Death Cab's second album for Atlantic and sixth proper LP overall is one of the darkest and most muscular in the band's discography, as they move from the undergraduate longing of their earlier work and the looming mortality of Plans to a more generalized existential angst.

Narrow Stairs

Love isn't watching someone die, contrary to what Ben Gibbard memorably sang on Death Cab for Cutie's major-label debut. No, love is watching someone grow and change and still staying with them-- whether we're talking about family, friends, romantic interests, or a little college-town indie rock band from about an hour-and-a-half outside Seattle. Death is just the dénouement. In the three years since their platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated Plans, Gibbard and Death Cab producer/guitarist Chris Walla have both entered their thirties, coming off a wave of successes that included 2003's Transatlanticism going gold and the debut by Gibbard side project the Postal Service becoming Sub Pop's best-selling disc since Nirvana. That's a whole lotta love.
Narrow Stairs, Death Cab's second album for Atlantic and sixth proper LP overall, is one of the darkest and most muscular in the band's discography, but they're still aiming for the same place: your heart. It's an album about growing and changing and becoming resigned to the fact that you'll never be truly content-- not even if you quit that day job, achieve your rock'n'roll dreams, and find yourself in a loving marriage. At times, the maturation feels forced; the more adventurous moments here are experimental only for such a high-profile group, and they don't play to Gibbard's sentimental, word-weighing strengths. Still, even the disappointingly sleepy Plans had ear-catching singles, and when Death Cab go with their pop instincts on Narrow Stairs, they bang out songs focused and evocative enough to win over maybe a few of this loved-and-hated group's longtime skeptics.
There are some vast expanses to navigate first, both production-wise and lyrically. Where Transatlanticism spanned an ocean, and Plans opened astride "the East River and Hudson," Narrow Stairs starts along the California coast, where Gibbard retreated to write the album. "I descended a dusty gravel ridge," his bookish tenor begins, in clear but vivid language, on "Bixby Canyon Bridge". Gibbard has said the song is about trying to commune with Jack Kerouac, who stayed in the same cabin to write Big Sur. From an initial echoey guitar trill, the track grows to pounding, distorted bombast somewhere between OK Computer and the new Coldplay single.
Speaking of singles, Narrow Stairs' first is the eight-and-a-half minute "I Will Possess Your Heart", a decision that's likely to be more successful as brand repositioning than it is as rock music. Death Cab get uncompromising-artist points for the four-minute intro that builds up with vamping bass, sprinkles of keyboard, and atmospheric guitar, but it's hardly essential to the standard-length pop song that follows, about how a well-intentioned man can turn into a de facto creepy stalker. "You gotta spend some time, love," Gibbard sings, as if by explanation for the song's length.
On Narrow Stairs, Death Cab move from the undergraduate longing of their earlier work and the looming mortality of Plans to a more generalized existential angst. But they're most successful when they don't switch up their style to match; the sound of settling, as Transatlanticism maintained, is a peppy "ba ba," not the krautrock pulse of this album's synth-touched remainder metaphor, "Long Division". Elsewhere, the tabla on "Pity and Fear" sounds out of place, not far-out; as Indian-instrumented songs about an apparent adulterous one-night stand go, this one's no "Norwegian Wood".
"No Sunlight" cuts through the murk like a beam of, well, sunlight-- musically, at least. Bright keyboards and guitars sweeten Gibbard's pessimistic lyrics, which contrast childhood bliss with the emptiness of adulthood. The best song on the album, "Cath...", matches the knotty, Built to Spill-style riffs of Death Cab's early records with a plainspoken (and gut-wrenching) account of a bride who dooms herself to misery by marrying the wrong man. Where fools rush in, Gibbard refuses to rush to judgment: "I'd have done the same as you," he concludes.
What Death Cab have to fear most is not their urge to dabble in different genres, but the risk of sounding like a more cloying version of their younger selves. On "You Can Do Better Than Me", which waltzes its 1960s-pop organs way past the line that Ben Folds' "The Luckiest" toed like a ballerina, Gibbard's nice-guy earnestness becomes too much even for a listener who relates to nice-guy earnestness. It's easy to tell where the heavy-handed "Your New Twin Sized Bed" and "The Ice Is Getting Thinner" are headed as soon as you hear their first lines, and thin ice is a pretty thin cliché for such a lyric-focused group. "Grapevine Fires" does better, adding funereal harmonies and recalling debut LP Something About Airplanes with a line about "wine and some paper cups."
Surely Death Cab's awkward position as one of the few indie rock groups with a platinum record would be enough to drive anyone to drink. Fellow million-sellers Modest Mouse brought on Johnny Marr for their latest major-label LP; the Decemberists, who also signed to a major but didn't go platinum, have yet to release their follow-up. Narrow Stairs' musical growing pains make sense for an album that stares into the banal void of contemporary adulthood. If you love the band, you'll probably find enough reasons here to keep sticking with them.


Inside producer Jack Hamill’s sci-fi odysseys, Detroit futurism meets ’80s disco in the neon glow of the chillout room.

Space Dimension Controller: Love Beyond the Intersect

Love Beyond the Intersect

Jack Hamill has spent the past decade building out his Space Dimension Controller project as though it were a Hollywood blockbuster franchise. The music, a mixture of Detroit-inspired techno, electro-funk, and atmospheric electronica, conveys a cinematic sensibility that’s reflected in his titles (earlier albums The Pathway to Tiraquon6 and Welcome to Mikrosector-50 were both bookended by tracks called “Feature Presentation” and “Closing Titles”) and even his character development. Mr. 8040, the Belfast producer’s alter ego, is a recurring figure: a space-journeying, time-traveling narrator with the unfortunate tendency to slip into the 20th century’s most hackneyed rap cadences. (Consider this, from Welcome to Mikrosector-50: “I’m the Space Dimension Controller/And time travel is my thing/So I brought you all to the future/To show you all about the funk I bring.”)
It can sometimes be hard to say whether Space Dimension Controller is a musical alias or a kind of cosplay. It’s not that his productions are derivative; at his best, Hamill has spun his influences into a rich, captivating blend whose signature would be unmistakable even without all the hokey sci-fi world-building. But his determination to stick to the bit can wear thin. The vocals and spoken-word interludes are often at cross-purposes with the genuinely immersive qualities of the music. And at times, Hamill’s determination to emulate the sound of black American electro-funk verges uncomfortably on pastiche.
Love Beyond the Intersect, Hamill’s first full-length in six years, continues in the vein of its predecessors. The ambient swirl of buzzing synth drones, radio static, and spaceship noises that opens the album is so evocative of the movie theater that you can practically taste the imitation butter flavor on your tongue. True to Hamill’s penchant for concept albums, the record comes couched in a space-travel narrative that doubles as an allegory of losing and rediscovering one’s way. (Hamill has spoken in interviews and on Twitter about getting sober and finding new love, both of which are hinted at in the text accompanying the album.)
Fortunately, the music doesn’t belabor the tacked-on narrative. As usual, Hamill splits his vocals between gravelly rapping and gossamer vocoded refrains, but both are downplayed here. Worked more deeply into the mix than on previous records, they’re largely indistinguishable from his synthesizers, and the lyrics mostly set aside elaborate fantasy elements in favor of couplets about self-knowledge and romantic love. If they’re still giving out Nobel Prizes for literature in the 81th century, Mr. 8040 won’t taking one home.
Musically, these are Hamill’s most confident productions yet, displaying a masterfully evocative blend of textures: spongy bass synths, graphite-slicked analog drum machines, pads as rosy as the blush on a replicant’s cheeks. The fundamentals of his music haven’t changed much in the past 10 years, but his fusion of influences like Cybotron, Egyptian Lover, Model 500, and Metro Area feels more holistic than ever. They’ve all pooled into a sound you might call ambient techno-boogie, in which Detroit futurism meets ’80s disco in the neon glow of the chillout room.
The problem is that Hamill’s fusion has become perhaps too holistic, because most of these songs follow exactly the same template. Again and again, he uses the same rubbery basslines and pitch-bent funk leads, the same gaseous pads, the same hissing Roland hi-hats. Sometimes, it sounds like he’s repeating old glories: “Slowtime in Reflection” is remarkably similar to the 2010 track “BBD Alignment,” just updated with more vivid production. And some songs on Love Beyond the Intersect are almost indistinguishable. “PVLN” and “Voices Lost to Empty Space,” which follows it, share the same key and tempo. Rather than complementary parts of a suite, they feel like alternate takes that Hamill couldn’t decide between. (For what it’s worth, the latter, an instrumental, is the clear winner.) This kind of consistency carries across the whole album. If you’re in the mood for it, the experience can be pleasantly immersive, like a blissfully inconsequential afternoon at the multiplex. But the world is already awash in sequels. Hamill is clearly talented; it would be nice to hear him visit some new worlds.

