latest rock or pop fashions into her gospel-inflected soul. Sometimes, this openness has been camouflaged by Staples power as a singer: she can’t help but be the focus, sometimes overshadowing her source material.
The studio albums Staples recorded for Anti- over-compensated for this slight problem by favoring handsome productions where any sense of grit was carefully sanded away; they weren’t devoid of passion, yet they were often tidy. By its very nature, a concert album corrects this problem: even if some tweaks happened in the mix, the source material is rawer than what happened in the studio. Indeed, it’s striking that the band supporting Staples on Live in London is essentially the same one who recorded If All I Was Was Black, since they sound rough and ready here, with Rick Holmstrom’s guitar sometimes growling so loud, it seems impolite.
Hearing songs from Staples’ recent studio albums performed with such earthy gusto is something of a mild revelation. It places these songs firmly within the continuum that stretches back to Mavis’ earliest recordings, since they’re all delivered with the same lean, weathered groove. These arrangements may help give definition to a tune as fragile as Vernon’s “Dedicated” but, more than anything, casting these recent songs in the same light as “Touch a Hand” or “Let’s Do It Again”—a number one hit for the Staple Singers back in 1975, but rarely remembered as well as “Respect Yourself"”—helps shift the focus to how Mavis still sounds mighty as ever.


The London singer and producer’s glamorous, infernally catchy new dance-pop record suffers from a deeply modern affliction.

It’s Over

Pop music feels cursedly literal right now: Ariana Grande is singing about how she “spent so much on therapy”; Billie Eilish’s Barbie song is a transparently straightforward plot summary of Barbie; Kacey Musgraves’ new album is a ripped-from-the-group-chat account of going through a breakup and communing with nature. It’s not a problem exclusive to A-listers. It’s Over, the second album by London producer and singer Tatyana, is riddled with literalism, therapyspeak, and phrases that are profoundly overused on TikTok: “I’m down bad,” “touching grass,” “acting like a fan.” One wonders if there’s a new pharmaceutical doing the rounds that saps a pop star’s desire for subtext and mystery.
Thankfully, Tatyana has an ace up her sleeve. It’s Over may suffer from a deeply modern affliction, but it’s also a supreme pleasure to listen to, a glamorous, fine-tuned dance-pop record filled with brazen, mercenary hooks and hypnotic synth lines that sound squelchy and spiky at the same time. Even as her lyrics dip into the sans-serif blandness of contemporary pop, Tatyana manages to refute its other fatal flaw—melody-averse mushiness—with songs that bullishly force their way into your brain.
It’s Over was produced by Tatyana with Mikko Gordon (Idles, Arcade Fire), and it feels of a piece with high-saturation early-career records by artists like Tirzah and the Knife. Like those artists, Tatyana often alludes to analog house and techno but rarely dives in fully. Instead, she takes formal instruction from those genres: Part of the reason songs like “Down Bad” and “Hold My Hand” are so punishingly catchy is that their hooks repeat over and over like samples in a classic Detroit track, sometimes layering the phrase on the beat and other times throwing it in haphazardly. Despite their condensed forms, these songs play masterfully with tension and relief in a way that makes their limited emotional landscapes feel like a feature, not a bug.
At other times, Tatyana’s vocals can feel mismatched with her production. “It’s Over,” a blocky, lurching track on which she sings about feeling emotionally volatile, features the kind of winkingly dramatic performance that might have felt more at home on her 2022 debut Treat Me Right, which dealt more in clean, soaring ’80s-inspired pop. “Out of Time,” a lovely, melancholy ballad, is underserved by its grand, almost OPN-esque synth maelstrom finale, and by the fact that it arrives two songs after “I Do Care (& That’s Okay),” a slow-building piece of hazy electronica that does a better job with the same conceit. But Tatyana’s warm, smoky voice is perfectly at home on “Control” and “Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible,” two simmering late-night house tracks that feel equal parts moody and cheeky.
These brighter moments are let down by lyrics that veer into total glibness. On “Down Bad,” clumsy lines like “All I do is feel my feelings/I write my silly little songs each evening” stall an otherwise riotous, sharply written song; on “We’re Back,” the heady idea of a potential reunion with an ex is undercut by a repeated hook of “we’re so back,” a phrase that’s overused and somewhat meaningless. Tatyana says that she wrote the lyrics for It’s Over in the way she would speak to her friends, but the result is an album that’s wildly proficient in one area and totally underwhelming in another—so off-balanced that you feel like it could topple at any moment.


The Philadelphia band’s seventh album draws from fiction, the history of international warfare, and their own internal rosary of images to create a dense, literary tangle of post-hardcore.

