Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a spirited but uneven salvo from the Ohio pranksters’ campaign to reprogram American minds.

Duty Now for the Future

Sophomore albums are a doomed enterprise. Caught in the crossfire between the demands of your original fanbase, hungry for more of the same but slightly different, and the knee-jerk antagonism of critics, nursing a masochistic thirst to chronicle your inevitable fall from grace, the endeavor hinges on figuring out who to disappoint while keeping your ego intact. Devo learned this lesson the hard way with 1979’s Duty Now for the Future. Ever the innovative pranksters, the new-wave iconoclasts found a way to not only confuse fans and lose the critics, but shatter their own inflated confidence in the process. Consider this: Greatest Misses, a companion to 1990’s crowd-pleasing Greatest Hits, features seven of Duty Now for the Future’s 13 tracks—a confirmation of the colossal nature of their second-record flop. Even bassist Gerald “Jerry” Casale, usually the band’s most stalwart defender, would later admit it. “Album one is like the Bible—you make your statement once,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “What you do next is produce the goods—that is, show in substance what it’s all about. The criticism on the second album is that we didn’t do that.”
Depending on your love for the band at the time, this disproportionate hate might have been a blessing in disguise. In 1990, when they cherry-picked its tracks for Greatest Misses, Duty Now for the Future was still four years away from reissue, shelved by Warner Bros. until Henry Rollins sought to put it out on his own label. And what better, more perverse—more Devo—way to reward the faith of hardcore fans than to repackage their greatest failure alongside such obvious winners as the superior, gloriously sludgy “Booji Boy” mix of “Jocko Homo”?
Only a true Devotee could embrace this record, where art rock’s finest wore out the punchline on their way to defining new wave’s bleeding edge. To critics and the public at large, Devo got caught lacking on Duty Now for the Future, but the resultant surge of embarrassment was just the lift they needed to leave behind their infancy for greener pastures.
Before David Bowie introduced the band onstage at New York City venue Max’s Kansas City in 1977, calling them the “band of the future,” Devo had already amassed enough subversive cred to fuel multiple careers. They’d opened for Sun Ra at Cleveland radio station WMMS’ 1975 Halloween party, extending their 15-minute slot by jamming “Jocko Homo” into a 30-minute punk-rock riot that got them kicked off stage. The Truth About De-Evolution, the self-produced short film that would open their concerts to wild cheers from their cult-like audience (affectionately known as “spuds”), had charmed critics enough to win first prize at the 1977 Ann Arbor film festival. They’d even managed to update the Rolling Stones’ existentialist masterpiece “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” well enough to earn the approval of Mick Jagger himself. Playing it for the rock icon in a bid to win his consent for its inclusion on their debut, the band looked on as Jagger “stood up and started dancing around on this Afghan rug in front of the fireplace… the sort of rooster-man dance he used to do,” Casale remembered with awe in a 2017 interview. “I like it, I like it,” Jagger exclaimed, prancing across the floor to its dilapidated rhythms and frantic yelps, jumping down from his lofty perch to bounce around with the rest of the underground.

Born in the working-class suburbs surrounding Akron, Ohio, Casale made a beeline for art school at Kent State University in 1966, eager to leave behind the rubber-factory town’s cultural malaise. “The Goodyear Museum, and the Soapbox Derby and McDonald’s and women in hair rollers beating their kids in supermarkets,” Casale would later groan to an interviewer regarding Akron’s all-American landscape. “Just reaction, without knowing what was going on. Getting fat, getting mellow, getting drugged out, getting married.”
In 1969, Casale sought out Mark Mothersbaugh, a printmaking student who’d made a name for himself by plastering campus with self-made decals. Taken with his drawing of an astronaut holding up a potato, Casale struck up a conversation on the hierarchy of vegetables. “Since we were both from working class families,” Mothersbaugh recalled, “we said, ‘Yeah we’re potatoes.’” We used it pejoratively and also [as] a ‘welcome comrade’ type thing. ‘Hello spud!’” With their long hair flowing free, united by a love of the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol, the two slipped into a clique of similarly minded art students, working on projects together in blissful ignorance that they were hurtling towards tragedy.

In a 2020 Rolling Stone interview commemorating the 1970 Kent State Massacre, Casale refers to the killings as the “beginning of my red pill moment.” Hundreds of students, including Casale and Mothersbaugh, had gathered on the university commons to rally against military expansion into Cambodia. Also among the crowd were Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, two first-year students who Casale had guided through registration as part of his work-study program. Claiming that they feared for their lives, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on the unarmed protestors, leaving Krause, Miller, and two other students dead as ambulances arrived to attend to the nine wounded.

Casale walked away, spared from the hail of bullets but stripped of his idyllic dream of academia, or anywhere, as a safe haven. “I confronted the vast, illegitimate authority that pervaded American government and institutions of ‘higher learning’,” he later said. “Any illusion that the squeaky-clean idea, the ‘white hat’ exceptionalism of the brand known as America, had much truth to it was wiped away. I felt like I had unwittingly been complicit in the big lie.”
Slowly, Mothersbaugh and Casale assembled a patchwork ideology to expose it. Piecing together anthropology and psychic spillover from a motley of sources—The Beginning Was the End: How Man Came Into Being Through Cannibalism, a pseudoscientific book that theorized that homo sapiens had gone insane after consuming the brains of their Neanderthal forebears; an anti-evolution pamphlet titled Jocko-Homo Heavenbound; and repeated viewings of the 1932 sci-fi film Island of Lost Souls—Devo’s crusade to expose humankind’s regression to its most savage instincts slowly came into focus. Lyrics about a decaying world were joined with Casale’s blues-based bass riffs and Mothersbaugh’s experimental synthesizer playing, a mess of sci-fi squeals and squelches designed to imitate “V-2 rockets and mortar blasts and ray guns.” “De-evolution” became their gospel, and the band solidified into a razor-sharp quintet with the arrival of jazz-trained drummer-turned-human-metronome Alan Myers, followed by Bob 1 and Bob 2, the brothers of the band’s founders, on lead and rhythm guitars.
Devo’s bracing cyberpunk stomp quickly wormed its way through the underground, turning all the right heads as they began recording their soon-to-be-classic debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, with no less than avant-pop kingmaker Brian Eno. Eno’s utopian “studio as instrument” sensibilities would be almost entirely shrugged off by the ascendant band, relegated to background harmonies on “Uncontrollable Urge” and one or two splashes of synthesizer, but Devo’s intuition proved to be spot on: Audiences ate it up. Whether live, where eager crowds could be heard repeating “Jocko Homo”’s call and response chant night after night, or on late-night television, their message was spreading.
Though critics would lag behind in appreciation—in an essay about Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, perennial hater Lester Bangs couldn’t resist getting in a few digs at Devo, calling them a “shrill hive-multitracked voice of appeasement, like giggling mosquito larvae”—the band’s ballooning popularity assured them that the tipping point for de-evolution to reach critical mass was near at hand. So in early 1979, they set up in a Hollywood studio, ditched the lofty Eno for the hands-off Ken Scott (known for his work with Bowie and Supertramp), and got to work making good on Casale’s promise to NME: Devo were “getting the broom out to make way for the ’80s,” one year ahead of schedule.
No moment in Devo history captures the awkward hubris at the heart of the band’s messianic project better than Duty Now for the Future, the album that those sessions yielded. From the moment the nauseatingly cheesy triumphal march of “Devo Corporate Anthem” comes blurting out of the speakers, Duty Now reveals itself to be exactly the sort of half-baked provocation you might expect from a band of art students positioning themselves as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement to reprogram society via rock’n’roll—the kind of album made by and for people who would go on record saying, as Casale did in Melody Maker, with a straight face, “We are simply the only people really creating new music,” and, even more audaciously, “Pop music needs a big enema.”
Duty Now’s pop-music enema is indeed the work of a new-wave clean up crew. The brooms, however, are aimed squarely at their own past: Regardless of Casale’s taunts about creating new music, many of the album’s strongest songs are relics from their earliest days. Taking up their guitars like they never would again, Devo do their due diligence, codifying these well-worn favorites for the fans before they vanish beneath their Freedom of Choice-era energy domes. The versions here hit harder than anything on their Eno-soothed debut. The tight, explosively twitchy “Wiggly World” is the best of the bunch, leaping off the turntable and into your chest. Myers’ drums heave forward with a breathless immediacy, colliding headlong into the explosive growl of the Bobs’ guitars. Mothersbaugh sounds utterly fried, shouting one of Devo’s earliest mantras at the top of his lungs: “The fittest shall survive, yet the unfit may live!” This kind of bracing punk squall never goes out of style, but the prophetic skewerings of a vicious corporate hellscape—the deadpan portrait of a bumbling cog in the machine on “Blockhead,” “Clockout”’s swaggering mockery of “the biggest little business down on the block”—glow with a particularly inspired timelessness. Devo may be bidding bon voyage to an era of laser-targeted cultural criticism, but when they stay on message and turn up the amps, they simply can’t lose.
Duty Now’s fatal flaw is their insistence on expanding the juvenile sexual comedy of Are We Not Men?’s “Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin’).” The band’s at times breathtaking immaturity surges to the forefront, a minefield of cringe-worthy, unevolved schoolboy horniness that makes a full-album listen a lesson in patience for even the most hardened spud. Ahead of Duty Now’s release, Mothersbaugh claimed that it would contain “love songs,” but that’s a frightening way to think of “Triumph of the Will” and its leering misogynistic analysis of how “females” never know what they want. Equally dreadful is “Pink Pussycat,” where a chittering, disconcertingly violent lust to “touch your fur” and “tear your little ears off” manages to turn a perfectly great riff/turnaround combo incurably sour.
The band’s greatest crime, however, is sandwiching the exultant power pop of “The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprize” between the two offensive duds. Energized with the same sparks that would ignite Freedom of Choice’s hypnotic populism, Mothersbaugh soars with otherworldly sincerity between crushed guitars and theremin-like keys, summing up an idyllic sci-fi romance with a crooning one-word chorus. Dropping from these heavenly surroundings into the muck of “Pink Pussycat” feels more than a little deflating. Devo may have claimed to be cleaning house for the ’80s, but Duty Now catches the band in the middle of vomiting up its worst impulses and preserves them in mid-air, like a freeze-frame, still hurtling towards the pavement.
Before the surprise success of 1980’s “Whip It” could lead Devo up the charts to become synth-toting new-wave icons, the band had to learn to play the damn thing. Duty Now for the Future was the crucible for Devo’s much-anticipated reinvention; a heated sparring match in preparation for their showdown with the future. On their first album, synthesizers served primarily as humble punctuation; here they learn to sequence in full sentences. For every “Triumph of the Will” there’s a “Strange Pursuit,” sputtering along to a jerky, slightly-too-fast pulse that Devo would distill into the sharper, more refined “It’s Not Right,” minus the vocoder. “Devo Corporate Anthem” ends mercifully fast, but “S.I.B. (Swelling Itching Brain),” an eerie ode to the cranial cannibals of their founding texts, stretches out to become Duty Now’s most atmospheric work and most dynamic synth workout, its criss-crossing swarm of keys playing out like a tutorial for the coordination they’d need to reanimate dense tracks like “Girl U Want” for a live setting.
Devo always knew they’d be a band for the ’80s, presciently describing themselves as an “eighties industrial band”—a tag repeated in the same Melody Maker review that saw them take responsibility for flushing out the rot of the ’60s and ’70s. Duty Now for the Future is their greatest miss by virtue of being their greatest, most necessary mess. Fumbling through their own de-evolution, Devo shed just the right amount of ego to claim the future for themselves.