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


Latest from the accomplished producer discards the sleek, gleaming microsound detail of Jelinek's earlier work for oddly cut loops of creaky old instruments like guitar and organ.

Tierbeobachtungen

There's a tendency with Jan Jelinek to lean on record titles and release notes for clues about the content of his music. As his latest is called Tierbeobachtungen, German for "animal observations," some have been hearing an "animal like" quality in these tracks. And as he's said that he recorded these tracks in various locations while between studios, others are hearing something restless and displaced.
It's an understandable tendency with projects as abstract and focused on pure sound as Jelinek's, to search for a concept around which to orient the music. And perhaps there's something to these ideas. But I'm hearing a record that continues very much in the vein of last year's Kosmischer Pitch, Jelinek's subtle (almost subliminal) homage to Krautrock, with a couple of noticeable differences.
Like his last record, Tierbeobachtungen discards the sleek, gleaming microsound detail of Jelinek's earlier work for oddly cut loops of creaky old instruments like guitar and organ. Whatever the sound sources-- whether the instruments were recorded live or sampled-- the grainy distortion of the recording is highlighted and the almost imperceptible air of the room is preserved. This is warm, loose, fuzzy music; in its unfussiness it's almost the exact opposite of the perfectionism Jelinek exhibited when he first came on the scene.
But where Kosmischer Pitch still made judicious use of beats, *Tierbeobachtungen * drifts untethered, the rhythms created only by the overlapping loops that are, for the moment, his sole mode of composition. Though Jelinek is still presumably working with software, his music presently bears a sharp resemblance to that of turntable artist Philip Jeck, minus the disembodied voices the latter usually cycles into his loops. Both the duration and quality of Jelinek's base segments have the sense of skipping vinyl. Most tracks consist of a half-dozen or so fragments ranging from a couple seconds to almost 10, which are set in motion, played off of each other, and tweaked in the mix.
The effect is both static and oddly propulsive, with swells of sound shoving the tracks toward something even as everything seems to be simultaneously spinning in place. The tension between movement and stasis is the most enticing thing about Tierbeobachtungen, creating a sort of woozy, disorienting headspace that winds up being psychedelic and more than a little heavy, despite the absence of extreme dynamic range or noise. The music is hypnotic and meditative but also quietly unsettling and sometimes even a little creepy.
At this point Jelinek's preference for widely variable "head" music-- even in his dance work, people talked more about texture than swing-- may well be his defining characteristic. He's not interested in drama, narrative arc, specific emotional states, or music scenes; Jelinek, more than just about anyone going, is exploring sound as an end in itself, the way a painter might explore the line or a filmmaker, light. Farben, his house alias, is the German word for "colors," after all. That he chose this specific word strikes me as the truest use of language on any of his albums to date.


The Australian duo Kllo is consistent in its commitment to moodily lit, immaculately appointed spaces—to stylish understatement at all costs.

Well Worn

The good news: “Bolide” is easily the best new SBTRKT song since “Right Thing to Do,” and “Walls to Build” is right behind “Bolide.” Both pair slinky UK garage rhythms with flickering keyboard stabs and midsection-caressing bass; singer Chloe Kaul’s voice curls like a wisp of colored smoke, and in “Bolide,” her singing has been sampled and applied like brushstrokes in wide, wet streaks. Both tunes artfully contain their contradictions: bittersweet but invigorating, soft and enveloping but also prickly—half fur coat, half porcupine.
Neither of these songs, however, has anything to do with SBTRKT. They’re the work of Kllo, an Australian duo—cousins, in fact— who make tidy fusions of bass music and R&B. They released their debut EP in 2014, and despite having a name that’s hard to wrap tired eyes around at first—that’s “Kllo,” not “Kilo”—they quickly found themselves feted by Radio 1, Spotify, Hypemachine, and Australia’s Triple J radio. They arrived with their aesthetic fully formed: Their debut EP, Cusp, features the same rippling syncopations and deep blue keys as Well Worn, the same breathy yearning and yawning emptiness. They are nothing if not consistent in their commitment to moodily lit, immaculately appointed spaces—to stylish understatement at all costs. The same could be said of the EP’s three remaining songs, which trade 2-step’s skippy energy for dusky boom-bap grooves, eking ethereal R&B out of muted drum hits and limpid piano, all overlaid with Kaul’s smoky tremolo.
Now, the bad news: As wonderfully executed as it is, their new EP also feels a little bit like old news—maybe even doubly so. Back at the dawn of the decade, part of what made acts like SBTRKT and Disclosure so surprising was the way they stoked nostalgia for late-’90s UK garage among a generation too young to have experienced it the first time (and, in the case of many American listeners, who may not have had any idea who MJ Cole and Artful Dodger were in the first place). The garage revival, which unleashed a flood of 130-BPM grooves, syncopated chord stabs, and kindling-dry rimshots, even led to something called “future garage,” a mostly-meaningless term that denoted garage-inspired electronic music with a richer, more vividly 21st-century palette. Part of what makes Kllo interesting—part of the itch they scratch, given that neither SBTRKT nor Disclosure has subsequently managed anything as good as their early releases—concerns, essentially, a kind of double nostalgia, for both first-wave UK garage and its brief revival just a half-decade ago. “On My Name,” another of the EP’s cuts, features actual wobble bass, a sound that American dubstep chased out of vogue not long after Skrillex swept the 2012 Grammys. Perhaps we’ve entered the era of future-past garage?
It doesn’t help that Kllo’s lyrics feel like they've been cut-and-pasted from the final iteration of a long Google translate chain, rendering vaguely metaphorical statements merely doggerel. On “Walls to Build,” they take a perfectly catchy hook (“Forward/ Forward, it’s all here/ Forward”) and undercut it with supporting verses that simply don't make any sense, and aren’t vivid enough to skate by as “impressionistic.” In “Bolide,” a song named for a type of meteor, a chain of assonant rhymes (“Hold tight, hold tight/I’m noticing the mine, I’m noticing the mine/Bolide, bolide/So close to leave the mine, so close to leave the mine”) serves mainly to distract us from the fact that the lyrics simply don’t scan. It’s as though they were so intent upon maintaining their restraint, they forgot that they were singing about flaming chunks of rock and ice streaking brilliantly across the night sky.
None of this is to detract from Kllo’s evident skill as stylists, though; it’s true that Kaul sometimes leans a little too hard on jazz-singer mannerisms, but she never oversells it, and in any case, her husky voice is so warmly agreeable, she could make Yellow Pages entries sound seductive, while producer Simon Lam has an uncommon grasp of dimmer-switch dynamics. If Kllo can come up with ways to make this sound more their own—and carve out sharper, less muddled sentiments in the process—they’ll be a formidable force.


