A new compilation of this hybrid Nigerian dance music—popularized in the U.S. by the likes of Drake and Diplo—shows that with Afrobeats, there’s much more than one dance.

Various Artists: Afrobeat Hot Hits: New Urban Dance Grooves From Africa

Afrobeats is an expanding genre from West Africa, primarily Nigeria, focused on blending the world’s best dance music together. It has become an infectious hybrid: immediately engaging, but a genre that is still growing with time. Afrobeats began with a foundation of Nigerian and Ghanaian pop music, and—over the past decade and a half—has added hip-hop, more pop, grime, dancehall, soca, house, R&B, and even EDM along the way. If you can dance to it, Afrobeats producers have found a way to work with the sound. Charting the roots of the genre does not reach back too far (it doesn’t share much more than a name with the singular Afrobeat made famous in the 1970s by Fela Kuti). Gaining traction in the UK in the early 2000s, major global attention came by 2013, arguably due to the massive hit “Personally” by P-Square—a song that was eventually covered by Jamaican dancehall artist Busy Signal in 2014 as “Professionally”. The huge, warm bass rhythm of the song, combined with a smooth flow and Auto-Tuned earworms, makes it a case study in what Afrobeats is able to achieve.
The U.S. has been hearing the influence of Afrobeats for the past few years now. Folks famous for taste-testing (and cribbing) like Drake and Diplo are well into the sound and its undeniable dancefloor-filling ingredients. The rhythms are layered and relentless, fast enough for a fast wine, but not so quick as to deny a solid head nod; the sparkling clean production values and strong melodies make nearly every song stick. Shanachie Records’ compilation of the genre’s best tunes from the past half decade or so aims to change this, and it’s a good introductory course: Every song on Afrobeats Hot Hits, the first collection of its sort in the U.S., is a strong example of the sound. With Afrobeats, there’s clearly much more than one dance.
The vast majority of the tracks on Hot Hits feature Nigerian artists, with the exception of Ghanaian hip-life duo R2Bees, a remix of American soul artist Anthony David, and a feature from Jamaican Sean Paul. This means that many tracks make use of the West African language of Pidgin, like “Wetin Dey,” a track by upcoming singer/songwriter Rayce (now signed to Shanachie himself). “Wetin Dey” features reliable Nigerian hit-maker Davido and takes its title from the Pidgin phrase for “what’s going on?” In The Guardian, writer Kobby Ankomah-Graham argued that “Pidgin is where our inventiveness will be on full display.” One might say the same thing about Afrobeats.
The high quality of each track here makes it easy to play Hot Hits from start to end, and since Afrobeats has really entered into the U.S. mainstream, the feel and rhythms are familiar. Adding to the set’s power is how individual Hot Hits tracks bring heavy hitters together. In addition to “Wetin Dey,” Davido appears alongside singer Kiss Daniel and former UK “X-Factor” contestant Tiwa Savage on a remix of “Woju.” The prodigal Wizkid, who everyone should know from his contribution to a certain Drake megahit, appears on “Crazy,” with the diva vocals of Seyi Shay. It’s tracks like this that helped these artists sign mega deals with Sony Music and RCA, respectively, over the last year. Another Hot Hits track that has received international attention is the instructional “Shake Ur Bum Bum,” by Timaya. Here, it features dancehall don Sean Paul, but there’s also a version featuring Trinidad’s seven-time soca monarch Machel Montano.
Another highlight of the compilation is “Ileko” from Tiwa Savage. She might not have the name recognition of Wizkid, but Savage has performed and recorded with huge names, from George Michael to Mary J. Blige. The confectionary chorus of “Ileko” shows off her deft melodic sense, so much so that you might call her the Queen of Afrobeats—though she’s got solid competition from Yemi Alade (whose collab tune with R2Bees, “Pose,” appears here) and the upcoming Kayefi.
A remix of Kayefi’s track “Oreski” is the last track on the compilation, but it rises to the top of the heap. Layers of rhythm reminiscent of UK funky house and UK garage are paired with moody vocals—Kayefi calls her style “Afro-soul”—and a chorus that soars over dense beats. Every track on Afrobeats Hot Hits will make people move, but it’s perhaps Wande Coal’s “Rotate,” with its soca bounce and sweet hook, that most elicits images of sweaty clubs. And even a culturally and consciously-focused tune like Tekno’s “Rara”—the video for which showcases panoramic imagery of Nigeria, both rural and urban—is built for the dancefloor.
Perhaps the biggest triumph of this beginner’s guide to Afrobeats is the fact that it’s all in one place. Though it’s possible to troll the internet and find these tracks, streaming and on YouTube, the compilation makes for an especially pleasant experience. It’s also a way to access these tunes in an officially licensed manner: given the challenge to Afrobeats from piracy, this is a good thing. More than anything, however, this a one-stop spot for music that sounds best loud, and thanks to the file quality here, it can actually be turned up.


Bruce brings heaps of feeling to a new set of some of his favorite, largely obscure soul songs, giving them a confident, faithful, and occasionally synthetic sound.

Bruce Springsteen: Only the Strong Survive

Only the Strong Survive

There are Bruce Springsteen albums born of obsession and perfectionism, endless studio hours and piles of discarded could-have-been classics left in the vaults. There are others that arrive in sudden flashes of creativity, bolts of inspiration with the smoke still rising while you listen. And now there is Only the Strong Survive, a covers album he made in early lockdown during “off hours” at his home studio, where he recreated a selection of his favorite, largely obscure soul songs alongside producer Ron Aniello and engineer Rob Lebret.
Before you rush to judgment about another classic rocker taking the Rod Stewart route, it’s important to remember that covers have always meant something different for Springsteen. Whether he was turning a Jimmy Cliff reggae single into an arena-ready burst of tension and release, or digging through centuries of American folk music to craft his most playful and vibrant record of the 21st century, he has a way of not only telling us his favorite songs but also showing us how those songs make him feel. It’s a quality that’s allowed chestnuts like “Shout” to stand alongside, say, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Jersey Girl” as staples of his concert setlists for decades.
From the opening snare thwack of the title track, however, it’s clear that Only the Strong Survive is a less transformative endeavor. “Now I remember my first love—of course, the whole thing went wrong,” the 73-year-old announces in his warm crackle of a speaking voice, updating Jerry Butler’s original with only some slight variations in word choice and an actorly chuckle. From there, it’s almost note-for-note: the strings and backing vocalists, the walking bassline and mid-chorus fadeout. (A “Volume 1” on the cover indicates there’s more where these recordings came from, and it quickly becomes evident how he was able to be so prolific.)
The most surprising thing about Only the Strong Survive is the song selection itself, which ranges from classics like Jimmy and David Ruffin’s “Turn Back the Hands of Time” to relatively modern fare like Dobie Gray’s 2000 song “Soul Days” and later gems from groups like the Commodores (1985’s “Nightshift”) and the Four Tops (1981’s “When She Was My Girl”). For those with even a casual familiarity with Springsteen’s music, it will be obvious what draws him to this material. The arrangements share his penchant for grand catharsis and minor-to-major uplift, blues in the verse and gospel in the chorus. In the lyrics, there are Chevrolets, backroads, summer nights, and lost love. Even just glancing at titles like “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” and “Someday We’ll Be Together,” the connections are so evident and obvious that he barely has to adjust them to put his own stamp on the music—and so he doesn’t.
In the place of his more characteristic touch is a confident, faithful, and occasionally synthetic-sounding accompaniment provided largely by Aniello as his one-man band. (Sam Moore of Sam & Dave makes two welcome appearances as a guest vocalist.) Since 2012’s Wrecking Ball and its grab-bag follow-up, High Hopes, Aniello has proven to be Springsteen’s most focused studio collaborator, seemingly pushing him to explore a specific element on each release. On 2019’s Western Stars, it was a wistful, melodic side of his solo songwriting, embellished with lush orchestral arrangements that felt like completely new territory. On 2020’s warm plate of comfort food Letter to You, it was the live-in-the-studio sound of the E Street Band: a familiar atmosphere that encouraged Springsteen to dig back into his catalog for abandoned songs he had yet to record with his bandmates.
On Only the Strong Survive, as Springsteen tells it, the focus is his voice. In an introductory video, he is practically shouting with excitement about the fruits of this exercise. (“I’m a good old man,” he says, cracking himself up.) You can hear what’s got him so hyped. From a gravelly whisper to a full-throated croon, a giddy roar to an anguished howl, the material allows him to explore the range of his late-career delivery, the same way his Broadway show could swerve between vulnerability and self-effacing humor without losing its narrative thread. There’s a jolt of comic desperation as he bellows “I live with emptiness” to kick off “7 Rooms of Gloom” and a sense of profound tenderness as he tells us it’s “gonna be all right” in “Nightshift.” He makes the nostalgia of “Soul Days” feel like a recollection of his formative years in Asbury Park, while it’s easy to imagine the regret of “I Forgot to Be Your Lover” situated between his own tortured chronicles of couples drifting in and out of each other’s lives.
On a record whose unrelenting brightness veers as close to Vegas as Springsteen has ever allowed himself—even 1992’s Human Touch, another largely upbeat collection with a similar set of influences, feels downright gritty by comparison—these moments of purpose help earn its place in his ongoing winning streak of studio work. It’s got character, and more than that, it’s got energy: Springsteen has never sounded quite so lighthearted, so unburdened, on record. It’s easy to think of a few ways he could have made this music feel more essential to his body of work—say, enlisting his E Street bandmates to help flesh some songs out—but at this stage in his career, he seems more driven by the act of creating itself: lighting a spark and watching as it grows, knowing someone, somewhere, could find a little hope in its light. After all, he reminds us, that’s what these songs provided for him.


With more than 20 volumes and counting, the Éthiopiques series on France's Buda Musique has been an invaluable source for Ethiopian music; this 28-track, 2xCD record takes on the uneviable task of attempting to serve as a primer.