Newly reissued on vinyl, Bikini Kill’s 1998 compilation stands as the defining document of the feminist punk band whose music remains relevant, righteous, and unflappably cool.

The Singles

The silencing of women is a social plague; Bikini Kill spent seven years annihilating it. From 1990 to 1997, the Olympia band fought to cultivate a feminist punk counterculture that blazed and shrieked and cared: “Dare ya to do what you want/Dare ya to be who you will,” went one early Bikini Kill rallying cry. Their fanzines burned between every weaponized word as they encouraged a participatory logic. “A band is any song you ever played with anybody even if only once,” as drummer Tobi Vail wrote—could a song topple the world? Could it destroy the deafening quiet? Bikini Kill were a scream in the face of silence, shattering it, casting its bondage into stark relief. This would not have been possible without their seismic, heroic songs, of which The Singles is the defining document.
The Singles compilation arrived in 1998, a year after Bikini Kill broke up, collecting three 45s: “New Radio,” produced with Joan Jett in 1993; plus two singles from 1995, The Anti-Pleasure Dissertation 7" and “I Like Fucking” b/w “I Hate Danger.” Concision is a virtue in hardcore and punk, which have historically flourished in the abbreviated EP form (see: Black Flag’s The First Four Years, the Minor Threat EPs, Bikini Kill’s own First Two Records). With brighter and more robust productions, Bikini Kill’s effect exploded, as if someone flipped a light on in their dark basement. If a person in your life wants or needs Bikini Kill—wants or needs proof that punk can seek justice and thrills at once; that feminist rock’n’roll can be palatable without being formulaic; that protest music can be unflappably cool—give them The Singles first.
By September of ’93, when “New Radio” first arrived, Bikini Kill had yet to release an LP—their lo-fi debut, Pussy Whipped, came out one month later—but their EPs had already laid out the core pro-girl principles of their band. In the early years, singer Kathleen Hanna would repeat single phrases like mantras to ensure the audience didn’t miss their insurrectionary messages in busted P.A. systems. But now, Bikini Kill fans were memorizing the words at home, so with “New Radio” and other singles, Hanna took more liberties with her lyrics. The Singles largely deals in the pursuit and politics of joy, adventure, friendship, and sex. As Hanna put it on “I Like Fucking”—in a semi-fried voice that immortalized her vision of a generation of scrunchie-clad philosophers, the Valley Girl Intelligentsia—“I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe!” Anger is an energy, she seems to say, but pleasure is power.
Joan Jett was 34 years old when she entered the studio with Bikini Kill that March, well over a decade removed from her all-girl teen rock band, the Runaways. Brash, glittery, and nails-tough—a woman who taught herself guitar with Sabbath riffs—Jett had been through the industry ringer many times over (she was rejected by 23 majors before she had a hit with “I Love Rock N Roll”). Jett felt quick camaraderie with the emerging generation of oft-misunderstood feminist punks. She was handed a Bikini Kill demo at a Fugazi show; the tape’s label said, “For a good time, call Kathleen.” Hanna was in sheer disbelief when Jett dialed the number: “Who the fuck is this?!” she spewed into the phone, sure it was a prank. In 1981, Jett was alone, singing, “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation”; later, Bikini Kill sang, “We’re the girls with the bad reputations,” joining her. It started on “New Radio.”
Bikini Kill recorded two glammy new songs with Jett, “New Radio” and “DemiRep,” plus a definitive version of their signature anthem, “Rebel Girl.” Jett sang back up and played guitar on all three, revving the band’s joyride energy with her giddy “Cherry Bomb” fuel. Jett had experience putting a highlighter to hardcore—14 years earlier, she produced the first Germs album—and these recordings pop and fly like her motorbike. On “New Radio,” Hanna’s lyrics of depraved childhood sound like lines from a lost Kathy Acker novel. “I’m the little girl at the picnic who won’t stop pulling her dress up,” she quavers at the start, before practically cartwheeling to the song’s sex-positive finish: “Let’s wipe our cum on my parents’ bed!” This is the self-determined “thrilling living” that the radical critic Valerie Solanas wrote about.
“DemiRep” opens with another marker of girlhood: Hanna and Jett playing the hand game “Miss Mary Mack,” concluding the rhyme scheme with an enthused “Fourth of July/Lie/LIAR!” Is America the lie? Is childhood? “DemiRep”—a word defined on the 7" label as a “woman of doubtful repute; an adventuress”—suggests both. Hanna hollers biting critiques of body image, class privilege, and capitalism: “I got something, man, that your fucking money cannot buy!” As “DemiRep” blasts forward, Hanna practically sticks her tongue out at the man: “You don’t know what it’s like to be alive!” She does not mince a word.
The steadied thrum of “Rebel Girl” is the march of patriarchy crumbling. Hanna observes her punk-rock queen and writes an ultimate girl-love anthem, tracing “the revolution” in “her hips” and “her kiss.” In every bar of “Rebel Girl,” our relationships matter; our speech matters. This gift of a song is a framework for rethinking both. “Rebel Girl” is like the glue that binds the two teen girl outcasts attending prom together in last year’s Lady Bird, defining for themselves what it means to be cool (Lady Bird, of course, has a Bikini Kill poster in her room). When Hanna’s rebel girl “holds her head up so high,” she’s hipper than James Dean. With Jett, Hanna sang “Rebel Girl” as if her life depended on it; lives did. The word “revolution” is practically dissected by her scream, made real, screeched into the brightest red.
Hanna could often depict the complexities of identity in a single verse, diving between yelps and bellows and growls. On The Singles, she does something similar to portray the rage and vulnerability of sex. “Strawberry Julius” shimmies from a shrill “WHAT THE FUCK?” to a tender “come on!” “It’s you all over my skin/Taking invisible streets/To the fake places where we win,” Hanna sings. On “Anti-Pleasure Dissertation”—a song about being in love with someone who “[writes] about fucking you in their fanzine”—she lashes, “Go tell your fucking friends..../How punk fucking rock my pussy smelled!” The Slits weren’t even this explicit. At its core, though, “Dissertation” is about the emotional burden of deception: “Was I wrong to trust anyone?” Hanna asks sincerely. On the swaggering “Rah! Rah! Replica,” it is pure emphatic joy to hear Bikini Kill scream “DON’T! YOU! TRY! TO! FAKE! ME! OUT,” as if blowing a colossal wind back at every man who has ever inflicted emotional or psychological harm.
Before Bikini Kill, Vail had made her name as a razor-sharp writer and thinker with her feminist music zine, Jigsaw. Her lyrics were accordingly searing, ideological, often essayistic. The two songs Vail brings to these Singles—“In Accordance to Natural Law” and “I Hate Danger”—are monumental moments in American punk, jolts of seething, inspired conviction. Both feature Vail on vocals, Hanna on bass, and bassist Kathi Wilcox on drums (Billy Karren stayed on guitar). “In Accordance to Natural Law” is a 29-second bomb, like a screamed monologue—proving that even as Bikini Kill polished their sound, they were taking risks, deconstructing and reimagining what we think a song can be. In less than half a minute, Vail ignites a scathing critique of underground media and flimsy scene politics, her own girlish V.G.I. shout dripping sarcasm. The whole song is a clenched fist.
Vail’s livid Singles closer “I Hate Danger” is what happens when a woman’s eyes look through punk’s societal magnifying glass. As she shouts about the subtle silencing of women in an everyday social situation—just sitting around with a friend and their other, narrow-minded friends, and not managing to get an inch into the conversation—“I Hate Danger” offers a clear metaphor for the systemic silencing and sidelining of women in the world. Vail captures the particular fury of being undermined by being ignored. She goes to war for every girl who could never articulate why it is so belittling to not be taken seriously in small ways, turning her anger into a singing polemic about the politics of hanging out: “It’s one particular point of view/This group dynamic caters to,” she sings with remarkable ease, “I think you know when it caters to you!” Vail is not here for your feigned ignorance: “If you do know/Don’t act like you don’t/Cause it’s really annoying/And if you don’t know/Well, let’s just say/You’re a lot, lot stupider than I thought!”
In the girl-gang refrain of “I Hate Danger,” Vail, Hanna, and Wilcox invert the situation in which our narrator felt so psychically powerless: “I stopped talking an hour ago!” they chant exuberantly over chainsaw Karren riffs. It sounds like solidarity, like three girl geniuses linking arms in protest. Vail imagines going back in time to say exactly what she meant—“You’re so not dangerous! You’re so no what you say you are at all!”—and those final words tumble and lock into one another like armor. “I Hate Danger” is charged with the superpower of the greatest punk: Our hearts race faster, we grow six inches taller, and in the eternal battle of us-against-them, if only for two minutes, we win.
In Bikini Kill’s orbit, women spoke openly about sexual assault, rape, harassment, abuse. “It was intense to be at the center of all that female rage and terror,” Vail said in 2012. “We were at the frontline of teen-girl pain.” The Singles validated these brutal realities while offering fun as an antidote. This combination makes these songs even more relevant in 2018, as these conversations permeate the public consciousness. Maybe it’s in how these particular Bikini Kill songs circle pop’s pleasure-centers, but there remains a felt optimism to The Singles. In “I Like Fucking,” when Hanna sings, “Do you believe there’s anything beyond troll-guy reality? I do. I do. I do,” it could be a mantra for fighting and overcoming the many forms of harassment that persist online today. This is legitamtely encouraging. Bikini Kill’s miraculous songs ultimately believe in a world beyond rape culture, beyond eating disorders, beyond female pain, and that hope makes them life-affirming.
Bikini Kill thought that if all girls started bands, the world would actually change. They were right: When girls make work to narrate their lives, they embolden each other and demand to be heard; they begin to infiltrate and subvert every crevice of existence; they no longer keep the truth of female experience trapped like secrets inside of their bodies and minds. The world is progressing with the unleashing of those truths. The Singles remains one of our most potent catalysts for that revolution. “I want to scream because I am just as much of a human being as any man but I don’t always get treated like one,” read an early Bikini Kill zine. “I want to scream because no matter how much I scream, no one will listen.” The world is listening now.