On his latest solo album, the Irish folk singer sets sail on a journey of the heart, full of sad break-up songs and meandering musings.

Between Two Shores

“It was a total vagary, an odyssey, an epic adventure... but thank God we had our instruments with us,” Glen Hansard recalled to the Irish Times in 2016. He was talking about his month-long participation as an oarsman on the final leg of the “Camino by Sea,” a three-summer voyage from Ireland to northern Spain that concluded that year. The mornings he spent rowing across stretches of the cold, blue sea cemented Hansard’s fondness for sailing, and that in turn helped inspire his latest album, Between Two Shores. The title, he’s explained, refers to that moment when a sailor finds himself halfway between departure and arrival, without a shoreline in sight. It’s a fitting title for an album that’s thematically adrift.
The product of a few weeks spent in France’s Black Box Studios with producer David Odlum, a former member of Hansard’s band the Frames, Between Two Shores was cobbled together out of songs left over from past sessions and home demos. This helps explain the album’s lack of focus. What’s missing is a singular idea for a listener to rest her headphones on. Instead, we get a hodgepodge of sentimental tunes that aren’t quite parallel, perpendicular, or adjacent to each other. Even its best songs, like “Time Will Be the Healer,” sound as though they were plucked from disparate moments of Hansard’s life and washed of their specifics so they could coexist on an album that’s described as “spontaneous” in its press release.
Some songs, like “Wheels on Fire,” give off a call-to-arms attitude (“You can turn and twist but we will overcome”), while many others (“Why Woman,” “Setting Forth”) sink sorrowfully into the predictable melodies and unimaginative words of the underachieving breakup song. “I’m letting go of us completely/I’m getting out,” Hansard offers on “Setting Forth.” The pallid lyrics do little to distinguish themselves from the lyrics of the similarly-titled “Movin’ On,” which puts a minor twist on the same sentiment: ”I’m tired of sitting around and waiting/I’m moving on.”
There’s no sign here of the vividness that defined Hansard’s previous solo effort, 2015’s Grammy-nominated Didn’t He Ramble. Punch-packing phrases like ”Everybody’s looking at you/But I can’t stand to watch,” from that album’s “My Little Ruin,” have no equal on Between Two Shores. Instead, we get half-drawn characters and ruminations on love that lack courage and complexity. Hansard references his “woman,” “my darlin’,” and his “baby” often, but fails to give her dimension. His banal observation of a lover who keeps letting him down on “Your Heart’s Not in It” does little to inspire sympathy for the position she’s put him in. To effectively tell a story about a love gone sour, the narrator must tell complicated truths. Hansard’s contemporary Josh Ritter did this well on 2013’s The Beast in Its Tracks, a divorce album that’s as devastating as it is hopeful. On that album’s “New Lover,” Ritter contemplated his role in the breakup, admitting “I feel like a miser, I feel low and mean/For accusing you of stealin’/What I offered you for free.” Between Two Shores would have benefitted from a similar sense of self-reflection.
The album’s strengths reveal themselves in the production. This is Hansard’s first solo spin in the producer’s chair, and he proves himself capable and even visionary, mixing strings and saxophones to create an orchestral effect or making room for an acoustic track that washes the listener’s ears in strums and thrums. On “Roll On Slow,” deftly deployed, Dap Kings-styled horns escalate and recede across a bed of percussion until they reach their climactic moment in the song’s final gasp. And what “Setting Forth” lacks in lyrical value, it makes up for in instrumentation. Recorded in a single take at New York City’s Avatar Studios, the song maintains its motion with a stable of instruments led by the piano’s tender melody—that is, until Hansard breaks into a warbling coo reminiscent of Springsteen on “I’m on Fire,” taking back the listener’s attention with his stunning falsetto.
Hansard’s emotive delivery is well-known for its arresting effect. Ever since his early days with the Frames, his vocal performances have been turning heads. He’s capable of pulling notes from the bottom of his belly and belting them out until even the most cynical among us get goosebumps. Hansard’s most famous song, “Falling Slowly,” showcased this talent in overdrive, eventually leading to an Academy Award for him and co-writer/duet partner Markéta Irglová after it was featured in 2007’s Once. Ten years later, and Hansard’s haggard vocals are still doing most of the heavy lifting. They often bring much-needed weight to Between Two Shores’ thin ideas. But there’s only so much a single voice can do to keep a sinking album afloat.


DJ Khaled has ranged from summertime hitmaker to self-help guru, and neither are all that interesting on his latest guest-filled album. There are plenty of voices but no clear message or intention.

Father of Asahd

The creep of positivity culture has been steady and relentless. It has become a dominant modality of Instagram influence and global culture ever since the publication of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and among its most ardent benefactors (and beneficiaries) is DJ Khaled. For years, he has blended be-your-best-self mantras with middling music to great fame and, presumably, growing wealth; he even published a book detailing his “keys to success.” In the Snapchat era, Khaled’s vague, emphatic preaching made him an intriguing public figure beyond music. But unfortunately, as in the arena of emotional development, shouting aphorisms does little to prompt significant artistic growth.
Khaled’s new album, Father of Asahd, continues in his tradition of envisioning every song as a posse cut. The project’s 15 tracks feature 29 different performers plus his own signature bellowing. (The absence of Drake, a reliable hitmaker and longtime collaborator, is palpable.) The result is pure chaos. Since assembling Akon, T.I., Rick Ross, Fat Joe, Birdman, and Lil Wayne for “We Takin’ Over” in 2007, Khaled has proven himself adept at project-managing rap and R&B’s biggest stars into contributing verses for transparent plays at song-of-the-summer singles. Along the way, the strategy has produced actual anthems, hit songs with a backseat full of guests that will likely activate nostalgia even when they sound thin and tinny in retrospect.
The formula’s limitations are evident on Father of Asahd: There are plenty of voices but no clear message or intention. The world seems colder than it did in 2015, and Khaled’s platitudes no longer function as an effective anchor. Vaguely uplifting songs (“Won’t Take My Soul” and “Weather the Storm”) mingle with generic theses on envy and loyalty (“Jealous” and “You Stay”). Specificity, I’ve learned, is another victim of positivity vulture. It’s hardly a flex to gather dancehall’s biggest names—Mavado, Sizzla, and Buju Banton, newly released from prison—for a motivational opener, only to throw in strained vocals by New Jersey singer 070 Shake.
But something is bound to stick. There are a handful of introspective verses from Meek Mill and Lil Baby; it’s a shame they are not alchemized into effective songs. Cardi B and 21 Savage rapping over a Tay Keith beat on “Wish, Wish” is refreshing and poised for radio play. The clear standout is “Higher,” featuring John Legend and the late Nipsey Hussle. Especially in the context of his death last month, Hussle’s two verses are an eerily on-time reflection on his own life, beginning with his family history and ending with this urgent prophecy: “Homicide, hate, gang banging’ll get you all day/Look at my fate.” It offers a rare moment of depth and vulnerability on an album largely marked by inanity.
In recent years, ostensibly as Khaled has increased his budgets and access to the major-label clearance apparatus, his more-is-more approach has expanded to include a reliance on recognizable samples and interpolations; “Wild Thoughts,” featuring Rihanna, Bryson Tiller, and a prominent sample of Santana’s “Maria, Maria,” reached No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard charts in 2017. This time around, samples include OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson,” which is remade into “Just Us,” a cloying pop song featuring SZA; “Freak N You,” featuring Lil Wayne and Gunna, is built around sped-up Jodeci vocals; the Buju Banton closer “Holy Ground” borrows a riff from Lauryn Hill’s “To Zion.” It strikes as a cynical play at nostalgia. Whereas his peers are trying new strategies to best the streaming wars, Khaled, a firm Gen Xer, appears to remain focused on traditional radio. His challenge to the hegemonic structures of radio and music industry marketing, he recently told Jimmy Fallon, is to force multiple current singles into rotation.
Here and elsewhere, Khaled owes a great debt to Diddy, another guru of positivity and the progenitor of Khaled’s style of not-quite-producer, not-quite-curator auteurship. The blueprint for much of Khaled’s discography was established by Diddy way back when he was known as Puff. In 1997, he released No Way Out, a Bad Boy compilation that repurposed songs by the Police, Grandmaster Flash & the Message, and India to various degrees of effectiveness. One of those tracks, “Senorita,” is literally referenced on Father of Asahd’s “You Stay,” in the form of a similar use of India’s “No Me Conviene.” More than 20 years later, it’s time to try something new.