Various Artists: The Very Best of Ethiopiques: Hypnotic Grooves From the Legendary Series

I don't entirely agree with the title of this compilation. Most likely, the majority of fans familiar with the Éthiopiques series on France's Buda Musique-- over 20 volumes and counting-- wouldn't agree with it either. It's an entirely subjective thing. If I were to make my own 28-track, 2xCD compilation of the very best of Éthiopiques, it would have three or four songs in common with this one. This is a good thing, serving to illustrate the wealth of outstanding music that series editor Francis Falceto has uncovered over the past 10 years. And at any rate, it's hard to argue with the subtitle, as these discs are indeed filled with hypnotic grooves that offer a nice beginner's guide to a series that's earned every scrap of its legendary status. If you like what you hear on this compilation, the next step is obvious: Dive in and start snapping up Éthiopiques volumes.
Americans and some Europeans could be forgiven for harboring skepticism about a series focused on reissuing Ethiopian popular music-- two decades later, images of the East African nation's 1980s famine is the first, if not the only, reference point many of us have of the country. It's hard to overstate how tiny a piece of the Ethiopian puzzle those images are. This is a country with a continuous history stretching back two millennia, a nation that converted to Christianity in the 4th century, and the only African nation never to be colonized by Europeans, though it did endure a brief occupation by Fascist Italy in the late 1930s and early 40s. It's also home to the oldest human remains ever found. Because of its highland geography and buffer zones of desert, Ethiopian culture developed more or less separately from surrounding cultures, with distinctive music to match.
Though only a few volumes of the Éthiopiques series have focused on traditional music, you can hear its strands running through the dozens of electric rock, soul, and jazz tracks on the records that cover the 1969-1978 "Golden Age" of Ethiopian pop music. It's most obvious in the pentatonic scales and melismatic vocal delivery, but it's also there in the six-against-four rhythms, lyrics filled with double entendres, and the saxophone styles of dozens of players who drew improvisational inspiration from the traditional shelléla war chant, used as a rallying cry prior to battle by Ethiopian troops right into the early 20th century.
All these elements mixed so seamlessly with American rock and soul in the hands of the country's best musicians created a new style of music. Most of the musicians who played on the scene that came to be known as "Swinging Addis" got their starts playing in official bands of Haile Selassie, the last Emperor of Ethiopia-- the Body Guard Band, Police Band, Army Band and official theater bands churned out musicians who were deftly skilled on Western instruments and highly disciplined. Most recordings and performances by singers were backed by official, government-controlled bands until the late 60s, when the first independent groups cautiously made their way onto the scene. These musicians had mostly resigned from official bands, particularly the Body Guard Band, many of whose members had been implicated in a 1960 coup attempt.
As the Golden Age took shape, there was almost no formal outside input-- Mulatu Astatqé, the innovator of the Ethio-jazz style and one of the country's most prominent arrangers, as well as a great vibraphonist, was the only musician in Addis Ababa who had received musical education in Europe and the U.S., though others would travel abroad later. Mulatu's greatest counterpart in developing a distinct Ethio-sound, Girma Beyene, was a self-taught keyboardist and vocalist who learned most of what he knew from listening to American Armed Services broadcasts from Asmara in the north of the country (it's now the capital of independent Eritrea).
Nearly all of Ethiopia's vinyl and (more commonly) shellac record output was accomplished by two shoestring record labels. The first, Amha, founded by Amha Eshete, was technically illegal when it opened in 1969 in defiance of the government's official monopoly on recordings. Amha was done for after the 1974 coup that deposed Selassie and installed a ruling military council known as the Derg, led by the narcissistic dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. Maryam's government imposed curfews that effectively destroyed Ethiopian nightlife and censored all media with a heavy hand-- its economic mismanagement was also partially responsible for those images of famine in the 1980s that we're all so familiar with in the West. One record label, Kaifa, managed to stay alive, issuing vinyl records until 1978, recording with just two microphones.
The music those two labels captured dominates Éthiopiques, and this compilation provides a good cross-section of the series, including a few cuts from artists who fall slightly outside the Golden Age/Swinging Addis purview for good measure. You get the four biggest singers of the era: Mahmoud Ahmed, Alemayehu Eshete, Tlahoun Gessesse and Ayalew Mesfin, several tracks featuring Girma Beyene, including half of the four vocal tracks he recorded, and a nice, if disproportionately large, helping of instrumental tracks from Mulatu, shelléla sax king Getatchew Mekurya and others.
Strangely, no woman singers have been included, although the female voice is so central to Ethiopian musical culture. Other odd decisions include choosing to open disc one with three instrumentals, even though their quality is unimpeachable, as well as only picking Mahmoud Ahmed tracks from Ere Mela Mela (available on Volume 7 of the series). While it's a great album-- and was the first Ethiopian LP to be widely heard in other countries (10 years after its initial release)-- Ahmed has two other volumes in the series, and they're both just as good, if not even better. Ahmed was a master vocalist, though, and all of the tracks that were included are fantastic regardless. Perhaps the only vocalist more powerful than Ahmed was Tlahoun Gessesse, who absolutely wails on all of his inclusions, with melismatic virtuosity and a preacher's fervor.
The only tracks that fall well outside the Golden Age-- a solo piano piece by Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou and an otherwordly modern recording of a traditional song accompanied by the ancient Harp of King David by Alemu Aga-- serve as a nice accent, illustrating where a few of the (to Western ears) exotic elements of the Western-influenced popular music tracks came from.
What's most striking about the music-- and the thing that makes this series worth checking out to nearly any mildly adventurous listener-- is that these tracks consistently transcend the curiosity factor. Yes, Girma Beyene's "Enken Yelelebesh" has a dark, tropical feel and a offbeat melody, Getatchew Mekurya's sax sounds like the work of an alternate-universe Archie Shepp, and Alemayehu Eshete's "Telantena Zare" tops its jazzy soul backing with a wildly melismatic and crazed vocal, but fundamentally they're all just great tracks, and they stack up to their closest American and European analogs quite well. Mulatu Astatqe, more than just good Ethio-jazz, is just good jazz.
Add in the fact that the Ethiopian recording industry, due to lack of resources, had a built-in quality control-- if you weren't good enough, and your song wasn't excellent, you didn't get recorded. Is this the place to start? Well, it's a good place to start, though you could do nearly as well going straight to Volumes 8 or 13-- it's a matter of how tentatively you want to explore the series-- and you should explore it. This is some of the world's most captivating music.


On their first album as a collective, Beast Coast attempt to move beyond the boom-bap revivalism that made them famous.

Escape From New York

Ever since 1999, the rappers and producers of the Beast Coast collective have been pegged as Golden Age evangelists and neoclassicists. They were a New York City squad with throwback New York City values, out to restore the soul to what de facto leader Joey Bada$$ called rap’s “very trash state.” A supergroup made of three smaller Brooklyn rap groups—Pro Era (Bada$$, Kirk Knight, CJ Fly, Nyck Caution, Powers Pleasant), Flatbush Zombies (Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice, Erick the Architect), and the Underachievers (Issa Gold and AK the Savior)—they spent their early years trying to conjure Biggie’s era by showing utmost reverence to the sacred land he stood on.
As they’ve grown up, the crew has softened a bit on revivalism. The Pro Era kids started singing more. The Zombies ventured into trap. Joey Bada$$ ghostwrote some of “Rockstar.” On Escape From New York, the first album by Beast Coast as a unit, they seem eager to escape their own provincial past. “This is actual, like, music,” Meechy told Hot97. “Nothing wrong with the boom-bap shit, but we didn’t really try to follow a format that everybody tried to lay for us.” Produced primarily by Erick Arc Elliott and Powers Pleasant, with Elliott serving as the project’s executive producer, Escape From New York turns its title into a metaphor. Beast Coast attempt to move beyond the boundaries established by the hallowed ground of their home, finding a deeper inspiration in brotherhood.
Despite their intentions, the album still often feels like wandering into a pointless cypher. Elliott pushed against nine-minute songs or “this Wu-Tang reincarnation kind of thing,” but most of the songs are still huge posse cuts, just with more condensed verses. Some songs have as many as nine. Some members squeeze in for a measly four bars. Sometimes it can be like watching too many people cram into an elevator; everyone would probably be better off if a few stepped off and caught the next one. They go to such lengths trying to ensure that everyone gets enough mic time that the process can feel restrictive. They don’t even get particularly cute with the matchups: Flatbush Zombies largely stick with their own, and Nyck Caution and Kirk Knight, who already teamed up for 2017’s Nyck @ Knight, almost always appear together.
There is a level of comfort that also feels like complacency. “I play these songs for people sometimes and they’re like, ‘Is that you or Joey?’” Meechy Darko told Complex. “I love that, because it’s me and Joey going after each other and that means we are in sync together.” But that smudging can also speak to a lack of originality. While they all do tend to follow one another, there isn’t much synchronicity in what they choose to rap about outside of “Problemz.” There is very little continuity. It can be difficult to get three performers on the same page, much less ten.
Cream rises to the top in situations like this, and Joey Bada$$ and Meechy Darko separate themselves from the pack. Bada$$ remains the best rapper this crew has to offer; the most technically proficient in a collective that prides itself on that sort of thing, and the artist with the highest ceiling. Meechy raps with such personality that he’s the only person who benefits from shorter verses. He could chew up scenery during a cameo. “You never get what you deserve, just what you negotiate/You want the bag, I want the safe/Click-clack, nobody safe,” he raps on “Rubberband,” howling like a berserk preacher. On at least two occasions, he gets two verses on the same song, and he earns them. On the flip side, no pairing underachieves quite like the Underachievers, who seem to shrink away at nearly every occasion. They suffer the most in this rigid format. There isn’t nearly enough time for their verses to pick up any momentum. The other members of Pro Era may as well be cardboard stand-ins most of the time.
Escape From New York is most engaging when it doesn’t try to force droning lesser rappers on listeners and instead focuses on making the “actual music” Meechy talked about. Songs like “Snow in the Stadium” and “Desperado” show that this group is, in fact, capable of producing not just functional but enjoyable rap songs under these tight conditions. But there isn’t enough of this balance, and a lot of that work is undercut by songs reinforcing the pecking order like “Puke,” a hookless bar-fest that crescendos into an all too meta Bada$$ breakdown: “I don’t even keep score, bitch I got the win/They need me like oxygen/On me, the whole block depend,” he raps, and it’s hard not to read that as rap Atlas bearing the entire Beast Coast on his shoulders. Bada$$ is the most talented and most famous member of the collective, and the Zombies have carved out their own little niche, but the Beast Coast album’s most insurmountable challenge is convincing the listener that the rest could ever hope to escape New York without them.


The California producer’s second release is a chill, whimsical listen whose Balearic compositions are filled with jazzy guitar, vintage synths, and reveal themselves to be surprisingly complex.