The LateNightTales series asks artists to create a "late night" mix from their record collections. Belle and Sebastian's second contribution leans heavily on the 1960s and early 1970s, with occasional glimmers of modernity.

Belle and Sebastian: LateNightTales, Vol. 2

LateNightTales, Vol. 2

Belle and Sebastian sometimes seem like the kind of people who like to have friends over and play them one record after another for hours-- "but have you heard this Lovin' Spoonful track? Oh, you have to! Here, I'll put it next in the queue after the Stan Tracey Quartet's King Crimson cover and-- okay, hold on, let me fade out this Pop Group instrumental, you kind of get the idea..." They also seem like the rare people from whom that behavior would not result in silent pleas to just put on an Al Green album or something and leave the stereo alone, because their ability to dig up amazing, not-overexposed music defies the Dunning-Kruger Effect by being as good as they think it is.
Hence, Stuart Murdoch and company have been invited back for their second volume of the LateNightTales series of "here's a bunch of not particularly dancey stuff a well-known artist likes, plus a new cover by that artist, and a spoken-word piece" compilations. (Their first came out in 2006.) As expected, their taste is superb; as you might also expect, they lean heavily on the 1960s and early 1970s, with occasional glimmers of modernity (Gold Panda, Toro y Moi) and the odd touch of naff-and-obvious just for contrast. (Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel"? Srsly?) Not a lot of this set sounds much like their own music, although the Wonder Who?'s pop-psychedelic "Watch the Flowers Grow" sounds like the Belle and Sebastian rhythm section might have taken a few cues from it. They also include two tracks by Broadcast, the much-missed Birmingham group whose aesthetic was all about stereophilic retro-futurism, and whose admirers are probably almost entirely a subset of Belle and Sebastian's own.
A handful of the songs they've picked effectively declare "but have you heard it like this?": not Margo Guryan's lite-psych delite "Sunday Morning" but Marie Laforêt's French cover of it, not the Cure's skeletal synth-pop heavy breather "Close to Me" but the repurposing of its plinky hook in Ce'cile's dancehall track "Rude Bwoy Thug Life", not the regular version of Pete Shelley's "North American Scum"-prefiguring "Homosapien" but some kind of dub mix. (They're the kind of record geeks for whom the less-heard version is obviously better.) And they turn out to be fond of very precise music by hairy hippies-- the folk-prog band Trees' "Streets of Derry", from 1970's On the Shore, sounds especially brawny in this context.
Still, this mix is trying a little too hard to be a mix, rather than letting tracks play out-- their few attempts at cross-fades leave a lot to be desired, and the echo-chamber effect that curtails several tracks isn't so hot either. And one of the album's few weak links is Belle and Sebastian's own pallid, ambling cover of the Primitives' "Crash": without the original's brakes-are-out momentum, there's not much left of it. (If it had come out back in the days when B&S were flicking out a new single every few months, it wouldn't have been disappointing, but a year and a half after Write About Love, that's it?)
LateNightTales' requisite spoken-word closer doubles as a commentary on the project itself: critic-turned-label-guy-turned-critic Paul Morley's piece "Lost for Words, Part 3", whose centerpiece is a string of his favorite sentences by other writers. They're fun to hear, they're intriguing as a key to an aesthetic, and they're no substitute for the anthologist's own work.


An unexpected comeback from the legendary indie pop band fronted by Dan Treacy.

Television Personalities: My Dark Places

My Dark Places

Dan Treacy and the Television Personalities have a big legacy-- a spot on the CV as godfathers of do-it-yourself pop, and a terrific 1980s back catalog of witty, eccentric new-wave and indie. Listening to Treacy's signature puppy/schoolboy voice-- the most vulnerable voice in the world-- and clocking the humor and whimsy scattered across those records, you'd hardly expect the guy to turn out a rock-star casualty; he's a twee-pop touchstone, not a sweaty romantic. But drug problems (and mental ones) don't much care for those distinctions. By the 90s, Treacy was missing and presumed dead; when he turned up this decade, it was while doing time on an English prison boat. When he was released, and told his friends he'd been writing songs all along, a lot of machinery sprang into motion to make this album possible-- from fans raising cash for studio time to the Brit rock label Domino signing the Television Personalities to its roster. Their press release calls the band "the original Babyshambles," but this particular wreck is a lot more human than stylish.
The first track we heard from this turned out to be perfect. The re-recorded version on the album is titled "I Hope You're Happy Now", and it's exactly the kind of song Treacy's always shined on-- languid, unassuming, unguarded, shambling-along guitar-pop, recorded in the kind of warm, naturalistic way not much heard these days. It was also perfectly placed in the Treacy story: The original title was "I Hope He's Everything You Wanted Me to Be", and the sense of fatigue, resignation, and disappointment in his vocals was awfully easy to connect with. Everyone must have been hoping that prison time had netted a whole record's worth of songs like this-- well-crafted, forlorn, and with a whole lot of very serious things to say, an unpremeditated "real deal" collection of intensely human stuff. A whole lot of people write a whole lot of earnest songs on guitars; sometimes it's nice to hear some that feel like one of them is genuinely struggling to express something honest.
But not quite. My Dark Places doesn't just uncover shadowy corners in its subject matter-- it's also musically unkempt, stumbling along and veering off in directions most bands wouldn't even be comfortable using as B-sides or jokes. "All the Young Children on Crack" consists mostly of a spare drumbeat repeating while Treacy sings the title-- interwoven with some fumbling handclaps and acoustic guitar wanders. "Ex-Girlfriend Club" is actively creepy, with Treacy speaking as the club's tour guide ("Help yourself to the salad bar") before singing bits of "Uptown Top Ranking", running in an odd sampled break, and talking about Puff Daddy over shapeless piano lines. Some tracks seem improvised, thrown-together, Treacy half-singing off a lyric sheet as the instruments around him try to find something interesting to do. Fans-only references abound: paisley shirts and miniskirts, "paradise is for the blessed," etc. Even the best songs aren't prime-time performances-- they're shambling in a worrying way, as if they only just barely managed to get themselves recorded at all.
When the songs are good, though, that quality is what provides a lot of the charm-- which has often been the way with this band. And a lot of these tracks turn out to be incredible. "She Can Stop Traffic" captures lots of things: the raw romantic enthusiasm of this act; the boyish, starry-eyed quality that comes out when the band "rocks"; and the wit and the pain both, which Treacy combines over the ending fade. ("She can stop traffic," he sings, "and she's mine. Or she was.") On tracks like "Dream the Sweetest Dreams", it's just the sound of the act that makes this so great-- these recordings aren't "lo-fi," but they're unadorned, in-the-room, full of a wide-open warmth, a slack human quality, and voices that leave them feeling spectacularly intimate. Considering that you get the same feeling from the lyrics, it's easy to see how the band's fans will be taken with this even in the moments where it's close to being a musical disaster: You forgive those things the way you might with your best friend's band. And as you listen more, a lot more of the record reveals itself as not so disastrous at all. This is a strange kind of "difficult" pop, where songs that first seem hard to listen to gradually take shape and acquire potent emotional effects.
On a few of these songs-- where Treacy plays his songs on piano, maybe accompanying his voice with a melodica-- that's exactly what's on offer: Whatever the quality of the music and the performance, there's an incredible amount of emotion that winds up coming through. (See "There's No Beautiful Way to Say Goodbye".) And whether Treacy's music is working or not, the one thing he always has working for him is the uniqueness of his approach; now more than ever, this sounds like pretty much nothing else, and in a way that's entirely unpremeditated. The most vulnerable voice in the world makes for the most vulnerable album in the world, and it's largely a train wreck-- but there are very good reasons to hope that Treacy stays well and keeps at it.


No longer able to summon his mythical sense of storytelling, Nas sounds lost on his 11th studio album. Kanye’s production doesn’t help, either.

Nasir

It’s hard to discern whether Nasir was even Nas’ idea. When Kanye West announced he’d be producing it, it felt like a personal milestone for him more than a fleshed-out collaboration. Nas clearly obliged, but it’s hard to imagine Nasir is the album Nas bragged about on the 2016 DJ Khaled song “Nas Album Done.” The record was not done at the time that track was released, but the sheer brashness of Nas treating a completed album like a plutonium cache indicated that he was feeling himself. But on Nasir, even as he tackles classic Nas subjects like police brutality, managing money, and conspiracy theories, a noxious cloud hangs over everything: Nas is bored.
He opens the album with the perfunctory enthusiasm of a waiter describing the daily special to her 30th table that night. “Escobar season begins,” he says flatly, quickly passing the mic to Diddy, whose raucous presence, by contrast, is immediately felt. A sped-up loop of the main theme of The Hunt for Red October gives “Not for Radio” some cinematic and regal flair, but Nas lumbers through his verses. Weaving together outsized paranoia (“They try to Hyman Roth me/John Fitzgerald me”), textbook hotepisms (“Black Kemet gods, Black Egyptian gods/Summoned from heaven, blessed, dressed in only Goyard”), and boilerplate faux-deep commentary (“Shoot the ballot box, no voter cards, they are all frauds”), he builds to a doofy litany of falsehoods and unsolicited history lessons.
On the surface, lines like “Fox News was started by a black dude” (it wasn’t) and “Edgar Hoover was black” (he wasn’t) are standard Nas soapboxing; messianic titles aside, Nas has very rarely claimed to be anything other than one guy trying to move the masses by sharing what he believes. But there’s an emptiness to these provocations. Nas sounds less like a street preacher touting with conviction and urgency, and more like an online commenter shitposting in search of a jolt of entropy. It’s not quite trolling, but there’s an abandon to his claims, a lack of consideration. It’s lazy writing.
“Cops Shot the Kid,” a bouncy track built around a rickety sample of Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” is more purposeful. Nas flits between irritation and resignation as he chronicles the dread and terror of being black in America. He’s been on this beat since he rebuked a “foul cop” who shot an allegedly unarmed man on Illmatic’s “Halftime,” and you can feel the history in his voice. “Y’all are blowing my high,” he laments as cops circle around some city kids enjoying a hacked fire hydrant. The song falters when Kanye dips in to detail the “other side” of cops killing black kids. Whereas Nas’ verse had setting, character, and mise en scene, Kanye’s is all stage directions. “I know every story got two sides,” he raps to the clouds. It’s clear which side he wants to empathize with, but considering his recent comments about slavery and his sloppy verse on Pusha-T’s Daytona (“Will MAGA hats let me slide like a drive-thru?”), his verse is distracting. The fact that it wasn’t cut feels negligent.
It’s easy to pin this lack of focus on Kanye’s domineering vision of Nas, but Nas never really demands the spotlight. Abandoning the keen eye for details that he honed from his famous project window perch, Nas instead offers bland reports from the Met Gala and somewhere in the south of France; his narratives have the excitement of a geo-tag. Luxury items, artisanal foods, and women are rendered crudely, without flourish or even appetite. “Having drinks in Vegas, my business,” he boasts on “Bonjour,” the beverage and the business omitted.
When Nas does find inspiration, his passion is outrageously misplaced. “Everything,” the centerpiece of the album, is essentially a bizarro version of “If I Ruled the World” where, instead of outlining a black utopia, Nas rails against… child vaccinations, inclusion, and the ghosts of rich white people. “If I had everything, everything/I could change anything,” Kanye croons, driving home the aimlessness of the song. They covet the power to shape the world, but not the responsibility.
In the rare moments where Nasir achieves coherence, Nas is often concerned with the precarity of his successes. “Adam and Eve” and “Simple Things” contain multiple allusions to loss, longevity, and humiliation. Nas frets often about his children missing out on his gains, and his own peace of mind being threatened by his indiscretions or generational trauma. Kelis’ recent allegations of abuse during her marriage to Nas can make these nods to broken families and debts feel like elisions and barbs, but that is probably too generous. The writing is so meandering and mechanical that little here feels intentional, even the gaps. And strangely, that’s the bittersweet takeaway: Nas the meticulous observer has been supplanted by Nas the nervous rambler. It doesn’t feel like an accident.