On his new album, the Portland rapper rediscovers the appealing lightness that made him famous.

Limbo

In 2017, Aminé had a moment: his debut album, Good For You, introduced him as a happy-go-lucky rascal, and the lead single, “Caroline,” went multi-platinum. The project he released the year after, ONEPOINTFIVE, squandered some of that good will, catering to trendy trap and straying from the outsider charms that initially made his music so interesting. On his new album, Limbo, he’s more pragmatic, suddenly concerned with crafting a sustainable legacy, and this new attitude produces the best music of his career.
Aminé’s shift was inspired at least in part, by the death of NBA icon Kobe Bryant. (“That was like seeing Superman die,” he said.) On “Kobe,” Aminé’s friend, comedian Jak Knight, speaks of Bryant as a benchmark, his death a symbolic end of innocence. To Aminé, the tragedy represented an unofficial start to his real manhood. The shock seems to have loosened something in him. The verses on Limbo are much more relaxed, the hooks are catchier, and his outsized personality radiates. He mixes subtle bouts of introspection with kooky references to Jim Carrey’s The Mask, Allen Iverson’s infamous “practice” speech, and the guy in the AllState commercials.
It would be an overstatement to call the album mature, but it does seem to exist in a transitional state between carefree youth (as embodied by Good For You songs like “Sundays” and “Yellow”) and real adulthood. On the opener, he raps, “Beat so cold it made Aminé want to open up,” and the album is reflective of that accessibility; he sounds uninhibited. Limbo isn’t exactly The Big Day, but he places more importance on being responsible and dependable, pondering what it means to be a better son and a potential father. “To my future daughter or son/The streams from this album gon’ pay for your college funds,” he raps on “Fetus.” He’s also eager to reposition himself. On “Shimmy,” which puts a reanimating spin on an ODB classic, he’s on the comeback trail, getting his groove back “like Fela, not Stella” and shaming fake flexers.
OnePointFive was mired by lackluster rapping, but the studio time wasn’t wasted by Aminé’s producer Pasque, who took the opportunity to experiment with off-center trap beats. Armed with those lessons, his work on Limbo feels like a progression, and additional production from Injury Reserve architect Parker Corey makes this Aminé’s best-produced album. He has always been a child of Drake, as a tune-happy flirt from an unlikely rap market, but on Limbo he leans into the comparison. He acquires moody beats from Drake producers Boi-1da, T-Minus, and Vinylz, and “Can’t Decide” and “Riri” are exactly the kind of rap-sung hybrids that the Toronto rapper built his empire on. It seems apparent that Aminé is thinking with that career trajectory in mind.
Aminé is more conscious of the big picture on Limbo, but there are still a few glimpses of the nonchalant scamp he used to be, and some of the most enjoyable songs on Limbo are least invested in assessing his standing. On “Compensating,” he pals around with Young Thug and comes up with his snappiest melodies. He embellishes his punches on “Pressure in My Palms” with slowthai and Vince Staples sharing a verse and matching his energy. In the first verse alone, he references an Arthur meme, Steve Harvey’s Miss Universe gaffe, Fergie peeing her pants on stage, Winona Ryder shoplifting, and the Malice at the Palace, relishing the absurdity of each one. These songs aren’t just high-spirited, slightly goofy, and unassumingly clever; they have a lightness that is invigorating. They feel like proof that the fun-loving kid who went viral in 2016 hasn’t yet been entirely overwhelmed by the burdens of reputation.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Recorded by Chad VanGaalen in his basement, this Calgary band's pleasantly varied and concise debut, versed in the use of tape hiss as both a stylistic aid and compositional element, is soaked in the stocky blasts of melody of Deerhunter or Times New Viking.

Women

There is an irony to Women's moniker-- the most un-Google-able name in rock since the Music-- that extends beyond the fact that the band is actually four dudes: Like many of their peers and forbears in the worlds of lo-fi psych-rock and industrial post-punk, Women make boys' club music, treehouse rock. Their debut deftly uses tape hiss as both a stylistic aid and compositional element, resulting in stocky blasts of melody. But where peers Deerhunter veer into amorphous song-globs and Times New Viking threaten to come unglued at any moment, Women has the cool, hard weight of something created under duress. You're reminded of how This Heat recorded their songs in a meat factory; Women’s cover-- a creepily synchronized group tai chi exercise-- recalls the sleeves for Reagan-era punk, released at a time when everything seemed vaguely politicized.
Women was recorded by Sub Pop artist Chad VanGaalen in his basement, at least partially on boom boxes. The jangly whoosh of opener "Cameras" seems like a direct product of those bohemian environs: Quivering voices are propped up by picks scraping against strings, even when an exacted synth squiggle-- the first of several compositional left-turns-- betrays the rugged surroundings. "Cameras" lasts a mere 60 seconds and segues seamlessly into the steel-wool industrial sounds of "Lawncare", and from there, Women is deceptively easy and oddly energizing. Standout "Black Rice"'s guitars rapidly approach and fall off little cliffs. "Group Transport Hall" is paisley-wallpapered psych, its hasty acoustic march a textural curveball. It's on tracks like these that singer Patrick Flegel's voice-- a sour monotone throughout much of the album-- gains unexpected contour, admirably navigating "Black Rice"'s sighing chorus.
Elsewhere, Women draws from a deceptive range of styles: "Upstairs" sounds like a mathematical composite of the breezier half of Chairs Missing. Instrumental "Sag Harbor Bridge" is almost John Fahey-esque in the way that its distorted, weaving fretboard runs conjure its namesake. On "Woodbine", another instrumental, a long drone sits impatiently as tittering electronics accumulate at its edges.
By Women's end, the band's guitars have rusted: "January 8th" is fevered paranoia, its guitars angrily panning between speakers. "Flashlights" slows the pace momentarily before ramping up to a Sonic Youth-style jamboree. It's a brash, youthful ending for a band that spent most of the album avoiding such bludgeoning. Also strange is "Shaking Hand", jittery, Dischord-style precision-rock; at just under five minutes, it's the longest track on the album. Women do spend a tad too much time flexing their way through their instrumentals-- a shame since, when they bother with songcraft, they rarely miss: concise, nuanced statements with idiosyncratic arrangements. Awkward, youthful moments exist, but Women tire of them almost before you do. What's left are the best of post-punk ingredients: curiosity, noise, and sly artifice.


Solo debut from the Strokes guitarist finds him trying his hand at a more cosmopolitan rock sound.