Subtle Vertigo

Blessed are those who have regular access to yard sales, for they shall inherit the best gear and records. Take Scott Gilmore, whose idiosyncratic studio setup is the product of years’ worth of scrounging through strangers’ garages in his native Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley. He records his music directly to a quarter-inch reel-to-reel machine that he picked up at a yard sale, and his instruments represent a mix of the enviably rare (Arp Odyssey), the economically minded (Roland TR-606 drum machine, a cheaper alternative to the more famous 808 or 909), and the truly unusual (a bamboo saxophone).
His music, which sounds as vintage as his Hammond 102200 Preset Synth, also has the distinct air of something you might find in a dusty corner of someone’s garage. The tracklisting of a recent mix that Gilmore put together for Red Bull Radio gives a good indication of his influences, like Arthur Russell, Gary Wilson, Captain Beefheart, R. Stevie Moore—a motley crew of eccentrics and iconoclasts who bent the process of getting music down on tape to their own crooked wills. Full of clean-toned guitars, percolating rhythm boxes, and layer upon layer of wispy analog synthesizers, it takes its principal stylistic cues from Krautrock and library music; the album often sounds like Air’s Moon Safari or Stereolab’s Dots and Loops run through a beat-up transistor radio that’s been wrapped in cheesecloth.
It makes a natural fit for Mark Barrott’s International Feel, an Ibiza-based record label that has taken upon itself to revive the sounds of Balearic music at its balmiest: The album is a chill, whimsical listen marked by sunny melodies, lilting rhythms, and timbres as watery as the ice melting in the bottom of your glass. Though Subtle Vertigois billed as his debut album, it’s actually the follow-up to a 2016 cassette on SFV Acid’s SFV Records label. Whereas that tape, bearing the low-key title Volume 01, was recorded in mono, the new one makes the leap to stereo; it also boasts an ever so slightly richer, fuller sound, achieved by recording eight separate tracks to his reel-to-reel, bouncing into the computer, then recording another pass on the multi-track and bouncing down again. Nevertheless, it maintains the same muted, understated air as its predecessor.
In “Pieced Together,” jazzy guitar chords strum around a kind of lite-reggae groove while Hammond stabs evoke wooden-floored roller rinks. “Walking Underground” fleshes out a sun-bleached bossa nova groove with sighing vocals that sound like they’ve been rescued from an answering machine. “Flight Through Grey” superimposes the German Autobahn onto the Southern California highway system, crisscrossing the arid landscape to the pulse of a chugging motorik groove, while long, skinny synth leads trace contrails against the pale sky. The opening duo of “E70 No. 01” and “Europe” will appeal to Shy Layers fans; the songs’ faintly tropical guitar tone, sublimated funk, and bittersweet reverie are cut from cloth similar to that used in the Atlanta musician’s yacht-pop debut.
Gilmore studied guitar for 18 years, and the level of musicianship here is accordingly high. His evolving compositions are surprisingly complex, given their laid-back air: Not only do they nail their desired hazy mood, but Gilmore’s multi-tracking methods keep their moving parts constantly shifting, so that no two passages are quite alike. New counterpoints are always cropping up, new voices constantly slipping into the mix; synthesizer leads multiply like Mickey Mouse’s splintered broom in Fantasia (just way more chill—imagine “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” adapted for the era of legal weed, maybe). If the album’s easy-going rhythms and chord changes suggest a certain low-stakes air, the music’s understated virtuosity keeps you coming back, and the penultimate track, “Tides”—a short, ambient sketch for arpeggiated synthesizer—hints at a more experimental undercurrent that Gilmore could well follow into his next recording, should he choose to. A wonderful Sunday-morning record, Subtle Vertigo revalidates the very idea of easy listening.


On his latest album, the Buffalo rapper and member of the tough-talking trio Griselda makes his first bid for a bigger audience.

From King to a GOD

Buffalo’s Griselda Records has built a fiefdom in western New York through prolific output with a very specific aesthetic, characterized by deep-seated grime draped in muted elegance. It’s the sound of long nights and cold winters, art made by hustlers toiling in relative obscurity, unable to garner support even from local institutions. As one of its founding MCs, Conway the Machine has come to embody Buffalo’s identity as a forgotten city, carrying a chip on his shoulder big enough to block out the sun. But on his latest LP From King to a God, Conway looks to shed his earthly confines for something more heavenly.
A rapper’s voice is their instrument, and few have one as distinct as Conway. His Bell’s Palsy (the result of several gunshot wounds) splits his diction right down the middle of his face, somewhere in between sharp and slurring. He’s a poignant lyricist with a penchant for storytelling, and his words are always intelligible, even if they sometimes sound strained through gritted teeth. His flow can turn an average track into something memorable, and serves as the perfect foil to his brother Westside Gunn’s nasal delivery.
The lyrics that unique instrument delivers on From King to a God are often vivid—albeit somewhat rehashed—street tales told with clever wordplay and a knack for scene-setting. He carries himself with the confidence of someone who knows they’re hard, and therefore isn’t afraid to be vulnerable, threatening violence and shedding tears in the same breath on “Juvenile Hell” (“I cried when Country Mike died, my heart broke/On the yard, get your jaw broke, as far as the bars go/Not only did I raise the bar, the bar broke”).
From King to a God’s production credits are star-studded, spanning several decades of hip-hop royalty, including EPMD’s Erick Sermon, Gang Starr’s DJ Premier, Mobb Deep’s Havoc, and the reigning maestro of mafioso rap, the Alchemist. The bulk of the production is handled by UK producer Beat Butcha and Griselda’s in-house producer Daringer, who are reverent enough towards the aforementioned OGs that the aesthetic across From King to a God is relatively seamless. The lone exceptions come from two modern-era production gurus, Hit-Boy and Murda Beatz.
Murda Beatz’s “Anza” floats a Double Dragon-esque chiptune melody atop a buoyant beat, and sounds like nothing else on the album. But the Hit-Boy helmed “Fear of GOD” is the album’s most compelling track, with a twinkling beat that teasingly withholds a sinister bassline in service of calculated drops. The inclusion of a perfectly serviceable Dej Loaf verse is curious, to say the least—her candy-coated AutoTune delivery sticks out like a sore thumb against the muted mahogany flows that typically populate Griselda records. And the vibe vanishes as abruptly as it arrived, shifting back into the tortured strings of the Method Man collab “Lemon.” It’s the strongest verse from Mr. Meth in years (“We creamin' em with pockets of dirty money, I'm clean again/Ain't gotta tell you I'm dope, just stick the needle in”), but the sequencing does it no favors.
From King to a God would be considered a solid effort from most MCs, but it's clear Conway has his aim set higher. Having conquered his hometown, Conway now seeks adulation from the world at large. And largely, it’s a world that has moved on from the New York sound of the ’90s. There are forays into potential new directions, but much of From King to a God finds Conway treading water. And the late additions to the tracklist—including the three interludes that essentially eulogize his homie DJ Shay (the recently deceased Griselda production mainstay) and tracks produced by DJ Premier and Khrysis—seem to look more backward than forward.
Conway admits that this LP is meant to be somewhat of an appetizer for his forthcoming Shady records debut, God Don’t Make Mistakes, the record that would mark a sea change for both himself and Griselda as a whole. And if he wants to shed the genre-rapper tag and graduate to the next level of stardom, he’ll need a record that elevates the Griselda sound beyond the limits of Buffalo’s icy streets.

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Drumwork Music Group / Griselda / EMPIRE


Black Mountain mainman Steve McBean here finds more room for the rest of the band's burgeoning personalities, and the resulting record raises the stakes of the debut considerably, leaving the band's musical talents to play catchup with their new material's epic-sized dimensions.

In the Future

Black Mountain's accomplished self-titled debut found frontman Steve McBean synergizing numerous local Vancouver talents along with his own grab bag of music sensibilities. To further up the ante, the band made little effort to shroud their classic rock fanaticism. Whatever you wanna call them-- revivalists, re-interpreters, or even rock fundamentalists-- that first record provided an engaging snapshot of late 1960s/early 70s AOR. With that in mind, sophomore effort In the Future faces the challenge of holding our attention amidst all these Guitar Hero games and Led Zeppelin reunions without puffing itself up to the ridiculous levels of more mainstream retro-stoners like Wolfmother and the Mars Volta.
Thanks to the emergence of side projects Blood Meridian and Lightning Dust, the curtain's been lifted, and suddenly Black Mountain sounds more complicated and conflicted than the bleary-eyed grin their debut flashed. The Debbie Downer pathos of Amber Webber, who until now had sounded like an afterthought on the band's recordings, spills over from her sobering Lightning Dust material, recorded with fellow Mountaineer Joshua Wells. Coupled with Blood Meridian exposing the bluesy id of bassist Matt Camirand, Black Mountain had no choice but to make room for these burgeoning personalities. While the debut grooved on a countercultural us v. them moral trip, Future raises the stakes considerably, leaving the band's musical talents to play catchup with their new material's epic-sized dimensions.
Simply juxtaposing Future opener "Stormy High" with the debut's first track "Modern Music" suggests that the band's more profound than playing Nintendo while high, but not entirely immune to "J.R. Tokin'" jokes. Starting with a lugubrious, "Hell's Bells"-style arpeggio before launching into stoner-metal chanty, McBean repeatedly belts the song's title as Wells's banshee howls in the background, foretelling McBean's lyric about "witches on your trail." A fitting way to kick off the album, "Stormy High" gently eases the listener into Black Mountain's increasingly fantastical world. The eight-minute "Tyrants," on the other hand, sounds like a Middle Earth baptism by fire. With its sprawling sections and gauntlet of brain-numbing riffs, "Tyrants"'s best analog would probably be "Don't Run Our Hearts Around." However, where the latter dims for hushed verses of traditional blues bellyaching, the former's eerie, calmer moments wrench the soul just as violently as the louder ax assaults.
Future provides a wide spotlight, and McBean's much more willing here to pass the shine to Wells when she's better suited for the part. "Queens Will Play" essentially beefs up Lightning Dust's threadbare palette of organ and guitar, changing a simple church house hymn into a menacing cathedral dirge. She even gets to carry the torch to the finish line with closer "Night Walks", a dreamy ballad that offers spiritual replenishment after a mystically taxing hour of dense music.
That's right, Future's hardly a smooth ride. Whether verified or not, drug use has always gone hand-in-hand with these guys, but here they either smoked too much and lost focus on some of these winding mini-sagas or remained painfully sober and sacrificed much of their debut's mind-freeing vibe. Black Mountain's strategic sequencing of long-track/short-track managed to keep listeners locked on, particularly for its dazzling first half. Future's valleys sag slightly lower, giving the listener less incentive to motor through this psych jungle. The sappy Spider-Man 3 soundtrack ballad "Stay Free" comes off the heels of the ho-hum "Wucan", a six-minute piece of all-too-canonized psychedelic sounds, and the nearly 17-minute (!) "Bright Lights" finds the band's creativity running on fumes by its midway point. Fortunately, buried in this massive time capsule you find some succinct nuggets, particularly the Tom Petty-esque swagger of "Angels" and crying-into-beer lurch of "Wild Wind". Ultimately, Future can't compete with the classic rock divinity that's been worshipped in countless high school parking lots and shag carpeted basements for the last 40 years, but you gotta love them for trying. After all, in a time when four rock gods reuniting for a one-off concert becomes the music story of the year, what can any of us mortals do?