The 21-year-old bedroom-pop artist’s major-label debut displays shaggy charm and an eclecticism that’s still confined to the more pleasant parts of the color wheel.

Para Mí

“I’m only interested in a label if they come through with whatever terms I send them,” Cuco told Rolling Stone last year. Interscope must have come through. According to Billboard, the 21-year-old bedroom-pop songwriter signed a seven-figure deal with the label, which promised him freedom and flexibility. That’s as much a testament to Omar Banos’ devoted fanbase as it is an admission by the suits that they no longer care to dictate the conversation. Why risk a flop when they can just follow the streams?
Para Mí, Cuco’s major-label debut, arrives with no other hands on the joystick. It’s just Banos, who’s still writing songs about love and other drugs and whose eclecticism is still confined to the more pleasant parts of the color wheel. The album pulses with the influence of Kevin Parker, as well as multi-instrumentalist tinkerers like Toro y Moi, Sen Morimoto, and Mac DeMarco. Its backward-seeming track sequence improves significantly as it goes along; its instrumental interludes are better than most of the songs. Para Mí may have been the result of a near-fatal car crash, but the album is a happy meanderer. Cuco knows it. His introduction concludes with the question, “Where is this fool going?”
Nowhere, really. Cuco’s unadorned songwriting isn’t for everyone. If you’re not in a place to appreciate a line like, “Don’t play with me/You broke my heart/But I’m also so obsessed with you,” the early portions of the album will be frustrating. (That’s from the third track, “Bossa No Sé.”) Stretch similarly simple lyrics over five minutes of gentle psychedelia and you have “Love Tripper,” the insipid song that’s smack in the middle.
Still, Banos’ appeal is undeniable. Every so often he hits upon a great dumb couplet, as irresistable as Best Coast’s early love for the ultimate Californian rhyme, “crazy/lazy.” (Cuco’s biggest hit, 2018’s “Lo Que Siento,” shared the same simple, sincere energy.) One of the highlights here is “Best Friend,” a ballad of devotion with a wry turn: “I know I’ve been quite dumb/But baby we’re quite young.” Awww.
It’s this shaggy charm that’s won over Cuco’s fans. A manager, Doris Muñoz, described the audience at an early backyard show: “Latinx teens singing every single lyric in English and Spanish to his music, which is inspired by our culture; it gave me chills.” Banos, whose parents are Mexican immigrants, has talked about how important it is to him to represent the Chicano community. But though his politics contextualize his music, Para Mí is not overtly political. When Cuco does get serious, it’s usually because he’s had a bad love affair. Once over the hump of “Love Tripper,” the album reaches a higher plane, starting with “Ego Death in Thailand,” where an insistent hook shoots skyward from the same gorgeous synths that make the interludes “Perihelion” and “Room Tone” so compelling. These tracks put muscle behind Cuco’s goofy obsession with psychedelics: They’re about expansion and exploration. Imagine Roger Troutman producing an all-instrumental album for Tame Impala featuring Mac DeMarco.
There are other standouts. “Hydrocodone” achieves a composure and balance that too much of the album’s first half lacks. The charming lyrics of “Best Friend” are all the more powerful because of the bossa nova rhythm and guitar they ride with. “Brokey the Pear” is like a lost Beach Boys interlude, with shades of “Let’s Go Away for Awhile.”
But “where is this fool going?” is a question Para Mí leaves unanswered. The repetitive, literal writing and head-scratching sequencing makes it seem like a bad thing that Cuco’s main sentiments are “I love you,” “I hate you,” and “I’m sad.” (Good pop songs are made of those sentiments too, of course, but they’re usually strengthened by more layered writing, more tightly constructed songs, or both.) Across an album, the weaknesses are magnified. There are not enough songs like “Lo Que Siento” here, heartfelt ballads that could close out a concert. Maybe in the old days, someone would have insisted that Para Mí shed some of its dead weight and be released as an EP. But, reportedly, it’s in Cuco’s contract; no one’s going to do that. It just means he’ll have to find his own way.


Over the course of four albums, St. Vincent's Annie Clark has been focusing her vision and sharpening her music's edges. St. Vincent is in a sense the Platonic ideal of a St. Vincent record, executing with perfect poise everything we already know she can do.

St. Vincent

Annie Clark's bold and almost jarringly confident fourth record, St. Vincent, does not sound like it was recorded here on Earth. Its songs sprout with their own strange, squiggly lifeforms and are governed by unfamiliar laws of gravity. Check out the first one, "Rattlesnake", a song that's bare, Kraftwerky, and full of imagery that is somehow both Edenic and post-apocalyptic. Clark glances around: "Am I the only one in the only world?" She spots the title creature, gasps, and then comes this song's idea of a chorus, like melodic gagging, or distress expressed in an 8-bit video game: "AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH AHH AHH/ AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH AHH AHH." You often get the sense in a St. Vincent song that Clark has touched down on a desolate, previously unexplored planet without an air supply and is showing off the fact that—for the moment at least—she can still breathe.
Given the fangs she bares on St. Vincent, it seems like Clark could take that snake, easily. Over the course of four albums, many early-career guest spots, and a 2012 collaboration with David Byrne, Clark has been focusing her vision and sharpening her music's edges; were it not for Google image search, it would be easy to convince yourself that you merely dreamed those days when she wore butterfly wings with Sufjan Stevens and blithely flowing robes with the Polyphonic Spree. With each release, Clark sounds less like anybody but herself, and more forcefully embraces a darkness that was quietly stirring in even her earliest songs. "You don't mean that, say you're sorry," she chimed in a creepy, Bride of Chucky voice on her still-magnificent debut single, "Now, Now". But the smirking overlord that stares out from the cover of St. Vincent does not apologize, not for any of the unpleasantries she utters through gritted teeth, nor the much nastier things she blurts out her fingers.
St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat. Her harmonic-filled style bears the influence of jazz (she picked up a lot of her signature tricks from her uncle, the jazz guitarist Tuck Andress) and prog rock, two genres known to embrace sprawl. But Clark's freak-outs are tidy, modular and architecturally compact—like King Crimson rewritten by Le Corbusier. Even at its most spazzy, there's always something efficient about St. Vincent. The stark, spring-wound single "Birth in Reverse" doesn't waste a second on superfluous sounds, and the same goes for the corrosive crunch of "Regret", which sounds like a classic rock song pared down to its most essential elements. All the negative space in that last one makes Clark's riffs hit that much harder, especially when—in one of the most thrilling moments on the album—a solo strikes down out of nowhere like a cartoon lightning bolt.
Critics of St. Vincent call her pretentious. Fair enough—these are the sorts of songs that dare take themselves seriously and tack on easy suffixes like "in America" when they want to let you know they are Making a Statement. But there's an under-appreciated playfulness about Clark's music that balances this out. I can't think of much contemporary guitar-based music that has this much fun with texture—the rubbery whiplash percussion on "Prince Johnny", the stretched-taffy vocals on "Bring Me Your Loves", the gleefully synthetic-on-purpose sheen of "Digital Witness". At best, St. Vincent has a mischievous curiosity about texture (and explosions) that feels almost childlike. Recently my 8 year-old cousin asked me, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, if I'd ever microwaved a banana. I'm terrified to try, but I'm sure whatever happens—splattering, abrupt, radioactive—sounds exactly like an Annie Clark guitar solo.
"What's the point in even sleeping/ If I can't show, if you can't see me?" Clark asks on the single "Digital Witness", a rather on-the-nose critique of our hyper-transparent, Instagram-your-every-meal culture. It's tempting to label St. Vincent Clark's anti-internet album, but that wouldn't be quite right—it knows too well what a life mediated through screens feels and sounds like to be sending it up entirely. (In fact, digital life may have influenced her concise, anti-jam style: "I have some restless ears, and I now have a fractured attention span because I'm like living in the modern world," she said in a recent interview. "So I'm like, how do I make this sound interesting to myself?") "Huey Newton" is maybe one of the best songs ever written about falling down a late-night, vaguely depressive internet k-hole ("Pleasure dot loathing dot Huey dot Newton/ Oh, it was a lonely, lonely winter"); seemingly stream-of-conscious references to Black Panthers, Byzantine architecture, and the Heaven's Gate cult flicker by like puzzlingly connected Wikipedia pages. The common threads emerge if you look closely. From the self-coronated Prince Johnny to the "near-future cult leader" Clark has fashioned herself on the album cover, there's a fascination with power, faith, and mind-control running through these songs—learning how to sell yourself your own lines well enough to sell them back to other people, too.
"I was reading Miles Davis' biography," Clark says of her Beyoncé-like decision to self-title a record this late in her career, "and he says that the hardest thing for a musician to do is sound like yourself." In that sense, it's a perfect title. St. Vincent is the Platonic ideal of a St. Vincent record, executing with perfect poise everything we already know she can do. But this also is why it falls just short of being her best. That honor still goes to Strange Mercy, which had a capacity to surprise and defy expectations in a way that this record does not. Strange Mercy was easier to connect to emotionally ("If I ever meet the dirty police man who roughed you up," she cooed on the title track, a line that was as jarring for its tenderness as it was for its violence) and gave Clark a little more room to stretch her legs in the grooves. The pixelated shredding on "Huey Newton" and "Regret" are great, but nothing here feels as unhinged as the borealis chaos of at the end of "Northern Lights" or the razor-sharp coda of "Surgeon". The Bowie-esque metamorphosis suggested by the cover image doesn’t mean she’s reinvented her sound. Of course it's not the worst problem for an artist to have, but Clark's become so good at being St. Vincent that, on future releases, she risks boxing herself in. You hope the next album finds her coloring outside the lines she's so meticulously drawn for herself.
Still, it’s hard to ask too much more from an album that boasts melodies as lovely as  "Prince Johnny" and "Severed Crossed Fingers". That last one is the best closing song on a St. Vincent album yet—a self-deprecating, slow-motion parade of a ballad that sounds like if Lorrie Moore had written the non-existent lyrics to “Here Come the Warm Jets”. (This song and “Birth in Reverse” both take their wry titles from Moore’s great short story collection Birds of America.) It’s a moment of vulnerability and bleak hope rounding out Clark’s hardest, tightest, and most confident record to date—a vaguely ominous promise of better days ahead. "We’ll be heroes on every bar stool," she vows, sounding so sure of herself that you’re liable to follow her to whatever planet she’s headed.