Yours to Keep

Quite a few spindly young guitarists would sacrifice body parts to be the third-most-famous Stroke. I probably would, too-- not so much for the money, the girls or the chops, as to don Albert Hammond, Jr.'s upscale formalwear and Chia hair. But somehow, at least for him, it turns out there's actually more to life than clean, supporting fretwork and curl-enhancing conditioner.
With Yours to Keep, Hammond-- like legendary third-wheel George Harrison before him-- becomes the first of his group to strike off for solo glory. Fortunately, the album is more "Wonderwall" than Wonderwall Music, a set of slight, cosmopolitan babe-lair rock by a guitarist who (superfans, you can exhale now) apparently hasn't yet left his band. Still, don't let First Impressions of Earth's shredder-school frippery deter you: Hammond's rare solos, on songs like "Last Nite", "Under Control", and "Trying Your Luck", have always been concise and grammatical, and so is his debut album.
Hammond has given tunes to the Strokes before, mostly for 2001 tour video In Transit, but his prime non-instrumental contribution remains fan club-only giveaway "The Elephant Song", recorded in 1999 for a New York University class project. Yours to Keep could hardly be further from the scruffy rawk of that early demo, though the most evidently Strokes-like song here, "In Transit", does seem to repurpose its sticky riff. Instead, Hammond's solo outing is a spry if unexceptional pop charmer, less supercilious than Is This It or Room on Fire but almost as cool.
Yours to Keep affords the guitarist more stylistic freedom than the Strokes' unsmiling mien typically permits. Opener "Cartoon Music for Superheroes" is a Beach Boys lullaby with a teenage indie pop beat and syrupy sun-spangled instrumentation, while "Back to the 101" is top-down power-pop you'd expect from the New Pornographers. "Jamaica, ooh, I'm gonna take ya," Hammond jokes on balmy "Holiday", which is better than "Kokomo" but not as good as the equivalent Weezer anthem. Lead single "Everyone Gets a Star" distills most of the album's styles into a jealous new-wave piña colada with elegantly wasted vocals closest to those of his dayjob frontman.
At other times, like Air's JB Dunckel (aka Darkel) on yet another 2006 solo debut, Hammond displays a fondness for the most famous dead Beatle. Yep, the Stroke's vowels are as phlegmy as John Lennon's on the skiffle-like "Call an Ambulance", with whistling and falsetto la-la-las. More ragged plaints join horns and faux-British enunciation on languorous finale "Hard to Live (in the City)". Sean Lennon himself performs guest duties on the album, joined by Julian Casablancas, Ben Kweller, and the Mooney Suzuki's Sammy James Jr. Elsewhere, "Bright Young Thing" picks up "I Got You Babe" music-box sounds and splotchy drum machine, while foggy folk waltz "Blue Skies" is the best reminder that Albert Hammond Sr. was a singer/songwriter, too.
From the first chords of Is This It, the Strokes came into the world wearing the international rock crit kick-me sign of disgustingly spectacular privilege. Except on last year's effortful First Impressions of Earth, the Lower East Side rock flagbearers have rendered their elite upbringing appropriately irrelevant through equally disgustingly spectacular displays of fuck-you talent. On Yours to Keep, Hammond doesn't surpass his main gig's rock'n'roll peaks, but he's still exasperatingly above average. What do the rest of us gotta do?


On her rawest and most cohesive project to date, the pop singer explores themes of depression and anxiety but too often relies on familiar imagery.

Trying Not to Think About It

JoJo knows you remember her. She can’t outrun the early 2000s nostalgia that her name and music immediately triggers; she has strained to articulate her identity as an artist, separate from her past success. She was 13 when she became the youngest person to top the Billboard charts with 2004’s “Leave (Get Out),” a supremely catchy earworm that’s aged into a glittering karaoke staple; her next album, 2006’s The High Road, brought the sleek breakup track “Too Little Too Late.” Then came a nearly decade-long legal battle: She sued her former label, Blackground, and was barred from releasing new music or placing her old music on streaming services. (Taylor Swift even invited her over to offer advice on navigating the industry.)
In 2014, she finally broke free from her label contract. She dabbled in electropop on her long-awaited third album in 2016, then launched her own imprint with Warner and released a slinky R&B record in 2020, crooning alongside Tinashe and Demi Lovato, two fellow veterans of young fame. That same year, she won her first Grammy for a fleeting feature on a treacly PJ Morton song, an achievement that could have tipped her back into splashy pop and widespread radio play.
Instead, JoJo has quietly crafted what she calls a “capsule project,” an elegant EP with deliberate and defined parameters. The music on Trying Not to Think About It is meant to portray the singer’s struggles with anxiety and depression: These are soft, cozy songs, with harmonies tucked between trickling piano keys and misty synths. “I hope this feels like a warm weighted blanket,” she told MTV, and the 12-track project plays like her most cohesive release yet. She constructs and curates a delicate feeling of intimacy, instructing us to exhale at the end of “Good Enough *interlude*,” like the narrator of a meditation app. On “Anxiety (Burlinda’s Theme),” she personifies her mental illness, addressing it in the second person: “You only show up when it’s inconvenient,” she belts over a building drumbeat. “Your power is amazing!” Elsewhere, she sings about slow, quiet collapse and the feeling of being drained. “The energy that it takes to be somebody just ain’t in me,” she murmurs over finger snaps on “Fresh New Sheets,” pleading to stay curled up with her space heater.
“Fresh New Sheets” is one of many moments that strains to be relatable, but the cutesy specificity can sound retrofitted from a meme or a tweet. She croons a jazzy ode to the comforts of “sugar and carbs”; she blames Mercury in retrograde. On “Spiral SZN,” a snappy pop track with blaring bass, she brands herself as someone who just “can’t chill,” tidying up the ache she articulates elsewhere. For too much of the record, JoJo relies on familiar metaphors: storms roaring in her brain, lovers shedding their skin, sunrise waiting on the horizon. Her vulnerability is commendable—this is the rawest she has ever been in her music—but she weakens the impact when she couches her confessions in worn imagery. It’s shallow writing about an inherently deep topic.
JoJo is still at her best when she’s at her most cutting, leveling the sting at herself. “Do I love you this much/Or is this just something to do?” she sings on “Feel Alright,” as her voice stretches into a howl. She makes her frustration palpable, sounding furious at her own self-sabotage. On “Good Enough,” her layered vocals swirl as she asks, over and over, if she can live up to her perfectionist standards, if she can ever find herself acceptable.
These songs feel less insightful, however, when you slot them into the long lineage of pop-adjacent artists musing about mental health. As the stigma finally, gradually starts to ebb, a wave of artists are singing about depression and anxiety, sometimes directly and sometimes draped in irony: “All the kids are depressed,” Jeremy Zucker hums; “I’m holding hands with my depression,” Julia Michaels rasps; “I feel like giving up,” Shawn Mendes wails. JoJo’s contributions succeed when her songs feel like snapshots, documenting her internal tension. She doesn’t stun us with insight and she doesn’t describe mental illness in a new or novel way. Instead, she offers a graceful portrait of a hidden battle, with the hope that someone hearing it might feel less alone.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Singer/songwriter Gallant's weightless voice channels ’80s and ’90s R&B, channeling the feeling of those eras without taking too much from them. On Ology, he’s coming to grips with all the struggle he’s endured, assessing himself through a mix of candor and ambiguity.