A concept album that serves as a nostalgic trip down clubland lane, Moby's latest attempts to distill a quarter-century of NYC dance music into one hour.

Last Night

Moby's controversial strategy of licensing the hell out of 1999's Play proved, not surprisingly, something of a devil's bargain. After years of hard work on the club scene and as a cult crossover star, Play was the big payoff and big payday all wrapped up in one. But the downside was that Moby's sudden ubiquity, and the seeming effortlessness with which Play proliferated, downgraded the Moby brand. The guy actually accomplished quite a bit creatively before he became a commercial force, but making it look easy made a lot of detractors think it actually was.
Still, at the same time, there may be something to that in light of Moby's post-Play output. Given that Moby has total autonomy, both creatively and financially, it's disappointing that the past several years have seen him do little in the studio to take advantage of freedoms many artists would kill for-- all while dozens of boundary-pushing DJs and producers circulate in and out of fashion. Maybe Moby sensed it himself, and, rejecting complacency, set himself some ambitious goals with Last Night, a concept album that serves as a nostalgic trip down clubland lane. This being Moby, it even comes with an explicit statement of purpose. "It's me trying to take 25 years of going out in NYC and condensing it into a 65-minute record. It's also trying to condense an eight-hour night into just over an hour of music."
Distilling 25 years of material and an eight-hour experience into a 60-minute record is no small feat, and to Moby's credit Last Night isn't a totally pedantic drag. Moby's never been shy about tipping his hand when it comes to his influences, and returning to dance music for inspiration makes perfect sense at this point in his career-- especially after the relatively uninspired Hotel and Baby Monkey (recorded as Voodoo Child, his last stab at a "straight" dance record). But there's "inspired" and then there's inspired. Compared to (for example) Hercules & Love Affair's own recent stroll through New York's varied club history, the relatively indifferent grooves on Last Night don't quite cut it. These may be songs designed to make you move but the results are only intermittently rousing.
"Ooh Yeah" and "I Love to Move in Here" (featuring the Cold Crush Brothers' Grandmaster Caz) start the album out with cool (as in cold) disco diva vocals and hip-house, respectively. Retro cred established, the disc then moves into peppier territory with "257.zero". The track doesn't really go anywhere, but it still feels like it could go on longer than three and a half minutes. "Everyday It's 1989", on the other hand, so perfectly encapsulates the spirit of rave that it might as well be drawn from a comp circa that titular year. If Moby wanted to distill that hour further down to just a single track, it would be this one.
The track's also a reminder of Moby's prowess as a producer, but unfortunately too much of Last Night stresses his recent bona fides as master of the middle of the road. The hip-hop spiced single "Alice" (featuring members of Nigeria's 419 Squad) rides a moody subterranean bass but ends pretty much where it begins. "Hyenas" is all swoon and no drama. "Disco Lies" and "Stars" (anthems, both) are more perfect late-80s/early-90s club recreations that nonetheless miss an opportunity to mix (or at least bridge) the past with the present. Somewhere in the middle are tracks like "Live for Tomorrow" and "I'm in Love", sexy, moody things that are equal parts bedroom lures and hints at the beckoning chill-out room.
That chill-out atmosphere kicks in for the album's final stretch, gloomy tracks such as the woozy trip-hop of "Degenerates" or the circular, minor key dirge "Mothers of the Night" that act as the big comedown after the implied narrative's night on the town. By dedicating such a big hunk of the album to the early morning, however, the lasting vibe conveyed by the record is not euphoric or even nostalgic, but oddly elegiac. In the end, lost amidst the faithfully reproduced house piano progressions and familiar melodies is anything signaling that those epiphany-filled late nights were actually, you know, fun. If Moby's glory days were anything like this, Last Night never quite makes an entirely convincing argument why anyone would ever want to go back.


On his solo instrumental debut, the New York acoustic guitarist balances the romantic dynamics of flamenco and the meticulousness of Windham Hill with the unguarded qualities of improvised music.

Kissing Rosy in the Rain

Mason Lindahl skipped the great solo-guitar surge of the last decade. In 2009, the North California native debuted with Serrated Man Sound, a quixotic collection of post-New Weird American pastiche. He sighed like M. Ward and cooed like Devendra Banhart, howled like the Dodos and crooned like Vetiver. Inchoate as it was, Serrated Man Sound didn’t cause a ripple in a scene that was already evaporating. The record’s real thrills, though, were its glimmers of guitar heroism—the dizzying dynamics of “No Man,” the phosphorescent flickers of “Nine.” “What if he just shut up and played?” one might have wondered, a conundrum that has vexed decades of fingerstyle giants. We never found out: While William Tyler, Gwenifer Raymond, and Steve Gunn navigated new routes from beneath the shadow cast by late colossus Jack Rose, Lindahl disappeared.
Or so it seemed. Lindahl’s first album in a dozen years and first since migrating to New York, Kissing Rosy in the Rain is as enchanting and emotive as any of the solo guitar records released during his extended absence. Tender, melancholy, and candid, these nine songs for nylon-stringed guitar suggest a gnarled apple tree bare in winter—muted wonders, suspended somewhere between sweetness and sadness. As its name and rapturous title track suggest, Kissing Rosy in the Rain is a remarkable distillation of nature’s bittersweet cycles, especially the way love eventually entails loss, and loss sometimes offers a new start.
The first thing you may notice about Kissing Rosy in the Rain is the sweep of its beauty. With little more than his guitar and occasional electronics, Lindahl weaves melodies and layers harmonies as though buttressed by a miniature orchestra, much like his predecessor James Blackshaw. You can imagine opener “Sky Breaking, Clouds Falling” replicated in some lavish concert hall, or the patient “Outside Laughing” rearranged for a string quartet. “Distress” and “Deep Wish,” meanwhile, summon the romantic dynamics of flamenco, where tufts of notes pause to exhale as if the music were a living organism. This majesty betrays more than a whiff of Windham Hill and ECM, stables whose instrumentalists have often been lampooned for meticulousness that borders on pedantry.
But these songs are pretty without being precious, more concerned with emotional integrity than sonic purity. Listen closely, and you’ll hear Lindahl lift from a string too soon or the noise inside the studio interrupt an otherwise silent rest. In fact, were the layers beneath these tracks not so deliberate and subtle—the baleful organ drone under the dirge “In Lieu,” the kaleidoscopic smears around “Sky Breaking, Clouds Falling”—these songs might be mistaken for improvisations, made in a such a way that the occasionally aberrant note or creaking chair couldn’t be corrected in a subsequent take. “Soft Light” feels like a brief meditation on chronic self-doubt, as patient but intense as an improvisation by impressionistic mage Loren Connors.
This idea will be familiar to fans of Grouper and Marisa Anderson, artists who have recently allowed their compositions to bend to the demands of space and time. This indeterminate approach fosters imperfection and vulnerability, coexisting conditions that remind us that music is first cathartic for the person who makes it. For Lindahl, these details let you in the room as he sorts through his passions. More important, though, these tiny errors reinforce Lindahl’s larger point: Nothing is ever entirely wonderful or tragic, broken or righteous. Hearing a string buzz against a fret or Lindahl pause to search for the next note turns listening into an act of trust.
Kissing Rosy in the Rain was originally slated for release early in the fall of 2020. As with innumerable other plans, the pandemic and its atmosphere of unease prompted months of delays. These songs now arrive right on time, at the start of a year when almost any smidgen of hope or delight already seems meted out with a matching dose of anxiety. Lindahl writes little hymns for the uncertainty of our existence and gentle laments for vanished happiness. His nylon notes flicker like a flame in a stiff wind, embattled but still clinging to the original spark.

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The viral phenom’s full-length debut cuts her modern pop sensibility with doses of historicism, embracing opposing energies with effortless swagger.