An Odd Entrances

An Odd Entrances arrived fast, even by Thee Oh Sees standards. The Bay Area-born psych band has always worked at a feverish clip—at least an album a year, in additions to shelves of singles, EPs, rarities and miscellany—but their 18th and latest studio full-length follows its predecessor A Weird Exits by a mere three months (for the truly impatient fan, they’d also released a live album just a month before that one). The band has reached the point where their prolificacy has become a kind of performance art, an experiment in how much worthwhile product one group can deliver without releasing an outright dud. Though it’s not a force of nature like the other LPs Thee Oh Sees have produced since returning from their farcically brief 2013 hiatus, Odd Entrances more than keeps their streak alive.
Making the most of the band’s new, double-drummer lineup, A Weird Exits was a concussive dropkick of a record, as focused and ruthlessly efficient as a wood chipper. It didn’t even pause for any of the woozy, psych-pop numbers that frontman John Dwyer usually smuggles onto each record, and now we know why: He was saving them for this one. Recorded during the same sessions, An Odd Entrances is a kinder, gentler companion to its shredding predecessor (“an appendix, if you will,” according to the liner notes), a clearinghouse for all the tangents and detours that would have dulled that record’s fierceness. It’s got riffs—opener “You Will Find It Here” is an absolute beast—but for the most part Entrances doesn’t try to melt your face. It just wants to hang out a bit, maybe split a joint and stare at the sky before calling it an early night.
Three of these six songs are leisurely instrumentals, one of them, “Jammed Exit,” a direct continuation of Exits’ trippiest number, “Jammed Entrance.” The tracks share the same Krautrock groove, except this time a wayward flute scribbles all over it. Like much of Entrances, it feels like a record collector’s in joke—a nod, perhaps, to the Blues Project’s Projections, or maybe some forgotten Nuggets-era deep cut. Other references are less obscure. “The Poem” is pure Magical Mystery Tour, right down its spacey prose and melted-taffy strings, while “At the End, on the Stairs” conjures a Donovan-esque blur of paisley and incense. Then “Nervous Tech (Nah John)” ends the record as it began, with another percolating jam that lets both of the drummers get some.
Much to the exasperation of newcomers looking for a consensus entry point into their endless discography, Thee Oh Sees have been so astonishingly consistent that few of their records tower far above (or for that matter fall far below) any other. An Odd Entrances is the rare effort from the band that clearly announces itself as a lesser work. Even at just half an hour long, it’s so disconnected that it feels more like an odds-and-ends collection than the group’s actual odds and ends compilations. Casual fans can take a guilt-free pass on this one, then, but as always, the group’s insatiable base won’t have any reason to regret placing their pre-orders. If A Weird Exits was Thee Oh Sees’ Thanksgiving feast, An Odd Entrances is Friday’s turkey and stuffing sandwich—hardly a destination meal, but plenty satisfying in its own way.


The celebrated avant-garde composer’s final work is a shrine to ecstatic disorientation.

The Third Ascension

“There are very few animals that kill their own kind.” Avant-garde composer Glenn Branca often began interviews with bleak screeds on human existence. “We’re vicious, psychopathological beasts,” he said in 2011, referring to our planet as a “disgusting shithole.” It was easy to take one look at Branca, drink in hand and perpetually smoking, and think you had him figured out. It was even easier to hear his vitriolic compositions and find them oppressive and terrifying, as John Cage famously did in 1982. But there was always an armored optimism in Branca’s work that suggested: If we can get lost in this maddening sound, we might be able to transcend our shared shithole, if only for a moment. With Branca’s final work The Third Ascension, released a year and a half after he died of throat cancer, the composer and his ensemble take the familiar instruments of a rock band and transform them into machines of calculated pandemonium, whose noise is so merciless it’s blissful.
The concluding entry in his Ascension series, The Third Ascension premiered at New York’s famed art space the Kitchen in February 2016, where Branca and his ensemble were recorded for this very album. Branca, dressed in his trademark black duster and slacks, flailed around the stage as he conducted for bass, drums, and four guitars (one of which was played by his wife, Reg Bloor). His movements were spasmodic, and he occasionally shimmied his hips like a beleaguered Elvis. He grumbled between songs, brief quips about the best hot dog he’d ever eaten, or a dig at John Zorn. He kept his sheet music in a plastic shopping bag, which, if memory serves, had a yellow smiley face on the front. It was the only concert I’d ever been to where earplugs were forcefully handed out at the entrance, like safety goggles at a gun range.
Branca was known to say that if you didn’t like loud music, you shouldn’t bother with his. At live performances, you had no option regarding volume. When it comes to his albums, you unfortunately do. But heed the man’s words: The Third Ascension should be played at full blast, neighbors and landlords be damned. One of the most exhilarating aspects of Branca’s music is the amount of aural hallucination it inspires—a frequent side effect of listening to his work is hearing things that aren’t really there. “The Smoke,” a 16-minute odyssey that kicks off like the opening credits in a western film, eventually bursts into a fit of distortion, and it appears as though a synthesizer simulating gale-force winds has been added to the mix. On closing opus “Cold Thing,” Branca’s guitar quartet sounds like a squad of machine guns firing at point blank range, and yet the continued roar somehow registers as distant screaming, air raid sirens, and a choir of angels all at once.
This psychoacoustic mindfuck is all part of the plan. “I want you to be confused,” Branca once said of his audience. “Because if you become a little confused, then you’re not sure what you’re hearing, and that’s the point at which you can start thinking about what you’re hearing, and you can start creating what you’re hearing.” The Third Ascension, much like Branca’s masterpieces The Ascension and Lesson No. 1, is a shrine to ecstatic disorientation. It is both exhausting and elating, so much so that the end of each song coincides with a deserved deep breath.
Branca’s work has always been as much of a physical experience as a musical one, and The Third Ascension continues that tradition beautifully. The high-frequency guitar riffs piercing through “Twisting in Space” feel like individual pin pricks, and the dueling rhythms in “Lesson No. 4” might as well be a series of 2x4s bashing you in the face. It’s a glorious, numbing assault.
Glenn Branca did not like the word “transcendence,” but he knew that was the ultimate goal. “I want everything in the world, in every minute of every piece,” he once said. “I want to create a small universe on that stage, and take you off of this earth, into a place that isn’t this fucking shithole.” Branca has finally escaped. Consider The Third Ascension his parting gift.


House of Feelings make euphoric New York house music packed with modern anxieties. Their promising debut EP is intricate and elegant, featuring guest vocals from Shamir, Meredith Graves, and GABI.

Last Chance

New York’s House of Feelings embody the long tradition of dance musicians feeling disappointed with clubs. Their music—by turns exuberant and melancholic, rapturous and despairing—is an expression of soul-defeating anguish with a great big smile on its face. Their debut EP, the ominously titled Last Chance, is, to borrow a phrase from Jay McInerney, a sustained assault on the citadel of good times. “I wrecked everything/I lost everyone,” runs a representative couplet on the title track, a buoyant, euphoric house number. “They say/You don’t live here/Until you cry alone on the train.” Doesn’t that make you want to cut loose and dance? This isn’t your run-of-the-mill 3 a.m. alienation. These guys have it much worse: They’re resigned to it. They are miserable and club-on anyway.
This quality of self-conscious wretchedness—of not only knowing how grim the nightlife is but addressing it with irony and wit—gives Last Chance a somewhat intellectual cast. It is, in other words, a record of ideas, conceptual in scope (“modern anxieties dissipate in the throb of the crowded club” is how they put it, not inaccurately) and often artful in design. Dale Eisinger’s sumptuous production, a melange of dance-punk hi-hats and rock-depth synthesizers and sax riffs in the spirit of Steely Dan, is frequently as intricate, elegant, and surprising as the work Tim Goldsworth and James Murphy did as producers in the early 2000s. Bandleader Matty Fasano, meanwhile, aspires to Murphy’s work with LCD Soundsystem—and if this ambition remains for now beyond his abilities, he at least shows promise that it’s possible.
He comes closest with “It’ll Cost You”—a six-minute thesis statement, part “Losing My Edge,” part “On Repeat,” that briefly realizes Fasano’s vision and looms as standing proof of his talent. “It’ll Cost You” is an excruciating disquisition on the modern struggle: on the cost of aspiration, the reality of compromise, and the suffering that’s part of the bargain of success. All the usual themes of an upbeat electronic dance track, obviously. The lyrics, so clear and so true, are intoned by guest vocalist (and New York-based film critic and Pitchfork contributor) Kristen Yoonsoo Kim with what you might call an understated ferocity, sometimes numb, sometimes vicious. “And your body/Let’s be honest/Well, it could be better,” she all but snarls. “It’ll cost you hunger/And the vain, harsh light of the gym.” The song is merciless: “And those slick smiling people you always wanted to run from/I’m afraid, I’m afraid, afraid you’re going to have to become one.”
This would be the zenith of any album. Over Last Chance, though, no other song comes close. Shamir guests on the lovely penultimate cut “Falling,” and Meredith Graves does get a lot of mileage out of a lugubrious refrain on “Avatar”—the sardonic touch suits her naturally. “I can’t make it/9 to 5,” she sings. “Not like I/Have endless time.” It’s among the album’s most compelling images. Last Chance works best as an ideas record, and Fasano could use more of them on this EP. He’s smart to harness his club-going woe. He just needs to let it stew a little longer.


The Top Dawg label’s latest signee is Inglewood-bred crooner Sir Darryl Farris, aka SiR. His latest EP embraces restraint and subtlety—a pure, 18-minute jolt of traditionalist R&B.