Ology

Christopher Gallant’s story is fairly common: The singer/songwriter got his start recording tracks as a teenager to assuage his angst. After high school, Gallant moved from Columbia, Md., a sprawling suburb of Washington, D.C., to New York City to study music and launch his career. But Gallant’s music didn't pan out there for whatever reason, so he eventually moved to Los Angeles after he graduated, where his aerial-view R&B had greater chances to be heard. Gallant soon caught the attention of Jake Udell, a business manager who helped catapult EDM artists ZHU and Krewella to prominence.
In 2014, Gallant released an EP called Zebra, a moody affair on which the singer delved into his own anxieties and partially addressed his time in New York. The results were haunting, and you could feel the pressure Gallant was under to make a way on his own. New York’s pace is incredibly fast; Gallant’s music is made for wide-open spaces, to enter the room and spread out comfortably. There was undeniable talent on Zebra, but the singer’s vocals were somewhat recessive, his piercing falsetto hidden behind dense electronic layers.
Gallant’s voice is more pronounced on Ology, a sign that the singer is becoming more confident in his art and the personal stories he shares. His pain is still prevalent, his torment a strong inspirational source that remains for the album’s duration. There’s a sense of isolation in these songs, as if Gallant recorded them alone in the dark, with only his introspection pushing him toward something brighter. Gallant mines that despair for self-therapy; his cathartic wails echo through the stillness, arriving in sharp bursts. On "Talking to Myself," for example, Gallant unveils hurt in the smoothest way possible, masking it behind a sultry R&B groove. "I’ve been whispering to ghosts lately," he sings over a stuttering melody. "I’m begging for more time, before I’m buried deeper in the trenches of insanity."  Gallant’s lyrics are vast and ambiguous, taking tonal cues from Frank Ocean while coming to grips with his own struggles. Gallant’s words read like diary entries on paper and sound mysterious on the album, unveiling pieces of his life without giving too much away. Gallant is a self-proclaimed introvert, so as a result, it's hard to get a sense of just who he’s supposed to be. His lyrics seem weightless, wafting throughout Ology without landing anywhere.
Gallant’s voice and the delicate way he contorts it, emulating ’80s and ’90s R&B without taking too much from those eras, is easily his best attribute.  Ology recalls the great feelings of those genres, with subtle tinges of hip-hop and soul, leaving a nostalgic imprint. On "Miyazaki," over a beat seemingly flown in from the early 2000s Soulquarians/Touch of Jazz period, Gallant reinterprets a line from Groove Theory's classic "Tell Me," his version giving off the same sweet vibe as the original.  On assertive ballads like "Weight in Gold" or "Bone + Tissue," Gallant’s inflection is the clear focal point. On those tracks and others, Gallant's delivery takes precedence over what he's saying. His words come off poetically, and in its totality, Ology is a slow burn that grows more infectious as it plays. Gallant pivots adeptly between old and contemporary styles, landing on something all his own.


The debut collaboration of Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner is gorgeous and ponderous, a document of a creative process that feels a bit like watching someone get purposefully lost.

Big Red Machine

Big Red Machine want you to think of their music not as a definitive product but as an indefinite process. Maybe not in a sudden Kanye “Ima fix wolves” kind of way, but more like a document of a process. When an album is framed this way, you can perhaps experience something new outside of a consumer framework, free of the burden of marketing and metrics, and rewarding on its own pure terms. This is the punk theory offered by PEOPLE, the recently launched artist collective founded by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver fame, the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner, and entrepreneurs Tom and Nadine Michelberger. PEOPLE functions as a digital space for artists to experiment and create without ads or pitiless streaming margins. It is indie music’s small war against ethical consumption in late capitalism.
PEOPLE’s flagship release is Big Red Machine, an album that began 10 years ago when Aaron sent Vernon a slight instrumental sketch. Vernon donated his words and falsetto, and soon it became “Big Red Machine,” which appeared on the era-defining 2009 charity compilation Dark Was the Night. Almost a decade later, the two reconvened in Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin to rediscover their collaborative spirit in earnest. The floating bog of an album they created there is both gorgeous and ponderous, using the same puddingy, R&B textures found on Bon Iver’s 2016 landmark art-pop album 22, A Million and the National’s still-great Sleep Well Beast, from last year. It feels a bit like watching someone get purposefully lost just because, well, they’ve never really been lost before, have they.
And if Vernon and Dessner are really trying to make PEOPLE “as much about the process of making work and showing all that openly, as the final outcome,” then perhaps what the sprawling and often inscrutable Big Red Machine does best is—through the medium by which it is delivered and the circumstances that birthed it—interrogate what we expect from music in the streaming era. It’s hard to hold onto anything concrete, musically or lyrically, here. The album’s 10 songs are much more thematic, sensory, and impressionistic. Their compositions are all suspension and ellipses, Vernon’s lyrics are mostly Sativa-fuelled poetry overlaid with the kind of yearning that comes from years of writing songs about doomed lovers. It is in between states, a musical and economic parasomnia that feels incomplete by the standard definition of an album but fully formed by PEOPLE’s definition.
Perhaps it’s unfair to levy criticisms about its lack of destination when getting lost for 45 minutes is kind of the point. All these songs creep in from and trickle back out into the night without much of an explanation. “Gratitude” builds out from a simple low-bit drum sample and a stately Dessner guitar riff to include a chorus of live drums, omnichord, piano, and Vernon singing about a litany of images whose relation to one another seems all but undiscoverable: a big bean field, Indians in the graveyard, lovers who were quarterbacks. On the opener “Deep Green,” the Vernon Mad Libs continue: “We met up like a ski team”—whose meetup habits are historically unremarkable to my knowledge—and then, “Well we rose up outta G-League/In a Teepee gloss/Where your tea leaves, boss?” The leaps from one image to another are so large it becomes impossible to glean any emotional connection; you’re simply hanging on to Vernon’s voice for dear life.
That voice—one of the most expressive baritones in indie music—is the showpiece throughout. And unlike 22, A Million, it is mostly naked and unprocessed, which brings you that much closer to his wintery impressionism. There’s an organic, old-school Bon Iver feel to the piano-led “Hymnostic,” a last-call, 6/8 ballad that runs on a rather traditional set chord changes. It isn’t until the instrumental break that a cacophony of distorted voices and buzzing synths take over the song for a bit, giving it a more acidic, unsettling tone. It’s one of many moments on the album when the production and arrangement pull focus and expand the borders of a song. Dessner and Vernon could place a distorted guitar sound off in the distance for you to squint at, then a woman vocalizing appears behind you, until a string section is summoned quickly in the foreground. As plodding as these songs can feel, they are composed in multiple dimensions and with a wide field of vision.
I’m reminded of the National’s 2015 project A Lot of Sorrow, a six-hour experimental live show they worked on with Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (who, incidentally, also co-wrote “Hymnostic”). It was a process, too: drilling down into one song, pulling it apart in an endurance test to uncover the very essence of a band. But the work of Big Red Machine feels inessential by design. In fact, it calls into question what is essential in the modern economy of music: emotionally, politically, physically. An album intended to be distributed outside the major streaming ecosystem (though it is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal) and through a transparently collaborative process is just going to sound different and behave differently as a piece of art. Trying to meet it on its level is frustrating, but for fans of Bon Iver and the National, it will sound like a fascinating appendix to their catalogs.
In considering this idea of process outside economy, I keep coming back to a phrase Vernon sings over and over on the lovely “People Lullaby”: “Has me all borderline re-erased.” It’s a line I could burrow into for hours, in all its colloquial recursiveness, in all its dreamy inconsequence. What is this feeling that causes him to feel this way? The line doesn’t drill into the blood and body of the songwriters, it simply wonders the space and then takes its leave. It’s not the feeling of something tangible, sellable, describable, permanent—but it’s a good feeling, fleeting, and if strung together over a period of time, maybe feelings like that can give music a new kind of value.


The ferocious noise-punk quartet Greys redirects indie rock's inward gaze back out into the wider world.