Cheap Queen

By now, Mikaela Straus’ artistic predicament has become uncannily familiar: A young unknown with a fresh, infectious sound releases a song that catches fire. Streams rack up, fame arrives overnight; the pressure’s on to articulate an artistic identity, cook up a debut album, and make good on the promise of that first hit, fast—all while contending with the gaze of several million curious onlookers. If Straus, who’s better known as King Princess, wanted to compare notes on the ups and downs of a viral breakout, she could do so with a fairly spectacular peer group that includes Maggie Rogers, Billie Eilish, and Clairo.
Straus’ story has an added layer of complexity. Last year, the 20-year-old singer-songwriter rose up on the shoulders of her song “1950,” a sticky, Harry Styles-cosigned debut that took inspiration from classic queer literature and opened with a nod to her sexual orientation: “I hate it when dudes try to chase me.” On its heels came “Talia,” a bit of liquor-wet, post-breakup revelry directed to a conspicuously female subject, and the self-explanatory single “Pussy Is God.” Within months, King Princess was not just a burgeoning pop phenom, but a burgeoning queer idol.
In the historically sanitized landscape of pop music, queer expression is undeniably radical, particularly how Straus does it—by naming and gendering her desire in a way that, not long ago, few dared to. And if Straus is fazed by the burden of representation, she doesn’t show it. Her debut album—that first true test of her artistry—is titled Cheap Queen, borrowing a term from drag culture, and on its cover, she appears with her face done up in drag queen glam, down to the painted-on beauty mark. The title track, she says, is a tribute to her squad, all cheap queens in their own right. (Straus, whose father runs Brooklyn’s Mission Sound studio, inherited a leg up in the industry, so it’s a bit cheeky of her to make a personal brand of scrappiness—but then, cheekiness is part of her brand, too.) Like any good pop song, “Cheap Queen” strikes a balance between specificity and relatability. It shouts out its community without wading into identity politics, instead cultivating, through its inclusive warmth and effortless swagger, a stoner-pop appeal likely to resonate with anyone who’s ever stayed up drinking and smoking with pals.
Thematically, though, “Cheap Queen”—originally one of the album’s sharp, economical interludes, until Straus’ team persuaded her to expand it—stands apart. On the whole, the album is more concerned with lovers than with friends. Sequenced as a chronological narrative, Cheap Queen loosely follows a fraught renegotiation of space between exes; the particulars aren’t quite so interesting as the emotions they draw out. Straus has noted her eagerness to “write about getting my heart smashed,” and she repeatedly delivers on the drama of that declaration. “Homegirl,” a schmaltzy, vibraphone-embellished ballad, tracks the triangulation of glances between Straus and the boys who are eyeing the same woman at a party—the kind of gathering where close quarters reveal vast emotional distance. The gulf between Straus and her love interest widens as she considers forgotten possessions unlikely to be reclaimed (“Isabel’s Moment”) and nervously awaits a text unlikely to arrive (“Watching My Phone”).
The latter song’s clincher is an admission of inadequacy: “I can’t be the million girls you’re going to meet.” The meekness is gutting; its narrator is barely recognizable as the same person who earlier claimed to be “getting too cocky, since everyone wants me,” who wrote off her ex with a sweetly condescending, “You’re probably just a fan now, babe.” But embracing opposing energies is the King Princess way. She is confident and vulnerable, cool and earnest. As her chosen moniker suggests, she’s masculine and feminine, swaggering and soft, posing for Playboy as both cheerleader and jock. She’s posing for Playboy, a bastion of the male gaze that her widely broadcasted sexuality belies.
In particular, Cheap Queen plays on a tension between old and new. Straus and her Gen-Z peers grew up listening to Drake, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift, but Straus’ industry-adjacent upbringing also exposed her to ’70s rock bands including Led Zeppelin and T. Rex. Like Styles, who helped precipitate her fame, she seems eager to cut her modern pop sensibility with doses of historicism. On Cheap Queen, the drum pads and Auto-Tune harmonics that defined her first singles are still part of the mix, but the computer isn’t her primary tool. There’s a hint of Janis Joplin when Straus layers in blues guitar and organ or teases the occasional snarl out of her otherwise silky voice. Latter-day rock prophet Father John Misty drops by to handle drums on “Ain’t Together,” a crisp, handsome tune with Beatles-esque eccentricity in its (digitally approximated) Mellotron fills and densely layered backing vocals.
Still, Straus is a distinctly contemporary creator, versed in samples and pitch-shifts and interludes—songs as short as post-digital attention spans—that house some of her most intriguing musical ideas. To the extent that viral success is explicable, it seems sensible that hers continues to hold. As Cheap Queen makes plain, she’s not an ingénue with one great idea—she has a few dozen of them, informed by sources spanning decades and genres. There are moments when she slips up—“Watching My Phone,” with its lugubrious strings and wistful choral embellishments, feels particularly overworked—and she isn’t breaking ground in pop by disregarding its supposed borders. But where post-genre stream-baiters pull their numbers by anesthetizing distinctive sounds, King Princess pulls hers by playing up their contrasts.

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The Toronto band’s pummeling sound still evokes white-knuckled, visceral disgust, but they struggle to take these songs somewhere more interesting than they started.

Atlas Vending

METZ isn’t hooky in the traditional sense of the word, but their appeal is immediate as that of any pop band. Years before Shellac and Hot Snakes broke their hiatuses, the Toronto trio’s Sub Pop debut proudly kept the bad vibes going for antisocialites who didn’t care to pledge full allegiance to hardcore, punk, noise, or indie rock. If Steve Albini producing their 2017 album Strange Peace didn’t move the needle much, it’s only because you might’ve assumed he did the other ones too. And yet, Strange Peace started to renege on the promises Alex Edkins made two years earlier on II: that METZ would never hire a big producer, clean up their sound, or make anything accessible enough for radio. Three years later, Atlas Vending verges even closer to “accessible” and “expansive.” For better or worse, the snare tone is still their best hook.
But what a snare tone. It’s about the first thing heard on the opening “Pulse,” a form of “grimy, airless 200-cap venue” vérité so antithetical to a typical studio-produced sound that it comes off like CGI—as if Hayden Menzies is banging oil drums inside a meat locker, which itself in inside a well, which itself is inside a cave. Getting on METZ’s wavelength has always required a miserabilist bent, and the insistent beat is self-explanatory: It’s the pulse of a man whose heart pumps coffee sludge, steel shavings, and malevolence, soldiering on in the hopes that tolerance for pain might amount to something useful.
It’s an apt state of existence for Atlas Vending, as METZ’s music skews more political by default in 2020. We’re told that Edkins addresses “crushing social anxiety, addiction, isolation, media-induced paranoia and the restless urge to leave everything behind,” and really, what else is an aggrieved noise-rock band supposed to write about? “A Boat to Drown In” and “Hail Taxi” avoid restating the obvious, but would benefit from a less oblique approach. Edkins attacks every lyric with the same unyielding, agitated bark, making it hard to grasp any heightened sense of stakes or outrage. Is he newly infuriated by three years of doomscrolling since Strange Peace or is this the inevitable outcome of matching his band’s unyielding, agitated music?
The cerebral aspect of METZ’s music is always secondary to its concussive power, and on Atlas Vending they take great care to get the sound and associations in place. Co-producer Ben Greenberg’s stint with The Men coincided with their creative zenith before he pivoted back to the industrial, urban assault vehicle of Uniform. The mixing comes courtesy of Seth Manchester, who guided the mainstream breakthrough of Daughters’ You Won’t Get What You Want, recreating their prior sonic snuff with a prestigious, filmic scope that roped in Nick Cave fans. METZ doesn’t lack those acts’ extremist convictions; Atlas Vending is among the most pummeling music released by a big-league indie label in 2020. Nearly every track has something to offer the pedalboard gawkers—the guitars of “Parasite” replicate a dentist’s drill on chattering teeth, the harmonies of “Blind Youth Industrial Park” imagines Alice in Chains’ Facelift as part of Sub Pop’s back catalog, and Chris Slorach’s bass tone ought to require oversight from OSHA.
Each of these things happens within the first 30 seconds or so, and METZ struggle to find ways to take their songs somewhere more interesting than they started. The choruses of “Blind Youth Industrial Park” or “Hail Taxi” are clean enough to pass for anthemic, but their impact diminishes with repetition, Edkins’ melodic austerity and rigid intonation ensuring they’re anthemic only relative to other METZ songs. “The Mirror” kicks off with an intriguing post-hardcore rendering of the Bo Diddley beat and cycles in place for about five minutes. Lead single “A Boat to Drown In” does this intentionally, a seven-minute motorik meant to signify a bold new direction rather a low-risk pivot, the result of incrementally widening their influences over the past decade. There’s no denying METZ’s ability to summon a white-knuckled, visceral disgust where tension and release are indistinguishable. It slaps, but it doesn’t leave much of a mark.

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Naeem Juwan steps away from the Spank Rock persona on an album that drifts between manic experimentation and somber fury. It’s the work of a freer musician, one unburdened by internet hype.

Startisha

If you spent time online in 2006, there’s a chance you thought Spank Rock was cool. His music was a defining cog in the genre-mashing thunderdome that emerged alongside bloghouse; it was superficially exciting and quickly overwhelming party music, an abrasive and sometimes thrilling concoction of break-beat Baltimore club mixed with bass-heavy hip-hop, house, rock, and electronica. But unlike his collaborators from the same era, who found commercial success by evolving out of the internet pockets they started in—artists like Diplo, Santigold, and Benny Blanco—Spank, real name Naeem Juwan, stayed put, treading water in some mid-aughts fantasy. He quickly became a relic of his time; when I think of Spank Rock, whose debut album YoYoYoYoYo came out in 2006, I think of purple American Apparel hoodies and cups of froyo at Pinkberry.
Startisha, Juwan’s debut album under his first name, arrives six years after the last Spank Rock EP. It’s the work of a freer musician, one unburdened by internet attention, hype, or the need to stand out. Most importantly, though, it’s an attempt by a musical harbinger to prove, all these years later, that he does, actually, have something to say. For the past five years, Naeem worked on new music with producers Sam Green and Grave Goods, in Philadelphia, and with Ryan Olsen in Minneapolis. He popped up last year on Bon Iver’s i,i, earning a writing credit on the transcendent hymnal “U (Man Like)” and a personal tribute on album highlight “Naeem.” Startisha’s nine songs, two of which carry writing credits from Justin Vernon, are undeniably more personal than Naeem’s previous work. There’s something cathartic about an artist with such a purposeful persona finally shedding his layers, even when it doesn’t reveal as much as he might think it does. But this album is more for Naeem himself than any listener. And when it hits a sweet spot, drifting somewhere between manic experimentation and somber fury, Startisha shines.
That sweet spot is the Francis and the Lights co-write “Stone Harbor,” a warm tribute to Naeem’s longtime boyfriend. Green and Grave Goods’ production swells from a trip-hop bounce, layered with electronic horn flares to a full-bodied, piano-flushed sing-a-long; it’s a near perfect encapsulation of the internal chaos of missing a partner, a sensation both vulnerable and assured. “Every song I hear I think of you/Every love I’ve had I think of you,” Naeem repeats, like a prayer. Just as transportive is “Simulation,” which features Vernon and Swamp Dogg and takes a page from Kanye West and Vernon’s maximalist playbook, blending folksy keys with heavy 808s as Naeem raps, scattershot, about the Sandy Hook shooting, banned books, and the DC Comics character King Mob. He still knows how to party, though, dipping back into Spank Rock territory on “Let Us Rave” and the ridiculously fun “Woo Woo Woo,” a raunchy and cocky posse cut over a hiccuping Baltimore house beat that features Juwan’s long standing (and sorely underrated) collaborators Micah James and Amanda Blank.
It’s unclear, really, what Startisha is trying to say, beyond manifesting a fresh start for its protagonist. When Naeem tries too hard to tell us who he is, he stumbles—songs like “Us” and “Right Here” feel insular and half-conceived, and his verses, while not Spank Rock-level crude, have the pent-up, free-associative energy of long-restrained rambles. The album’s closer, “Tiger Song,” is a well-intentioned but exhausting attempt at something like a worldview, where Naeem’s pontifications about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. are downright confounding. It’s unedited and raw, as inaccessible as a stranger’s scribbled journal entry.
It’s on Startisha’s title track, though, that we finally meet Naeem Juwan. The song tells the story of his childhood neighbor, Startisha, who appeared one day at a family get-together, drawn by the thump of the Baltimore club music playing, and danced with Naeem. He never forgot it. And over a dripping, fractured electronic symphony that’s part A.G. Cook and part Bon Iver, he unites both the awe he felt at the time, witnessing Startisha’s presence, and the nostalgia he feels for her now.
“Sometimes when I have time/I think of you and I wonder/Do you still move this way?” he sings. Nearly six minutes long, the song luxuriates in its remembrance; soaked in heavy drums, luscious horns, and dramatic vocal runs, it has the feel of a rediscovered home video, a simple but vivid origin story of an impressionable queer black kid watching a glamorous black woman dance. Naeem is singing about his radiant neighbor, but he’s also singing to himself: the one still in the closet as a boy in Baltimore, the one slamming sounds together on some blog in 2006, the one searching for an artistic identity, the one we meet, now, finally at peace with himself. “I’m still moving, I’m still moving, I’m still moving,” he sings, pained, as the song peters out. He’s assuring us, but really it feels like he’s reminding himself. When you’ve been stuck for this long, even the smallest hint of clarity can feel heaven-sent.