Her Too EP

Since the early 2000s, the proprietors of the TDE label—Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, Dave “Miyatola” Free, and Terrence “Punch” Henderson—have made a home for more critical darlings per capita than perhaps any other hip-hop-dominated outpost. Each of the last three acts signed to TDE (SZA, Lance Skiiiwalker, SiR) have been R&B artists, an indication that the moment’s hottest rap label is perhaps looking to expand its palate.
The latest signee is Sir Darryl Farris, aka SiR, an Inglewood-born-and-bred crooner who has spent years following in the footsteps of his older brothers, the songwriters Daniel and Davion Farris (aka WoodWorks), writing for artists behind the scenes. It’s uncanny for a mainstream R&B newcomer to have started out penning tracks for Jill Scott, Robert Glasper, Stevie Wonder, and Anita Hill rather than Drake or Rihanna, but this is central to SiR’s ethos.
Her Too is an 18-minute jolt of pure, traditionalist R&B and neo-soul. SiR’s successes lay in his polish and maturity. In this lane, his peers have recently focused on self-discovery, nostalgia ultra, and experiments in form, but SiR’s concerns are in subtlety, restraint, and finesse. SiR’s releases, then—2016’s HER EP and 2015’s Seven Sundays among them—have lacked a masterpiece like his labelmate Kendrick Lamar’s “The Art of Peer Pressure.” But Her Too contains fantastic analogues to Jay Rock’s “Hood Gone Love It,” which are a purist’s thrill.
Much of Her Too feels warm and leisurely. SiR has said he was aiming for something darker than his previous EP, but the project doesn’t live up to that description, save for a few bars on the Anderson .Paak- and King Mez-assisted opener “New LA.” King Mez raps, “Man why we take the murder route?/Shouldn’t we be worried about niggas dying, niggas dying?/Or we could just not say shit and take the Cam Newton scary route.” As virtually the only patch of lyrics that aren’t explicitly romantic, it’s a bit discordant. On it’s face, it’s a whimsical and somewhat funny, topical sports reference. But it plays into the pathology that, no matter a black person’s station in life—and even if they’re currently blinded by love and passion—the threat of state-sanctioned violence lingers in the back of the mind, ready to punch itself into the foreground at a moment’s notice.
“New LA” is nonetheless the project’s brightest and most buoyant moment. Cardiak samples Drake’s overlooked “With You,” crafting a saccharine trance of a beat. “Ooh Nah Nah” is a smooth, sultry number featuring Masego’s vocals and darting saxophone; it finds SiR bellowing in a tenor full of lust. Five of the six songs here embrace a degree of calm, but the closer “W$ Boi” possesses kinetic energy that explodes in the chorus, as SiR shouts that he’s a “westside boy.” It’s like SiR’s version of “Uptown Girl,” which is Billy Joel’s Romeo and Juliet—the template for an endless trove of tales about star-crossed lovers.
In his real life, Sir Darryl Farris is about 30, and he’s been with his wife for the better part of a decade. About seven years ago, he was in Hollywood jobless, drug-addicted, and nearly homeless. The W$ Boi returned home and started writing songs in his mother’s house, which eventually turned his life around. SiR proclaims, “I don't know if she knows/She don’t know what I been through.” Even amid a song that could afford to be a bit more chaotic, the result is a contained personal anthem. SiR’s debut album is slated to come out whenever Top Dawg chooses, but up to this point, his story is one of triumph.


Affliction and addiction shape this London band's twisted worldview. And while their musical translation of this mindset is anything but pretty on the ears, the group’s knotted noise feels inviting.

Songs for Our Mothers

Four years into their career, Fat White Family have garnered a reputation for two things: acting crazy onstage and off, and gobbling up pretty much any illegal substance that crosses their path. The Londoners don’t refute either of these points—on the contrary, their madness connects them to their audience. “There are deep-set psychological issues in this band that are a bigger problem for us than drugs,” guitarist Saul Adamczewski told NME, going on to add, “there’s nothing exceptional about us as drug abusers; we’re just like everybody else.” Affliction and addiction shape their twisted worldview, and while their musical translation of this mindset—infusing the darkly-shaded psychedelia of Velvet Underground with the cheap electronic throb of Suicide—is anything but pretty on the ears, the group’s knotted noise feels inviting. On their sophomore album, Songs for Our Mothers, Fat White Family lead us misfits in another corrupt communion.
Lias Sauodi (who writes the songs along with brother Nathan and Adamczewski) finds inspiration in drunks, degenerates, domestic abusers—scummy avatars that grant him entry to the underbelly’s topsy-turvy world. (Drugs play a considerable role, of course, although one of the band’s principle songwriters, Adamczewski, primarily worked sober). The first half of *Songs for Our Mothers—*all plodding tempos, feedback fuzz, and layered whimpers—casts Lias as a strung-out participant in some depressing half-hearted orgy that begets nothing but sloth and wasted opportunity. Devoid of all flower-power optimism and good intentions, “Satisfied," “Love Is the Crack,” and “Duce” take on an almost funereal component.
Such is the Fat White Family existential cycle: drugs and delirium fuel sex, sex begets a useless life before giving way to death, and then there’s nothing. Can you blame them for casting aside trifles like dynamics and sonic variety when they openly admit that they want nothing more than to make your skin crawl? But while Fat White Family’s nihilistic heart endows their sluggish dirge-rock with a sense of purpose (or rather, explicit purposelessness) that distinguishes them from UK contemporaries like Cheatahs or Slaves, it’s not enough to make up for the uniformity of their songwriting. Apart from the understated lo-fi pop of “Hits Hits Hits” and churning opener “Whitest Boy on the Beach,” there’s little to differentiate one jam from the next.
Fat White Family’s notorious live shows prove that they’ve got the brains and the insanity to make a carnal, carnivalesque classic, but Songs for Our Mothers doesn’t come close to that energy. Where’s the aural equivalent of the shit-smearing, or the head careening into the audience? Like Champagne Holocaust, Songs for Our Mothers puts too much emphasis on setting the smoky, sinister scene—upping the reverb, working in odd yelps or electronic clatter—and too little attention on establishing dynamic, compelling arrangements.


The lo-fi shoegaze project from the Seoul musician is a rare find. The ambitious and alluring music expertly captures the feeling of a sound so uncannily familiar that it truly feels like a dream.

파란노을 (Parannoul): To See the Next Part of the Dream

To See the Next Part of the Dream

The anonymous mastermind behind 파란노을 (Parannoul) has refused to reveal their name, their exact age, or whether anyone else is even involved with the making of To See the Next Part of the Dream. When I asked for this information, they demurred, admitting they’re too embarrassed to identify themselves on the internet or even tell their parents they make music. But the internal circumstances that inspired their phenomenal second album are indispensable and included in its de facto press release on Bandcamp: they’re an “active loser,” “below average in height, appearance and everything else,” a stunted adult with “singing skills [that] are fucking awful” chained to their adolescent fantasies of a middling career in indie rock.
The only subjective fact: they’re a student writing music in a Seoul bedroom. Despite the internet’s endless possibilities for personal reinvention, Parannoul is an alias, not an alter ego. To See the Next Part of the Dream is not an antidote to its creator’s paralyzing misery, but a monument that honors its enormity—“I wish no one had seen my miserable self/I wish no one had seen my numerous failures/I wish my young and stupid days to disappear forever,” they sing on the opening “Beautiful World.” If that feeling scans as melodramatic, To See the Next Part of the Dream ensures it’s every bit as overwhelming as they say it is.
In the music, there is no happiness to be found in the present or the future, only bittersweet memories of youth wasted on the young and the good times that never were—specifically, the early 2000s. To See the Next Part of the Dream is littered with time-stamped references like Welcome the NHK!, Goodnight Punpun and, more disturbingly, All About Lily Chou Chou, a pitch-black cult favorite that layered gauzy cinematography atop a brutal story of high school kids committing unspeakable acts of bullying. Like many shut-ins who’ve internalized the shame in their singing voice or instrumental prowess, Parannoul primarily works in shoegaze and bedroom-pop. The guitars are almost always either coppery acoustics or saturated fuzz, with nothing in between. The low-end is imperceptible and though they sing brutally despondent lyrics in Korean, the vocals are mixed low enough to function as texture for listeners assuming the usual sweet nothings of shoegaze.
Parannoul sees themselves as a fan more than a musician, and the clarity of their reference points inspires awe-inducing dream dates: The Radio Dept. covers “Vapour Trail”! Ulrich Schnauss joins American Football! What if Phil Elverum started the Microphones as a Smashing Pumpkins tribute act? Parannoul’s Bandcamp recommendations respectively tout Brave Little Abacus, Weatherday, and Car Seat Headrest for their “inspiration, production and passion.” But for all of its decades-old influences, To See the Next Part of the Dream takes an inherently modernist approach to shoegaze, reliant on advances in home-recording technology that have eliminated barriers to entry in a genre long obsessed with straight-to-tape purity, bespoke pedals, and an album that infamously bankrupted its record label. Your favorite shoegaze album of the past couple of years might have come from a band who openly admits to using off-the-rack guitars and DAW presets to create sounds bigger, bolder, and brighter than anything a major label could’ve financed even ten years ago.
But that’s not what Parannoul does. Their formative years include M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, which emerged as the 21st century’s first truly innovative shoegaze album by exclusively using synthesizers to replicate their analog analogues. To See the Next Part of the Dream is its inverse: all of its acoustic instruments could pass for tones triggered by MIDI pads or synth keys. It really does sound like someone routing their guitar directly into their computer to avoid waking up their parents. “Beautiful World” and “Youth Rebellion” are fascinating transmissions from shoegaze’s Uncanny Valley, its fuzz tones all neon glow and pixelated grit, erasing any remnant of fingers meeting steel. The drums are redlined to near-constant digital clipping and are as textural as they are rhythmic.
Audiophiles will go insane pointing out what Parannoul gets wrong and any attempt to remix or remaster To See the Next Part of the Dream would negate its entire emotional thrust. In every single note, there’s a reminder of what this album actually captures: the point where inspiration meets limitation. The music isn’t intended to replicate the sound of four people who pooled their money to rent a studio and hire a professional mixer. To See the Next Part of the Dream thrives on artistic decisions that likely wouldn’t have survived committee thinking: “White Ceiling” frantically adds layer after layer over its ten minutes without ever peaking, and why would a song about the punishing repetition of existence do that? But when “White Ceiling” finally ends at exactly ten minutes, there’s a sneaky sense of joy in the accomplishment of reaching that ten-minute mark; 9:58 just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
These are the flickers of joy that push To See the Next Part of the Dream towards the possibility of a brighter tomorrow: cycling through synth presets until something catches your ear, stumbling upon a countermelody and demanding it find a place in the mix, discovering the soothing effect of letting a single distorted riff cycle for several minutes. For someone who fixates on their inertia, Parannoul is obsessed with momentum, patching in hints of house music, twee-punk, and krautrock that ensure these lengthy tracks never drag.
Amidst more obvious genres, Parannoul lists “emo” as one of their tags on Bandcamp. Beyond their earnest candor and gooey sentimentality, the title track is their only clear tie to its sonic signatures of braided acoustic guitars and tricky time signatures; at least until they’re buried under magma-bright synths, leaving “To See the Next Part of the Dream” like a Pompeii in the Midwest prairies. But it’s no surprise that To See the Next Part of the Dream has found its most vocal boosters in the greater emo universe—as the fifth wave (give or take) has begun to assert its presence, last year’s Bandcamp breakthroughs like Glass Beach and the similarly anonymous Weatherday have become its leading lights: auteurist and omnivorous acts that debuted with hour-long opuses. “This album can be said to be the answer to my dream,” Parannoul writes, a bold statement of an intent that’s strangely free of ego. Parannoul aspires to be like the first Korean indie musicians they remember hearing, difficult and amateur acts doomed to obscurity and wiped from the internet, but not before implanting a “stupid and anachronistic” dream in their mind. If Parannoul aspires solely to be remembered and not to be adored, they might not have much of a choice for long.