Outer Heaven

For the past five Halloweens, Toronto has played host to Death to T.O., a marathon two-level party where 20-odd local bands dress up as some iconic group and cover a bunch of their songs in rotating 20-minute mini-sets. Last October, noise-punk quartet Greys performed as Smashing Pumpkins, a ruse that required not just an aesthetic suspension of belief (no dollar-store blond wig can make hulking bassist Colin Gillespie look like D'Arcy) but an ideological one as well. Essentially, the Pumpkins are Greys' polar opposites. Where Billy Corgan channels themes of alienation into unabashedly earnest, immaculately rendered grunge-prog, Greys power through theirs with bull-in-a-china-shop recklessness and snarky humor. And the messianic cult of personality and gothic flamboyance that Corgan so eagerly cultivates is antithetical to Greys' everyman, stage-leveling ethos. After all, Greys are the sort of band that write songs in honour of Fugazi's Guy Picciotto, while cheekily acknowledging that idolizing an anti-rock star like Picciotto is idolatry nonetheless ("You do what you do/ I do it, too!").
But listen to Greys' second full-length, Outer Heaven, and that Pumpkins gambit seems less like a one-off goof than a practice drill for the new album's fearless embrace of both art-rock experimentalism and pop accessibility. When they first emerged in 2011, Greys came off like a less brawny, more bratty complement to fellow Toronto-scene stalwarts Metz. Singer-guitarist Shehzaad Jiwani didn't necessarily shy away from melodic choruses and introspective lyricism, but he had to blow out his vocal cords to be heard amid the band's Jehu-schooled, post-hardcore pummel. And the feelings of inadequacy he was trying to express were filtered through cheeky song titles (see: "Use Your Delusion") and tongue-in-cheek complaints ("Wish I was born in New York, wish I was born in L.A., wish I was born in the royal family"). But with the tranquil, starlit jangle of the opening "Cruelty," Outer Heaven marks a clean, abrupt break from that past—not just by opening up greater spatial possibilities in the band's sound world, but by foregrounding a nakedly emotional tenor that permeates even the more typically ferocious tracks that follow.
Like many ’90s kids, Greys got swept up in the alt-rock revolution, before burrowing deeper underground to discover the self-sustaining network of bands and labels that laid the groundwork for it. (That evolution can be traced from the fact the aforementioned song about Picciotto swipes its opening line from the Foo Fighters: "There goes my hero!/ He lives right down the street!") Now that "indie" has become a satellite-radio format for well-heeled commuters, it's hard to remember a time when such a discovery could be so empowering that it could alter the course of one's life. But guitar-driven indie rock's deliberately modest scale and often introverted, sometimes ironic sensibility can make it ill-equipped to address the more complex socio-political conversations that dominate our thoughts today; at a time when the top pop stars of our age are tackling big issues head on, the insular nature of indie rock can seem antiquated at best and tone-deaf at worst. For those raised to believe in indie-rock's insurrectionary spirit, it's easy to feel like you were sold a false bill of goods—a music that once seemed absolutely revolutionary now reeks of complacency and privilege.
Jiwani is a unique position to reconcile this divide. He's of South Asian descent, which makes him a minority amid a scene that's predominantly white even in a city as famously multicultural as Toronto. So you could say his relationship with indie rock is complicated, and that tension comes to a head on Outer Heaven's delirious mid-album highlight, "Complaint Rock." Jiwani gamely assumes the role of a slack motherfucker ("gimme gimme my gold star/ for not trying so hard"), before summing up his chosen vocation with a two-faced cry of "I hate it!/ I want it!/ I need it! /I love it!" That conflict is as much musical as lyrical: partway through, the song's glass-smashing abandon gives way to a gentle waves of rippling, psychedelic guitars—as if Jiwani suddenly slipped into a spa isolation-tank treatment mid-song—before it's violently thrust back into attack mode for a final blitz. And that push-pull structure presents a perfect microcosm of Greys' larger mission—as easy as it is to complain about the state of indie rock and check out of the conversation, they feel compelled to stay in the game to get the job done right.
On Outer Heaven, that means redirecting indie rock's capacity for introspection and turning its gaze outward. In the past, Jiwani has expressed feelings of otherness in more generally misanthropic terms ("wish I could be somebody else and just go," he declared back on "Use Your Delusion"), but Outer Heaven's searing, slow-boiling salvo "No Star" sees him tackling matters of race in more explicit terms: "Don't shoot/ I'm not the enemy," he sings, giving voice to anxieties in the wake of last fall's Paris attacks and the subsequent bloodlusty calls for swift vengeance. And when you consider that he routinely gets the third-degree treatment from airport security, the harsh opening line of the industrialized stomper "Sorcerer"—"My body makes me sick/ I'm trapped inside my skin"—assumes an even more brutal resonance. But the songs here also touch on more universal, but often documented, situations: "Blown Out" chronicles the effects of depression on a romantic relationship, the song's thundering thrust and surging choruses mirroring the inner turmoil of someone who's "having a hard time when everything's fine."
Outer Heaven's heightened ambitions are best measured in terms of density rather than sprawl: the most bracing songs here pack in more radiant guitar textures, a greater lyrical depth, and sharper hooks without sacrificing Greys' innate moshability and punk-schooled economy. Ironically, the more self-consciously outré material feels staid by comparison: the sudden grindcore shocks of "Strange World" can't quite force the song to shake off its dirgey gait, and though the drum machine-ticked "My Life As a Cloud" taps into the spectral beauty of Halcyon Digest-era Deerhunter, its trickling guitar outro closes this highly charged album on an oddly resigned note. But even if Greys are still learning how to stretch out with purpose, Outer Heaven serves as a most welcome reminder of indie rock's iconoclastic potential, from a band committed to the belief that it could be your life.


This welcome reissue of the Clientele's first full-length restores it to its UK tracklisting and artwork and puts it back in print on vinyl for the first time in years. The original album has lost none of its evocative indie pop brilliance, and the bonus disc fleshes out the story of the band's early days.