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A benefit compilation from the venerable UK label 4AD sets its roster loose on its back catalog for a varied set of covers that uphold the imprint’s exploratory spirit.

Bills & Aches & Blues

The venerable UK indie label 4AD has long embodied a sensibility more than a particular sound. As the label’s U.S. general manager, Nabil Ayers, recently observed to The New Yorker, even during its halcyon 1980s and ’90s, signature acts like dream-pop fantasists Cocteau Twins and college-rock absurdists Pixies had little in common musically. So Bills & Aches & Blues, a new 18-song set of 4AD artists covering other 4AD artists’ songs, comes with both a distinguished pedigree and a wide stylistic purview.
With proceeds benefiting an after-school program for children, the album exists for a good cause. At its best, Bills & Aches & Blues presents beloved and lesser-known artists from the label’s roster unearthing hidden gems with the same adventurous, borderless spirit that has cemented 4AD’s status as a pioneering indie institution. Yet, especially in the form available on streaming services—four separate, side-long EPs—the compilation often feels like less than the sum of its parts. While it’s clear that the songs and musicians here are interconnected, exactly how is sometimes less so.
The tracklist for Bills & Aches & Blues—the title is from the Cocteaus’ “Cherry-Coloured Funk,” a song that doesn’t necessarily ask you to notice the words—is unpredictable, for better and worse. It’s not exhaustive: You’ll search in vain for TV on the Radio, SpaceGhostPurrp, St. Vincent, Throwing Muses, A.R. Kane, Zomby, Camera Obscura, Gang Gang Dance, or perhaps your 4AD act of choice. It’s not a greatest-hits victory lap, either, though it opens with relative newcomer Tkay Maidza’s jubilant electro-pop take on Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” and includes a sadly irritating, H.O.R.D.E. Festival-hootenanny version of the Breeders’ “Cannonball” by Tune-Yards. (Two of 4AD’s unlikeliest global smashes—Modern English’s “Melt With You” and M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up the Volume”—are, probably wisely, absent.) It’s also not a rarities project, but the label’s mindset seems to show through most vividly when its artists take the road less traveled.
On Bills & Aches & Blues, 4AD’s bigness and ineluctable weirdness often meet through the Breeders, specifically Kim Deal. Two of the label’s most revered artists of the 2000s and ’10s—Bradford Cox (of Deerhunter/Atlas Sound) and Big Thief—each choose Breeders covers, and they’re not obvious picks. Big Thief’s autumnal folk-rock rendition of Deal’s stark “Off You,” from 2002 comeback Title TK, is simply gorgeous, finding common ground in off-kilter catharsis. Cox, a longtime champion of 2008’s underrated Mountain Battles, is firmly in avant-garde mode for that album’s title track, all drones and chimes, but his version is a welcome curveball that suits the strange, ceremonial original. Better yet, and similarly art-damaged, is the Breeders’ astonishingly faithful cover of “The Dirt Eaters,” an astral-folk ’90s deep cut from cult group His Name Is Alive. Ambient project Bing & Ruth’s piano-based reworking of the Pixies’ Deal-led “Gigantic” turns one of 4AD’s best-known songs into something unrecognizable. Serene and instrumental, it’s a Bing & Ruth song now, a fake-out as fun as it is irreverent.
Glimmers of 4AD’s bizarre alchemy pop up across the compilation. Helado Negro’s leisurely synth-folk take on recent Deerhunter album cut “Futurism” is a delight, as is Aldous Harding’s lithe, loungey reinvention of a song close to Deerhunter fans’ hearts, “Revival,” originally off of 2010’s Halcyon Digest. Jenny Hval luxuriates radiantly in the ethereal introversion of shoegaze trailblazers Lush’s 1989 EP track “Sunbathing”; U.S. Girls transform the Nick Cave-led Birthday Party’s 1982 Junkyard title track from glowering goth rock to their own expansive art-rock style. Future Islands’ regal baritone recasting of Colourbox’s 1985 single “The Moon Is Blue” arrives as a wonderfully convincing love letter. It sounds a bit like Arctic Monkeys in their songs-about-lunar-taquerías phase, while also highlighting the work of one of alternative music’s many unheralded Black artists, Colourbox singer Lorita Grahame.
The chemistry doesn’t always click. Dry Cleaning’s cover of Grimes’ “Oblivion,” a haunting electro-pop single from 2012’s Visions that has since taken on a life of its own, is a regrettable disaster, a somnolent trudge: The UK band rightly spotted a connection to their own fragmentary lyrical approach, but alas, this group known for spoken vocals doesn't seem ready yet for actual singing. British producer SOHN’s cover of Tim Buckley’s modern standard “Song to the Siren”—which became a 4AD landmark as sensuously reimagined by the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser fronting the label’s This Mortal Coil collective—is silkily sung and elegant adorned, but it’s a bit po-faced for its surroundings, like it’s wearing a suit on the off chance it’ll be called on for Grammys tribute. Much the same goes for Swedish project Becky and the Birds’ strummy, glitchy, ultimately reverential update of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago ballad “The Wolves (Act I and II),” a song that came out on 4AD in Europe but seems inextricably linked with its North American indie label home, Jagjaguwar.
Bills & Aches & Blues is a frequently impressive assemblage of extraordinary artists running amok through a trove of extraordinary songs, with occasionally uneven results. If what unites them all at times feels undefinable, that’s probably the point: 4AD’s roster is most interesting when they’re exploring, escaping, closing their eyes and dipping into an ocean of swirling, immersive sound. The most thrilling and maybe representative discovery here is Irish folk experimenter Maria Somerville’s cover of the profoundly obscure “Seabird,” a 1995 song by short-lived Unrest offshoot Air Miami. Surreal and escapist, with hypnotic drones and the sounds of waves splashing, it’s a fitting 2021 successor to the reverb-drenched dreamscapes that have been inextricably associated with 4AD for almost all of the label’s astounding 41-year run.

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The Irish American singer-songwriter taps into the propulsion of prime Joni Mitchell: a restless mind bouncing against the blur of one’s surroundings.

Age of Apathy

To title an album In the Magic Hour—as Aoife O’Donovan did in 2016—is to invite certain chromatic expectations. She delivered, in part, by exploring memories of childhood summers on the southern coast of Ireland, daubing the text with crepuscular blues and low moons. Ancestors sang like evening stars, skin tasted like fine light. O’Donovan’s probing compositions—the culmination of a career straddling the worlds of progressive bluegrass and folk—unfolded like porch-lit conversations, which meant that even at its uneasiest, the record was unhurried. And there was unease. Magic Hour ended with a triptych of songs about escape: planning, packing, panicking. But all that activity hung in the air, a sort of motion memory.
Six years later, O’Donovan is still on the move. The images are as impressionistic as ever, but now the impressions arrive at velocity: On the Taconic State Parkway, on bus routes to Brooklyn and Boston; in a horse-drawn cart on the plains and a car on the cusp of Earth’s orbit. On Age of Apathy, she taps into the propulsion of prime Joni Mitchell: a restless mind bouncing against the blur of one’s surroundings. She has that same actor’s sense—when to go big, when to bring it backwards. A celebration of the muse returning, “Phoenix” puts a muted groove to an in-the-pocket strum right out of “This Flight Tonight.” “Fever’s got me shaking/Rises up like a road to meet me,” O’Donovan sings. She sounds honored. The title track, like “Flight,” finds the narrator on an impulsive trip, blasting tunes to chase her thoughts. O’Donovan breaks into one of those tunes at the end: Mitchell’s “My Old Man.”
No song here, though, is as plainly lovestruck as that snippet. “Galahad” feints at devotion, but O’Donovan ultimately treats the legend as a foil, someone whose pursuit of Avalon only adds space between him and everyone else. “Somebody told me you were pure of blood and oxygen/That your good knife can cut through anything,” O’Donovan smirks. “But I’m alive.” She leaves him staring at seagulls, having flirted him to a draw. The chamber-rock crawler “Lucky Star” alternates details of a seasonal affair with travel complaints. O’Donovan and guest Madison Cunningham—both alumni of the radio variety show Live From Here—prod the fog with mewling guitars. “I’ll die if you tell the world about my third eye,” O’Donovan murmurs. It reads as a joke but sounds like a threat. So does the chorus: “If I had a little money/I would go somewhere.”
For all the dust O’Donovan kicks up, the point is neither the destination nor the journey. It’s the leaving. On the title track, a lonely trek upstate bears a memory of sheltering in a Christian Science center on 9/11, a sort of existential way station she doesn’t wish on anyone else. “Oh, to be born in the age of apathy,” she sighs over cymbal roll and hovering strings, ”When nothing’s got a hold on you.” “Elevators” follows, with brittle guitar that flaps like a wren finding a place to land. “In America,” the refrain keeps intoning: usually a marker of pretension, but here it’s mostly the springboard for some clever internal rhyme. Having seen too many big-box stores and gas station bathrooms, O’Donovan hops into a covered wagon and heads for the past. She arrives at a prairie lake. “What’s good here?” she yells, “and what are we going to make?”
Age of Apathy ends with the blithely sunny “Passengers,” an expansion on In the Magic Hour’s closer “Jupiter.” Each track puts O’Donovan in a car heading for outer space. In “Jupiter” she’s driving, asking her companion to speak to her “of star stuff.” In “Passengers,” she’s ceded the wheel but not the navigation. “Stay in your lane, you’ll be fine,” she notes over a warm rumble. “Mercury is stuck in Scorpio and the Little Dipper’s dripping dry.” The effect is that of an astrological driving instructor, sure, but an expert one. I’m not sure anyone else keeps as many vehicles running, or maps as many escape routes.