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Tangents artfully mix acoustic instruments and electronics in pieces that combine improvisation with careful processing. At their best, they bring to mind Can, Tortoise, Four Tet, and the Necks.

Stateless

In a recent radio interview, Ollie Bown, the resident electronic musician of Australian improvisers Tangents, said that the band has been trying to learn to leave more space in the music. Each of the quintet’s members—on guitar, drums, cello, keyboards and mallets, and electronics, respectively—is capable of kicking up quite a racket, and in their music, listening to each other is paramount. Judging from Stateless, their ears are as finely tuned as their chops. It’s a lovely album—porous, dynamic, lively, shot through with silence and bathed in warm light. It’s sometimes cluttered, but never distractingly so; like a cozy apartment strewn with curious objects, it’s just busy enough to keep you stimulated, your attention thrown pleasantly off balance.
Stateless marks a shift in the band’s method: while the group’s debut, I, was recorded live in the studio, the new album is the product of jams that were chopped up, remixed, and extensively processed on computers. As a result, it’s a hybrid beast, with one foot in the improv world and the other in electronic music, and it strikes the perfect balance between group interaction and digital production, and between groove and texture, repetition and abstraction.
Evan Dorrian’s drums drive the group’s sound. He likes the sound of sticks on rims, tapped cymbals, and other small, scratchy gestures, which he arranges into bursts and clusters and pin-prick constellations. Sometimes his playing is multi-tracked or run through effects, but rarely in a way that calls attention to itself. Guitarist Shoeb Ahmad alternates between reverberant background washes and potent droplets of tone, and cellist Peter Hollo frequently treats his instrument more like an upright bass, plucking instead of bowing.
Adrian Lim-Klumpes, a member of Triosk, rotates between piano, Rhodes, vibraphone, and marimba, and he often supplies the music’s tonal center. His watery vibes gives “Jindabyne” a hint of Tortoise, and his limpid piano chords run like a cool stream through the tangled brambles of “Masist Cau”; toward the end of “N-Mission,” a bass-driven tune recalling Four Tet, Lim-Klumpes unfurls a rolling, surging solo reminiscent of the introduction to Prince’s “Condition of the Heart.”
With the exception of “Directrix,” a brief free-improv freakout that lurches like a rock tumbler stuffed with steel wool and metal shards, Tangents develop their pieces patiently and almost imperceptibly. The way the hardscrabble “Masist Cau” builds, you keep expecting it to kick into overdrive—but at the same time, lulled into a state of deferred expectation, you forget you’re waiting for anything at all. It’s a curious feeling. “Along the Forest Floor” forgoes percussion, tossed like lazy ocean swells by cello and reversed vibraphone; it’s the rare track on Stateless where a lyric impulse comes to the fore. But even when there’s no melody to speak of, Tangents can be plenty expressive: “Oberon,” swirling like the inside of a snow globe, evokes a sense of peace that’s the opposite of its wild kinetic energy.
Tangents are obvious disciples of the Necks, another improvising group from Australia: Like the latter band, they emphasize tone and texture above melody, privileging small, incidental sounds over big declarative ones, and they favor hypnotic patterns that pulse and twitch like perpetual-motion machines. And while nothing on Stateless has the sustained mood of Necks’ hour-long pieces, Tangents’ keen sense of focus leaves no doubt that they’re in it for the long haul; “Jindabyne” cycles patiently for seven minutes and could easily run longer; the flickering “Oberon,” 13 minutes long, has even more potential to just keep going forever, powered by the energy stored in its quick, snapping rhythms, its path greased by cellist Hollo’s fluid, energetic lines. Tangents’ impulses tug them toward the margins, even as their combined force pushes them ever onward. It makes following in their wake the most captivating kind of journey.


Fusing folk, doom metal, and improv noise, the Indonesian duo Senyawa are unlike any other band. The five songs of their new LP are drawn out and meditative, admitting little daylight.

Brønshøj (Puncak)

It’s safe to say there is no other band on the planet quite like Senyawa. What do you call the music of this Indonesian duo: folk? Doom metal? Unplugged minimalist noise improv? In fact, it is a little bit of each. Wukir Suryadi plays the bambuwukir, an instrument of his own design—an amplified zither, fashioned out of bamboo, that looks like it could double as a weapon. It does the work of many instruments, and from it he ekes bowed string passages, plucked and strummed guitar-like sounds, and even woody, percussive rhythms. He has long hair and an intense mien, and onstage, he looks like a metal guitarist coaxing spirits from an alien relic rescued from a shipwreck.
As for Rully Shabara—how best to describe what Shabara does? You couldn’t call him a “singer,” exactly. He never simply sings. He incarnates the fleshy essence of the human voice: He shrieks, he ululates, he jibbers. Sometimes, he dips down to a low, throaty growl, its texture as pronounced as the clicking of a dial; in his falsetto range, he is a bird of prey honing in on a small mammal. He lies somewhere on a spectrum connecting Diamanda Galás and Mayhem’s Attila Csihar.
Brønshøj (Puncak), the follow-up to last year’s Menjadi, is darker and more abstracted than that album. In place of melody or rhythm, see-sawing drones and scraped textures predominate. The record is the product of an intense session held in a basement studio in Copenhagen’s working-class Brønshøj neighborhood. The duo would agree on themes—cues like “old shed,” “McDonald’s,” or “forest,” although none are necessarily discernible from the music itself—and then commence playing. Suryadi ran his bambuwukir through a short chain of cheap guitar pedals, including a looping device; Shabara used an old-school Shure 55SH Series II—the “Elvis microphone”—and the mixer’s built-in reverb and echo effects. For two days, the duo jammed, cooked Indonesian food in the kitchen next to the studio, smoked, and jammed some more. Beyond the vinyl master, there was no post-production.
The album’s five songs reflect their genesis: They are slow, drawn out, and meditative, and they admit little daylight. (“Puncak” means “summit” in Indonesian, but the music feels more like a series of plateaus than peaks.) “Brønshøj 1”—all five of the album’s tracks bear simple, sequential titles—is a kind of invocation. In an approximation of Tibetan throat singing, Shabara explores the lowest, gravelliest reaches of his voice, as though caressing his larynx with a scouring pad, while Suryadi bows funereal drones. It sounds a lot like an acoustic cousin of Sunn O)))’s blackened doom, and the closing “Brønshøj 5” continues in a similar vein, applying fuzz-pedal distortion to Suryadi’s guitar-like leads as Shabara paces in slow, teasing circles around the root note. Continuing in the avant-metal vein, the short “Brønshøj 3” takes a few strands of similar material and simply runs the tape in reverse; it wouldn't sound out of place as an interstitial sketch on a Blut Aus Nord album.
In its pursuit of a singular mood, the record is slightly less dynamic than *Menjadi *or the duo’s self-titled 2010 album, but the album’s two longest tracks offer a fuller indication of the duo’s range. On “Brønshøj 2,” Suryadi loops a glowering pedal tone and twists the tuning peg on a second string as he plucks it, creating an eerie, undulating effect; Shabara largely hangs back, laying down a smoky backdrop behind Suryadi’s high-necked riffing, which suggests the liquid glint of lap steel. “Brønshøj 4” combines bowed melodic phrases with a looped rhythm reminiscent of thumb piano; it is the album’s lightest track, melancholy yet also comforting. Toward the climax of its 11-minute run, as silvery string loops begin to burn white-hot, Shabara finally lets loose with a succession of inhuman shrieks and growls, lightly augmented by delay. He sounds like a synthesizer; he sounds like a pterodactyl. Yet, despite the obvious, formidable power of his voice, he never feels the need to fully unleash it; he sticks to the sidelines, directing his voice away from the listener.
It reminds me of something Shabara did when the duo played Krakow’s Unsound festival this fall. At the end of a song, he stepped away from the microphone and unleashed a brief operatic run, which went soaring over our heads. Even unamplified, he dominated the cavernous hall. This short, intimate album functions in similar ways. Rather than attempting to bowl you over, *Brønshøj *instead invites you to lean in closer, and rewards handsomely when you do.


Jessie Ware’s sumptuous fifth album is classic disco revival done right.

That! Feels Good!