[Untitled]

This is how mewithoutYou’s 2015 album, Pale Horses, ends: In its closing seconds, frontman Aaron Weiss narrates a dream in which he becomes his own father; in the background, a series of guitar notes brighten and blur as if melting away in the fallout of a nuclear blast. The sky splits open. Protons collide in the empty air. Buildings burst apart and scatter weightless as dandelion seeds. Stars loosen from the sky like figs from a branch. Everything gets paved over with emptiness, the earth shaved down to a lifeless irradiated desert.
What happens then, after the end of the world sweeps through? The seventh album from the Philadelphia post-hardcore band, called [Untitled], seems to take place amid this scraped-out post-apocalyptic nothingness; its scale is wide, its landscape sprawls. Weiss opens the album as if waking from the dream that ended Pale Horses; chords gather and swell and he screams a date and time of uncertain significance—“9:27 a.m. / 7/29!”—his voice howling across a scorched earth. Weiss’ imagery—the glow of phosphorous, ploughshares morphing back into swords—draws alternately from scripture, from the history of international warfare, and from his own internal rosary of images to create a dense, literary tangle of meanings and associations, like sections of a newspaper spilling onto the floor as you read it.
The scene the rest of the band paints behind him is, in a way, just rock music, gnarled and swelling post-hardcore bruises inherited from bands like Sunny Day Real Estate. But it’s rock driven to the furthest edges of its own potential dreaminess and austerity. On “Julia (or, ‘Holy to the LORD’ on the Bells of Horses),” guitars bloom in hazy roses, as if glimpsed through a window cloudy with fingerprints; Weiss, instead of screaming or singing, barely whispers over this, a bird perched on a power line singing into the hum. He paraphrases Rumi (“Out beyond ideas of right and wrong is a field/Will you meet me there?”) under his breath and adapts imagery from 1984 (“‘Send a couple rats,’ said Julia/I’d have done the same thing to you”) to convey the feelings of abandonment and betrayal that boil beneath the surface of even the deepest, most telepathic relationships. When Weiss sings, “Who do you think needs who more?” it’s chilling—he’s peering fearlessly into the gap that gradually widens between ourselves and others.
Listening to Weiss’ almost overcrowded songs can feel like sifting through the static between two banded radio stations, as on “[dormouse sighs],” where voices and images from seemingly distinct sources overlap and disappear back into a low menacing thrum. There’s rarely one sure meaning to a mewithoutYou song; instead, you come away with a hundred little interlacings. On the centerpiece of the record, “Flee, Thou Matadors!,” Weiss plays the characters of both the fictional, mad Ferdinand VIII, King of Spain, and the historical, mad Maria I, Queen of Portugal. The song withers into silence towards its end before a guitar solo unfurls from its center, guitarists Michael Weiss and Brandon Beaver bending the remainder of the song into a question mark, unresolved, flickering between states—quiet to loud, composed to disintegrated ribbons of tape. It’s a microcosm of [Untitled] as a whole, a byzantine, feverish album that unravels and pieces itself back together song by song, a mind gradually turning inward on itself.
Both [Untitled] and its accompanying EP from August, also [untitled], find Weiss watching the wave of mental illness that overtook his father advancing toward him; “Dad tried his best/But finally fell apart at just my age,” he sings on the EP’s “Existential Dread, Six Hours’ Time.” Here, he zooms in on the rot he believes is inching through his skull. “Have I established a pattern perhaps/A biannual mental collapse?” he asks the closer, “Break on Through (to the Other Side) [Pt. Two],” the music of which explores the dreaminess of the other side as much as the Doors song depicted the breakthrough. Weiss later dreams of writing a sequel to the Belle and Sebastian song, “The State I Am In” in “New Wine, New Skins” and succeeds somewhat—both songs sustain a kind of slow, melancholy sway, at least before “New Wine” starts to stutter and lurch violently: “Come, unfastening android limbs/In the moonlight through translucent skin,” Weiss sings as the guitars stretch and shiver back into shape like elastic. “Now we’ve both been there and back again/to the state that I’m no longer in.” It’s as if he took the original Belle and Sebastian song and pulled it inside out until it was as bottomless and uncertain as his own thoughts.
As Weiss attempts to document his potential unraveling, the album’s language gets knottier and knottier. “Have I made myself?/And myself clear?” he shouts on “Another Head for Hydra,” as lost in what he acknowledges are imaginary constructions of the self as he is in their continuous fallings apart. His writing is dense, but the density is the point of the project; he is trying to convey the totality of not knowing. Like the exploding ropes of color on the album cover, the picture [Untitled] forms doesn’t necessarily get any clearer the more one stares at it; it’s a huge unhinged massing confusion of everything—the Old Testament, the French Revolution, lyrics from a Beatles song that stick in the mind like footage in an old projector. There’s no individual story that it can be reduced to; it’s all congealed together, so that by the end of the record there’s no thread to hold onto and no sound left except what any survivor can tell you comes after the apocalypse: the empty howl of mental illness. “Someday/I’ll find me,” Weiss sings almost mournfully on “Break on Through,” but the tremble of his voice seems to acknowledge there could just as well be nothing on the other side.