On her first EP under her own name, the artist formerly known as Wynter Gordon returns to R&B; it’s a record marked by her striking voice and emotional candor.

Pure EP

2016 was a year of professional rebirth for the artist previously known as Wynter Gordon. Gordon, who was born in Queens and lives in Los Angeles, had been writing for pop stars for more than a decade, and she had experienced several false starts in the spotlight, including a stint making impersonal, big-tent EDM. She was rankled by the anonymity of her own music but didn’t know how to make a change. Then she was called upon to write for Beyoncé on what would become the Lemonade tracks “Sorry,” “Daddy Lessons,” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” She ended up penning what was arguably the album’s most culturally resonant line: “He better call Becky with the good hair.”
Shortly thereafter, Gordon chose to start performing under her given name, Diana. (An anonymous source told Page Six that, according to Gordon, Beyoncé had suggested the shift, but Gordon has been more circumspect in interviews.) Whatever the truth, the name change made a difference. It connoted a new, more personal approach to music, an approach that animates Gordon’s first EP under her own name, Pure. The five-song record hits with the impact of something twice as long, and it is a worthwhile addition to the group of strong female-led R&B projects of the past two years.
Gordon’s father abandoned her family soon after her birth, and her mother, who became intensely religious, was harsh and domineering. Gordon was forced to become a parent to her five siblings, a task that took up much of her emotional energy, even after she left home at 17. Pure is a distillation of those experiences, an understated but strongly felt record about the muddle of love and pain that family brings. The strongest of its songs is “Kool Aid,” a ballad dedicated to Gordon’s brothers, including one who she was out of touch with for 16 years before finding him homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. The song is suffused with warmth and encouragement as Gordon performs the role that she has said comes most naturally to her, that of the nurturer. Another standout finds her playing the opposite part, pleading, in a moment of vulnerability, for a “Moment to Myself.” And “Thank You” is bitterly addressed to her father, as she acknowledges the way his absence shaped her: “Always knew you didn’t like me/Always seem to forget to invite me/The little tomboy, shoes too tight/If I was wrong then, now I’m so right.”
The Los Angeles producers Noise Club produced “Kool Aid,” and another single, “Wolverine,” and co-produced the rest of the tracks here. They keep things simple (minimalist synths, huge echoing bass, and skittering drum lines) and stay out of her way, often to underwhelming effect: The hooky melody on “Thank You”’s pre-chorus, for instance, makes less of an impact because the beat does not shift to accompany it. As a result, Gordon lives and dies on the strength of her consistently striking voice and her occasionally messy songwriting. “Wolverine” is a head-turner, with its mercilessly catchy chorus and a pre-chorus that captures the volatility of living with her mother. But it’s also a cluttered song, filled with fragments that bear a puzzling relationship to one another. It might be difficult to make sense of it all without the supplementary material of the singer’s interviews.
The rest of the songs are clearer but less ambitious. If Gordon has not yet quite caught up with peers like SZA and Teyana Taylor, it is not because she is lacking in emotional urgency. Rather, she hasn’t quite found the words that would allow her to channel her emotions with precision. But her extraordinary empathy makes for a notable contrast with the occasional solipsism of other up-and-coming singers. The final song on the EP, “Too Young,” finds her speaking in her mother’s voice, confessing to her children that she and their father made a youthful mistake. It is a testament to the depth of Gordon's understanding that she is able to perceive so much of the pain she and her siblings have undergone as stemming from something so human as a simple bad choice. Despite her anger at her parents, the song is forgiving, soothing and, like the rest of Gordon’s music, strangely sanguine.


The L.A. band Puro Instinct evaporates some of the shoegaze fog around their debut for some tentative bigger pop maneuvers.

Autodrama

Shortly after the release of their hotly anticipated debut *Headbangers in Ecstasy**, *Puro Instinct unlocked the highest level of achievement for a Los Angeles buzz band in 2011: Haunted Graffiti played the 16th birthday party of guitarist/vocalist Skylar Kaplan at Wombleton Records in Highland Park. The duo have barely released any music since, and even in the past few months, there are stark reminders of the distance between “Los Angeles indie rock in 2011” and the current day: the imminent demolition of the Smell, lackluster records from now-veteran peers Nite Jewel and fellow sister act Bleached, an eerie lack of news on Ariel Pink’s latest antics. Moreover, *Headbangers in Ecstasy'*s then-fashionable ambition to find the hazy overlap between 4AD and MTV in the ’80s is pretty much de rigueur at this point. But the lack of hype surrounding Puro Instinct this time around actually works towards their advantage: having improved in every aspect over the past five years, they can sound new again on the surprisingly crafty Autodrama.
Puro Instinct have modernized in an important way, which is that they’ve internalized the relatively recent inversion of the long-assumed maturation process of music nerds: Slowdive, Pale Saints and the like were their teenage discoveries, now Piper and Skylar Kaplan are pop music advocates. That said, no one will confuse the Kaplan sisters with Haim; only the shawl-twisting mysticism of “Six of Swords” and “Scorpio Rising” (“Time is just a slap on the wrist/to the bastard child of Genesis”) bear the hint of Fleetwood Mac ca. *Tango in the Night. *
*Autodrama *is largely self-produced with assistance from Sam Mehran, who appears to appreciate the misty, immersive qualities of reverb as much as his former Test Icicles bandmate Dev Hynes. As much as they vouch for Katy Perry, Piper and Skylar aren’t *big *vocalists, and these songs aren’t meant to be belted out anyways. The melodies and production are both tiny and a little tinny, pop music more reminiscent of the hi-NRG or freestyle hits you were more likely to hear at any given roller rink in the ’90s than a hockey arena.
While Puro Instinct’s newfound confidence allows the hooks to protrude from the mix rather than recede behind a smeared lens, this also means their lesser ideas are also given more prominence. “Twelve dead Americans/Young and dumb, full of cum, holding smoking guns/Stuffed into body bags/Stack ’em up, send ’em off, let God sort ’em out” is a lyric that would be jarring in any context, more so within an album with an otherwise entirely insular focus and a genre that’s almost invariably apolitical. But even if “End of an Era” is Puro Instinct at their most #woke, the song itself is an Ambien-laced plod, the vocals just *enough *off the beat to sound like an irritating tic rather than an intentional choice. Inexplicably, this quality carries over to the equally momentum-killing title track.
At the very least, “End of an Era” is a disturbance to *Autodrama’s *surface-level shimmer and proof of Puro Instinct making an effort to provide depth. The Kaplans are just as referential as they were on *Headbangers in Ecstasy, *though there’s more discernible substance. Yes, “Panarchy” is a pun on the wild stereo mixing techniques on the opening track, and it’s also a nod to the concept of choosing whatever form of governance you want without limitations of geography. It’s easy to hear what they're getting at, given the Kaplans’ disillusionment with the music industry after the underwhelming performance of Headbangers in Ecstasy. The remaining emotional state of *Autodrama *is murkier: “What You See” recasts “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as a DJ Khaled-esque exercise in visualizing success, while the outlook of “Peccavi” is more attributable to Homer Simpson: trying is the first step towards failure.
Somehow, these don’t feel like contradictory viewpoints on a record mostly concerned with the blowback from vulnerability. And according to the actual Six of Swords tarot card inspiring the song of the same name here, they're not. It’s otherwise known as the “Slough of Despond,” more of an emotional and physical divot than a depression. If it appears reversed when pulled, the Six of Swords signifies a choice to wallow in misery. When upright, it provides the promise Puro Instinct so deeply desire on Autodrama: being able to move forward, even in a less than ideal situation.


The Seattle-based emo band longs for the unattainable with a sense of modesty and restraint that can be as frustrating as it is endearing.

Dartland

If there was any question whether a band called Worst Party Ever qualifies as emo, consider that their debut, Dartland, has a house on the cover. But as the genre has become ever more atomized and antic since their formation in 2014, the Seattle-via-Sarasota quartet have distinguished themselves in reverse, functioning at an even, slightly elevated emotional keel. Songwriter Andy Schueneman experiences the same communication breakdowns and spiritual crises as his peers, but instead of screaming into the void, he offers a shrug and a shoulder to lean on.
The band’s 2016 compilation Anthology crammed 21 songs into 53 minutes; representative titles include “Did the Cubs Just Win the World Series?” and “Sleeping With My Cellphone (Demo).” Conversely, only one of 12 song titles on Dartland is “funny” and most are just one word. Worst Party Ever recorded the album with producer Tyler Floyd, who’s helped other scrappy, emo-adjacent acts (Greet Death, Dogleg, Michigander) level up their sound. But while Dartland appears to be the first Worst Party Ever release forged by actual expectation, it holds true to their credo of never making anything seem like too big a deal. Nearly half the songs check out after about a minute and a half, evoking rain-slicked Pacific Northwest indie rock c. 2002, the early emo revival’s folkier variants, and the plainspoken, compact specs of pop music right this moment. For people in Worst Party Ever’s age demo, Dartland might recall latter-day Tigers Jaw songs stuffed into TikTok or early Joyce Manor if they had access to Rob Schnapf’s production.
Schueneman’s sonorous, conversational vocals are just about the only thing left from Worst Party Ever’s origins as a topical acoustic emo band jokingly compared to the Front Bottoms. If not the most dynamic instrument, it’s a voice well-suited to express a palpable yet manageable unease. The minor-key surge of “Circle” gets the blood moving, but it won’t open up the pit. The wistful leads of “Prism on a Window” suggest a pervasive wistfulness but will not induce any tears not already in motion. Dartland is littered with strong choruses and the verses are just as melodically immediate—in case Schueneman decides to end a song without a chorus, which he often does.
Dartland’s sense of modesty and restraint can be as frustrating as it is endearing. On a cursory listen, the album’s 23 minutes breeze by like a sitcom in the background. With undivided attention, its shortcomings intensify: There’s no dramatic arc, no moment of true catharsis, or a sonic curve aside from the acoustic intro and tempo shifts of “Provenance.” But if we’re to take Schueneman at his word, the longing for something greater in Worst Party Ever’s music is by design; Dartland seeks an exact frequency to express distinct wants that are not likely to be satisfied any time soon.
In his songs, Schueneman yearns for a new body to test out his resolution for cleaner living, a new god that can give him advance warning about all the ways he’s going to fuck up—but until then, he spends “Provenance” continuing to fill his current body with drugs. He does not want to leave his house, or sometimes even his bathroom, but what to do about weather so beautiful it feels like a supernatural challenge to depression? Friends talk endlessly into the night about future plans, but no one wants to change. On the closing “Into the PÜR,” Scheuneman asks, “Do you still talk to all your friends?/The people you lived near when you were a kid,” and it doesn’t sound rhetorical. Throughout Dartland, he regards people engaged in healthy and fulfilling social relationships as if he’s staring at a UFO. When you’re on Worst Party Ever’s wavelength, the things that aren’t really, like, that big of a deal are low-key all-consuming.