I’m told that we’re living in a sexless era—that Gen Z simply isn’t doing it and that everybody else is too busy or too addicted to their phones or just too freaked out to fuck. There are other great reasons for this—the pandemic, the widespread suppression of bodily autonomy—but historically, eras of oppression lead right into Dionysian excess, where all that apocalyptic dread manifests in, say, clubwide make-outs at 4 a.m., bods grinding under the purple glow of bisexual lighting. New York in the 1970s was the apex of this concept: the need for temporary relief from widespread poverty, racial and queer discrimination led to the creation of a queer, Black, and brown space—the disco—where the youth could unloose and commune with like-minded peers. “You could be on the dance floor and the most beautiful woman that you had ever seen in your life would come and dance right on top of you,” the legendary house producer Frankie Knuckles once said of the original disco, The Loft. “Then the minute you turned around a man that looked just as good would do the same thing.” Which is to say, repressive eras often find an antidote in the nightlife underground, usually soundtracked by music that demands a kind of spiritual freedom.
Jessie Ware, the British quadruple threat—powerhouse singer, author, podcaster, and children's fashion magnate—has spent the last few years reading up on queer history, and is looking to her forebears for inspiration. Disco is a long-explored touchstone for excess and emancipation, and the genre, or at least the concept of the genre, has certainly taken hold of the modern pop milieu, whether Beyoncé’s full-body immersions, Dua Lipa’s corpo-rave pleasers, or Lizzo’s feel-good bass funk. But That! Feels Good!, Ware’s fifth album, stretches beyond vibes and delves into the well-oiled mechanics of bands like Chic, Sister Sledge, the Trammps, and a little P-Funk, opening up the hood and pulling out all the parts to see if she can piece them back together. Alongside disco-savvy producers like Stuart Price (aka Thin White Duke/Jacques Lu Cont) and James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco), as well as co-songwriters Shungudzo Kuyimba and Sarah Hudson, Ware has achieved a rare feat: a genre revival album that’s painstakingly true to its source material, but doesn’t sound like a curdled rehash. This has everything to do with Ware’s unfailingly strong vocals—one of her generation’s preeminent white belters—and the wild joy she emits on every track, with a thesis that le freaking it on the dancefloor and in the bedroom is key to liberation, and that love alone will save the day.
Disco is familiar territory for Ware—2020’s What’s Your Pleasure looked towards Giorgio Moroder’s blueprint for arpeggiated synths and light-up dancefloor grooves, helping kickstart pop music’s disco revival. That! Feels Good! is a grittier affair, reminiscent of the small underground disco clubs of the early ’70s at individual apartments and lofts in downtown New York. Accompanied live by the preternaturally tight eight-piece funk/Afrobeat band Kokoroko, which has the freewheeling but precise instrumentation of disco down to a science, Ware floats into the sweet spot for her elastic soul vocals, somewhere between Donna Summer and Teena Marie: a glamorous libertine we’ll follow into any dingy club so she can show us the light.
It helps that Ware is a true believer, underscoring That! Feels Good!’s title track with a command that’s almost militant: “Freedom is a sound, and pleasure is a right. Do it again.” Like Donna Summer before her, she eliminates the distance between dancefloor ecstasy and sexual pleasure, suggesting an imperceptible difference between the two. With the thrust of funk bass and spontaneous yelps, she also conjures the physical release of a Soul Train line, transported by syncopation. And when she belts, “Why don’t you please yourself? If it feels so good then don’t you, baby! Don’t you stop!” she revels in the sensual prerogative of adult womanhood, of spiritual excess, staking out her own joyful territory. (She also suggests, over the driving piano of “Free Yourself,” that rapture doesn’t necessarily require a partner.) Her confidence fizzes and levitates with an assuredness that feels deserved but hard-won. “I’ve always relied on people that believe in me because maybe I haven’t believed in myself enough,” she told Pitchfork of her past experiences with music industry men, “but now, actually, I do, which is really wonderful.”
Having reached the point where she can own her vast talent, she’s in a position to extend the favor. On “Beautiful People,” she drops a perfect pride anthem, channeling her existential angst—“I wake up in the morning and I ask myself, ‘What am I doing on this planet?’”—into a purple leather outfit and a cocktail party. “Mix your joy with misery,” she reasons, before deciding that “beautiful people are everywhere.” It’s a vibrant exhortation fueled by cowbell and the band’s robust horn section, mining the eternal solution to life’s indignities—the dancefloor, with friends—and a song dying for a drag queen to lip-sync it. (Whither Sasha Colby!)
Largely, though, Ware’s focus is on the corporeal, celebrating self-determination and sexual versatility with cheeky metaphor: bottles that pop, lips that are underworked, and the mother of all innuendo, pearls. (She also works in time-tested double entendres of food and humping, linking her career interests by invoking limes, strawberries, and pink champagne.) On “Pearls,” she conjures the soul arias of Chaka Khan with another paean to dancing until your insecurities are moot and your clothes are in a pile. “Freak Me Now” ups the cosmopolitan allure by introducing French touch and a distinctly computerized synth whorl to the equation. While it steps away slightly from the ’70s lane Ware has so carefully carved, it sits comfortably among the analog piano and string jaunts. The only other track outside That! Feels Good!’s classic disco-ball rubric is “Lightning,” where Rhodes, strings, and layered harmonies sit next to a pitch-shifted vocal flourish and a boom-bap beat that zooms you right ahead to 2016. It’s a lovely song because Ware is an exceptional vocalist, but it takes you out of the fantasy, which any actor or drag queen can tell you is a mortal mistake.
But overall, That! Feels Good! stays focused on a mission that never feels like a chore. In its relatively brief 40-minute runtime, Ware takes her task extremely seriously, but she’s unencumbered by its immensity; actually, it seems to unleash her, as she experiments with vocal tricks—smoky, Grace Jonesian talk-singing; spirit-catching falsetto that’ll absolutely melt off your Halston—with the sure knowledge that the good-time, nighttime prima donna was always who she was meant to be.


The Montreal-based singer-songwriter and violinist’s music feels like an invitation to reflect. Each song recounts not just stumbling and uncertainty, but a sense of motivation.

KIND

On KIND, Thanya Iyer’s second album, she asks listeners to question who, exactly, is nurtured by our current cultural notion of togetherness and who is left out. The Montreal-based singer-songwriter and violinist has spent the past few years exploring the intersection of baroque pop and improvisational jazz, and her music often feels like an invitation to a discussion, specifically one that calls for honest reflection and careful analysis. With KIND, Iyer transforms her songs from individual sentiments into a fluid conversation, utilizing her voice as a guide to face the unknown.
Alternating her violin parts between spritely pizzicato and languorous fermatas, Iyer stacks harmonies to create the sensation of flurrying sounds. She and her bandmates—bassist Alex Kasirer-Smibert and drummer Daniel Gélinas—are periodically joined by brass players, flautists, harpists, and a choir, who float in and out of focus. The combination turns KIND into a lucid daydream that’s constantly melting at its edges. Above it all is Iyer, crooning just above a whisper with a powerful voice that sometimes recalls a blend of My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova and Kadhja Bonet.
At a glance, song titles like “I Forgot to Drink Water (Balance)” and “Bring Back That Which Is Kind to You” suggest the kind of self-care advice found on pastel-hued influencer blogs. But while Iyer’s overall message is optimistic and simplistic, her intentionally open-ended lyrics allow her to chronicle a journey that grapples with racism, disability, grief, self-love, and depression, among other subjects, through the richness of the music itself. After opening with an invocation of rebirth post-loss, KIND shifts into a more determined mindset. Its narrator is faced with a choice between creating change immediately, or waiting for someone else to do so later. They opt for self-made change, of course. It isn’t immediate or pretty, and each song recounts stumbling and uncertainty, yet Iyer sows it with motivation: “Looks up to the light will find me lost in layers/Light will guide me.”
In the early 2010s, the definition of baroque pop took on a new meaning. Black and Brown artists began to elevate the genre as an experimental art form, with musicians like Moses Sumney and Sudan Archives pushing the boundaries of orchestral folk and classical instrumentation. Iyer does the same, and her ear for texture and landscape is consistently noteworthy. In “Always, Be Together,” she dots verses with raindrop-like synth notes and cut-off piano runs that make an otherwise straightforward looped rhythm feel like the portal to an alternate earth. Moments like these weave throughout KIND, without wasting space or adding flair for its own sake. This may only be her second album, but Iyer’s patience, thoughtfulness, and commitment to communal growth stands out.

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A true child of SoundCloud, the small-town Florida rapper trades some of his storytelling skills for enhanced fidelity on this Kanye West–assisted project.

We All Shine

With a trill, the 19-year-old warble rapper YNW Melly can make a death knell sound like a lullaby or inflate a petty breakup into an epic tragedy. At the age of 16, Melly, from an unincorporated spot along Florida’s eastern shore, started uploading his pastel trap songs to SoundCloud, becoming a small-town sensation before spending a year in jail for firing a gun near a high school. Behind bars, he started to take rap more seriously, writing his best song, “Murder on My Mind,” a stunning prison log that morphs during its second act into an intimate exchange. Melly’s power comes from converting solemnity into enthusiasm, making sweet things of sour situations.
Melly exists a world away from the rap of Southern Florida, specifically the lo-fi, bass-boosted behemoths of Broward County. His music is less actively aggressive in sound, if not content. Sometimes his ghoulish melisma resembles Trippie Redd’s, while some of his flows and melodies feel indebted to Lil Uzi Vert. He’ll dip in and out of melodic phrases like Young Thug. A true child of SoundCloud, he is most interested in hitting the right note. Last year, on his debut mixtape, I Am You, he turned casual terrors into buoyant songs. He interpolated Chris Brown’s “Say Goodbye” for a tune called “Slang That Iron” and sometimes veered from home invasions to amorous gestures. There is a tenderness to his singing that even lends a fragility—a beauty—to his threats of violence.
We All Shine sounds more polished than I Am You, slightly more braced. There is an enhanced fidelity, giving his voice more shape and tracing his runs with more precision. At points, he sounds like he could open for the B2K reunion tour. He sings about hundred-round drums and twerkers, on songs like “Rolling Loud,” with the same passion that R&B heartthrobs use to profess their love to their sweethearts.
But while he was smoothing his tunes, his writing lost some bite. None of the songs here match the heights of their predecessors: the vivid imagery in “Murder on My Mind,” the sobering introspection of “Mama Cry,” or the rousing salvos of “Virtual (Blue Balenciagas).” His collaboration with Kanye West, “Mixed Personalities,” should be a banner moment for an unsigned artist like Melly; their duet characterizes lovers as bipolar for simply ignoring their calls, and it is almost painfully unremarkable. (Kanye, who announced that he was bipolar by scrawling it on the Ye cover and called the disorder his “superpower,” is dismissive of it here.) He’ll occasionally wander backward into a clever idea (“I just found out a new ingredient to death/I’ma give it all till it ain’t nothin’ left”), and he’s capable of dressing up some pretty bugged-out images. The most interesting thing he does here is write a diss track for his bank.
We All Shine is a regression in his development as a storyteller. “No Holidays” takes his most poignant jail revelations from “Murder on My Mind” and flattens them out until he’s rapping about jacking off in his cell, lining up for lunch, and wearing Gildan T-shirts. His observations from the inside come across as mundane. To be fair, jail by its very nature is mundane, but his potential hinges on his ability to bring a touch of the extraordinary to ordinary circumstances, to sing black and white into color. Previous prison dispatches imagined all Melly was missing on the outside, but this tape lacks that outward-looking, illustrative quality.
Melly was originally pegged as a serenader, though reports of his balladry have been somewhat exaggerated. He hasn’t penned anything quite like “Trap Queen” or “I Be U,” and the closest he gets to romance is offering to “lend” a city girl his love. But there is a warmth to his best music that feels sentimental, and it is there that We All Shine is transporting. The infectious “Curtains (Burtains)” reimagines Young Nudy flows with more robust croons. “Control Me” has the same 1990s R&B bounce as some of the most catchy Kamaiyah songs, with choice words of post-millennial intimacy: “I would never look on your post or your messages,” he sings, as if reciting wedding vows. When YNW Melly is on, it seems like he can make any banal string of words pop. Listening closely to We All Shine, however, proves just how much his writing must be the glue that holds it all together.