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Loaded with snarled rhymes and hyperlocal references, the Brooklyn rapper’s latest tape is a thrilling, larger-than-life depiction of New York hip-hop cornerstones.

Outerwear SZN 3

As residential districts fall prey to Bloomberg-era economic policy, New Yorkers have watched their city become a parking lot for foreign capital, a disposable plaything for the millionaire class. Chinatown Sound, a video series from Brooklyn rapper Bub Styles, is a testament to the holdouts and leftovers. Each installment features a lone rapper rhyming a cappella on a sidewalk in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood. The format obviates the rap-battle element of most freestyle showcases, and the environs of downtown’s last ethnic enclave lend solemnity to the late-night setting. Styles spotlights a diverse range of performers—Black, Dominican, Nuyorican, and Jewish artists from across and beyond the five boroughs—yet their similarities are striking. In spite of varying backgrounds, they share many of the same mannerisms, intricate codes of regional speech and dress. As wordy and flamboyant as they are, the subtext speaks volumes: These are the last men standing.
“Imitation of the Rappers You Idolize,” the finale of Styles’ latest tape Outerwear SZN 3, reflects the Chinatown Sound ethic. Fellow Brooklynite ARXV raps the opening verse, his couplets like schoolyard taunts: “Y’all just imitations of the men you idolize/Rockin’ all that Gucci and Dior, but your attire lies.” He rhymes in full sentences, pausing haphazardly in the absence of sturdy percussion, the understated production accentuating his slang and inflection. Styles’ verse, on the other hand, is delivered in a primal roar: “I just popped two triple-stacks like they was Advils/Each meal that I ate this week equaled the weight of an anvil.” His vocals arrive with a subterranean rumble, like echoes from an abandoned IRT tunnel.
Outerwear SZN 3 is a leering triumph of tri-state genre work, its obligatory trafficking narratives embellished with a garish palette. On “Buckfast,” Styles contrasts designer labels and luxury cars with dollar-store squalor. “Smoke Box,” his portrait of a vindictive kingpin, concludes with the exhausted hustler ensconced in a 2006 Nissan Maxima, rolling up his own product. Wealth and seediness are collapsed in a collage of New Era fitteds, greasy deli meats, and paneled North Face jackets. If you can’t transcend your circumstances, you might as well cop new Foamposites.
It’s emblematic of Styles’ world-building that so many references—the brands, the jargon, the sneakers—are 20 or 30 years old. Yet Outerwear SZN 3 isn’t nostalgic so much as suggestive of an empire in decline. Styles meets his neighbors with hostile disdain (“Shit, I’ll poke a hole up in your diaphragm/Dog, it’s lookin’ like it’s only glizzy in your diet, man”); he boasts of a corpulent physique, proof positive of a self-made man. If his persona is larger than life—a street-corner dealer with Scarface ambitions, a loud mouth, and a brash wardrobe—it’s satire of the post-Nems, post-Action Bronson variety. However warped or attenuated, the Giuliani-era hallmarks endure as recognizable shorthand, and Styles translates them into a dour, grandiose lexicon.
The downtempo arrangements from Finn, Ace Fayce, and Revenxnt balance Styles’ menace with a more evocative elegance. His supervillain voice drapes heavy drums and sinister basslines on “Lights Out” and “Glockcoma,” whereas “Smoke Box” and “Cumbia in Cooley High” spell the aggression with resplendent jazz loops. Clocking in at just under 90 seconds, “Holiday” breaks the pace with a blistering double-time showcase. As Styles barrels through his verses, producer Brassxbeard switches out the instrumental layers, isolating the snarling vocals and centering Styles amidst the nervy production.
Outerwear SZN 3’s success lies in its interpretation of genre cornerstones, an insularity that borders on inscrutability. Yet even its hyperbolic elements—the pitbull brutishness, the grown-man pageantry—speak to a systemic winnowing of local lore. When a cultural capital is subsumed by speculators, when ornate masonry gives way to chintzy steel and fiberglass, survival becomes a matter of marking territory. Where operatic mid-’90s classics like Mobb Deep’s Hell on Earth and Onyx’s All We Got Iz Us dramatized the lawlessness of precincts left to fend for themselves, Styles’ flashier oeuvre poses a follow-up question: What happens when a city decides to take back its streets?


On their debut, the Columbus, Ohio, four-piece All Dogs offer 40 minutes of grungy intimacy. Maryn Jones (who also plays solo as Yowler) delivers her words with joyous belligerence over hectic drums and fuzzy power chords hewing euphoric hooks.

Kicking Every Day

When All Dogs' debut tape started getting noticed in summer 2013, it felt as if the Ohio four-piece, fronted by indie-rock lifer Maryn Jones, were on the crest of something. Katie Crutchfield had just released Cerulean Salt, her breakthrough second album as Waxahatchee. Northampton's Speedy Ortiz would soon release their debut, as would Wales' Joanna Gruesome, while Courtney Barnett first broke beyond Australia that August. All received some degree of international mainstream acclaim; the plainspoken, fuzzed-up frontwoman was being widely celebrated for the honesty that would likely have been dismissed as typical confessional singer-songwriter chick fare a decade, or even half a decade, earlier. While the links to forebears like Liz Phair were clear, their simply stated, often brutal honesty felt somehow new.
Two years later, as All Dogs finally release their debut album, its 40 minutes of grungy intimacy feel, in a sense, relatively commonplace, though that's good. Praising young female lyricists for the simple candor with which they confess complex emotional devastation as if they didn't expect to be heard is a trope by now, but the growing audience and respect for a woman's internal life should be relished. And even if Kicking Every Day firmly inhabits a sound and type, that doesn't mean that it has nothing new to offer. The female trainwreck is having a pop cultural moment on the big and small screen, but all too often these figures are reduced to their perceived or self-professed limitations. Jones (who is also a member of Saintseneca and plays solo as Yowler) deals with the constant mutability of experience, refusing to let a single interpretation of an event define her. It's appropriate to an age where everyone is the editor of their own life, when self-love and self-loathing go hand-in-hand online.
Back on "Love Song", from that debut 2013 tape (a split with fellow Columbus band Slouch), Jones warned a potential partner not to give her a chance because, she admitted, she'd only fuck it up, "just wait and see." Across Kicking, she confesses to being driven by anxiety and self-loathing, maintaining on "Skin" that "every darkness I push through/ There is a quiet familiar feeling/ And in it I am always waiting for everything to fall/ Just like I always make it so." "That Kind of Girl" starts with her mid-sentence, aware that she's as destructive a force in someone else's life as she always imagines herself to be. But the minute some unknown third party warns her lover off "messing with that kind of girl," she starts burning with rage, demanding transparency and explanation over a fiery squall and bass that drones and sparks like an anchor towed down a gravel road. On paper, Jones' lyrics can scan a little sad-sack; on record, she delivers them with the joyous belligerence that befits a band who often sound like early 2000s Guided by Voices, all mid-fi production, hectic drums, and fuzzy power chords hewing euphoric hooks. They play arena-sized in basement studios, their reach infectious.
Jones spends much of Kicking bristling against her own limitations as well, aware of the way her self-defeating impulses play into depression's toxic loop. "I will find a way to justify my pain," she sings on "Skin", and asks any friend that finds her on the floor to check if she's alright, but not to tell her otherwise on "Sunday Morning", a Lemonheads/Sundays-y bundle where she's caught adrift in the routine-less routine of touring. "How Long" is a triumphant-sounding portrait of self-loathing where she gives the Joan Didion edict about staying on good terms with your past selves a nightmarish inversion: "All these people that I've been hold knives." Her lacerating lyrics offer the potential for deadening recognition, but also empathy. "Your Mistakes" has a softer touch, as if Sharon Van Etten had started releasing records as a drunk 19 year old in a garage, and offers a friend comfort for the way that enduring regrets tend to obliterate the mind. Jones makes shame corporeal and emptiness vast, giving these songs gut-punching impact beyond the lingering melodies.
split tape w/slouch and November 2013's 7” both saw All Dogs moving at breakneck speed, stretching out power-pop with fiery yearning. Towards the end of Kicking especially, things take a calmer, darker, turn, the drums often fading away. The stillness suits them. Standout "Leading Me Back to You" has the tainted romance of American Football or Mineral; before the defiant chorus kicks in, "Skin" could be a relic from 1990s Louisville, and the warm hiss of "The Garden" suggests that it's Jones' original demo. It's a softly strummed plea for someone to hold tight, because parts of her are going to disappear by the time she returns from some sojourn—not through collapsing in on herself as in opener "Black Hole", but by heeding the warning she set out in the careening "Flowers": that you'll never find satisfaction "if all that you grow are gardens of longing for things you don't know." Kicking Every Day spends a lot of time trawling the murk, but recognizes that, ultimately, it's down to the individual to dig herself out; it's a warm thump of encouragement from an equally grubby hand.