Suburban Light

In the late 1990s, an English band called the Clientele began to put out 7" singles on small labels like Pointy and Motorway and Elefant. The songs, mostly written by leader Alasdair MacLean, sounded as though they were recorded inexpensively but they didn’t sound careless; with rich, heavy reverb and careful arrangements, they had the whiff of a band with big ideas who didn’t yet have the resources to realize them. And so, instead, they huddled together in a rented room somewhere, turned on the tape machine, and created a world as best they could.
Suburban Light, the first full-length by the Clientele, initially released in late 2000, gathered these early singles and some other stray tracks. It was a modest record that developed a small cult, one that would grow a little bit with each new Clientele record through the last decade. While the group always had a very specific and identifiable aesthetic, they never quite sounded like this again, if only because, once they were signed to labels and putting out albums, they began to record in proper studios. But while Suburban Light is a special record, it’s not surprising that, for many, it flew under the radar. For one, its core musical idea—guitar-centric indie pop enamored with the gently psychedelic 1960s (deep Beatles cuts, Donovan, Kinks, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band) and the UK indie pop of the ’80s (Felt, Television Personalities)—isn’t exactly novel. It’s not hard to imagine hearing these songs casually and thinking “Sounds nice enough” and then moving on to something more immediately distinctive. But those who stop there are really missing out; Suburban Light is a very unusual record in its way, a perfectly realized amalgam of time, place, sound, and subject matter.
Clues to its enduring appeal can be found in its most immediately noticeable quality: the relentless repetition of a small handful of themes. Almost every song here mentions rain, and two do so in the titles; there are references to stars and eyes and gardens and light and leaves and silent motorways—elemental tools for building intimate pop songs. But instead of worrying about redundancy, Alasdair embraces the recurring images, and the cumulative effect over the course of the record is that the record feels very much like a specific place, somewhere you visit rather than something you listen in on. This, combined with the album’s rich, heavily reverbed sound, makes Suburban Light feel unusually enveloping.
MacLean has always been open about his influences: surrealist poetry, found-object art, the fathoms-deep atmosphere of Galaxie 500. From the surrealists he learned a rich vividness with language; lines like “Bicycles have drifted through these leaves still wet with rain” (from “Bicycles”) and “6 am in morningside, the first car rushes by/ We walk down to the garden and the sunlight fills your eyes” (from “6am Morningside”, included in the U.S. version of Suburban Light and here on the bonus disc) have an uncanny ability to put pictures in your head. Suburban Light is filled with such couplets, lines dripping with romantic yearning for something just out of reach paired with nostalgia for something slipping from memory. The freighted imagery inflates mundane objects and situations into impossibly grand tableaus; these songs invite you to look a little more deeply at your surroundings, to see how a few workers walking over a bridge at dawn might be connected to your own sense of dislocation.
Indeed, Suburban Light evokes a lonely world. One of the reasons the record sounds so dreamlike is that the narrator is completely in his own head; he wanders lamp-lit streets and sees a carnival crowd dispersing but feels a million miles away. The scenes describing human contact seem to happen more in imagination than reality. So in addition to romanticizing the mundane, Suburban Light also makes moving through the world in solitude and observing it carefully seem like a state of grace.
Driving home all these quiet scenes and minute observations is music that is unfailingly gorgeous. MacLean is an inventive guitar player and he sings with real emotion, and he also has the songwriting chops to hang with his earlier pop heroes. Part of why Suburban Light feels so bound to memory is because the constructions of the songs hearkens back to an age when the right chord change, when paired with the precise melodic turn, counted for everything. The songs seem old in part because their melodic conception is from another era, one when competition for penning tunes was thick. And the extreme reverb, sometimes reminiscent of the ghost halo of echo surrounding voices in the Flamingos' “I Only Have Eyes for You”, evokes a particular era of radio, one we know now only filtered through many generations of media.
One of Suburban Light’s paradoxical qualities is that it’s not afraid of boredom. Because of its golden AM sonics, Suburban Light always exists on one level as ambiance, the kind of mildly bland prettiness you hear leaking from a beat-up transistor set to an oldies station. That quality, of past and present and foreground and background all existing at the same time, makes me think of a certain strand of atmospheric electronic music. MacLean has expressed great admiration for the music of Boards of Canada, but Suburban Light seems spiritually akin to something like An Empty Bliss Beyond This World by the Caretaker, the way it creates a stirring atmosphere that’s unsettling in its surface beauty while containing layers of deeper meaning. On the Clientele’s Lost Weekend, which contains tracks recorded around the same time as some of the songs here, there’s a brief sound collage with street noise called “Boring Postcard”. The title is a reference to Martin Parr’s book of the same name, which presents selections from his collection of postcards gathered over the years, without comment. The book features ancient snapshots of roads and banks and hotel lobbies, most of which are eerily empty; Clientele songs could be set in these places.
And now, thanks to Merge’s 25th anniversary reissue program, Suburban Light is back in print on vinyl, where it belongs. The bonus disc included here is universally excellent, and includes the tracks that were on the American version of Suburban Light as well as a few other singles that could have been on the record proper. It’s the definitive statement of early Clientele, and it underscores the kind of subtle brilliance this band was capable of. Suburban Light is ultimately about a particular way of seeing, of looking at your life from the outside while living inside of it, romanticizing events as they happen. All of which connects it firmly to the mindset of youth and young adulthood, when you’re straddling the space between hazy childhood and the uncertain future, inhabiting a world so lovely and unreal.


Circuit Des Yeux’s Haley Fohr recasts her alter ego as a long-haul trucker against ambitious, synthetic soundscapes that evoke the near-spiritual loneliness of the solo traveler.

Jacqueline

On Haley Fohr’s second album under the moniker Jackie Lynn, she lays out her rules for travelers. “Travel light, share your finds,” she starts out on “Traveler’s Code of Conduct,” doling out seemingly familiar instructions before the track slowly disintegrates, turning sinister and surreal. A low, electronic thrum engulfs Fohr’s voice as she begins firing off more complex, difficult thoughts—“I’m thinking of past lives/I’m thinking of having a kid”—the kind that might occur to you after long hours alone on the road. As with Fohr’s best songwriting, like her 2018 record as Circuit Des Yeux, what first appears simple or familiar soon reveals strange and surprising depths.
When we first met Jackie Lynn, she was a drug kingpin telling an elaborate tale of revenge and redemption. Jacqueline, however, depicts the everyday inner life of a long-haul truck driver. It’s a shift in character, retaining the dramatic presence of Jackie Lynn while re-casting the specifics. By adding the element of long-distance travel, Fohr merges Jackie’s story more closely with her own: The album was conceived largely during time on the road as a touring musician. In her original iteration, Jackie Lynn came with a lot of baggage, but on Jacqueline, she’s stripped back to an archetype. Fohr describes her as “more of a costume than a figure... her wig looks like a wig. It doesn’t look like real hair. I want people to recognize that that’s someone dressed up. All you need is dirty wigs to find a new you.”
Cut through with the scent of gasoline and hairspray, Jacqueline revels in the gritty glamour of its central concept. With the assistance of Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan (aka Bitchin Bajas), the ambitious, synthetic soundscapes have the feeling of trying on every gown in the closet. The record opens with the propulsive drum pattern and hyperactive synth melodies of “Casino Queen,” mimicking the forward motion of wheels on tarmac. “Shugar Water” is a bluesy, rambunctious bar sing-a-long, and “Odessa”—a seven-minute psychedelic jam—is a journey within itself. On the latter, Fohr carves out wide open spaces between her chopped-up vocal lines, using acidic sci-fi synths and urgent drums to evoke the near-spiritual loneliness of the solo traveler.
Yet the isolation of Jackie Lynn is felt most deeply in the album’s meditative moments. On some of these more minimalist songs, like “Dream St.” and “Lenexa,” the structure can feel so slight and spacious that there’s little to grab onto. But on the album closer “Control,” a masterful slow release, Fohr evokes a very different side of her titular character. Here, the casino queen has mellowed and turned inwards, hands steady on the wheel as she drives into the sunset.
Once again, Jackie’s experience seems to dovetail with Fohr’s own: Between extreme bursts of extroversion, the traveling performer must also find peace with her own thoughts. Fohr’s songwriting has always envisioned a vast emotional landscape, and in just a short time with Jackie Lynn/Jacqueline, she shows us a broad sweep of this driver’s isolated life. On the twinkling, sighing “Lenexa,” Fohr repeatedly intones: “I got everything you need.” The double-edged pronouncement encapsulates the mood of the record: On the one hand, it is an empowering statement of wholeness and self-sufficiency; and yet, in Fohr’s resonant voice, it is weighted with sadness.

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


The Nots' second album finds the Memphis band moving beyond minute-long blasts of hooky punk and experimenting with new textures and art-damaged noise.

Cosmetic

At its inception, punk wasn’t just an attack on ’70s rock excess but on the very idea of entertainment. By holding up a mirror shard to society’s ills, punk’s message was that entertainment-as-escapism was a luxury we could no longer afford. When the E-word is dropped in a punk context, it hits like an F-bomb—from Gang of Four’s Entertainment! to Sleater-Kinney’s “Entertain,” the sentiment is dripping in sarcasm and spite. So when Nots singer/guitarist Natalie Hoffman shouts “Entertain me/Tell me who to be!” on her band’s second album, she’s in good, caustic company: By setting her crosshairs on the conformist, intellectually corrosive effects of pop culture, she reminds us that punk’s primary function is not to amuse, but to abuse.
“Entertain Me” is the sneering last song on Cosmetic, the follow-up to the Memphis foursome’s 2014 debut, We Are Nots. For a band that once dealt in 48-second blurts, the track’s seven-minute sprawl offers a convincing gauge of their growth; their double-timed rhythmic thrust stretches out hypnotically as Hoffman’s guitar stake out new spaces between piercing punk aggression and amorphous, art-damaged squall. To borrow a pair of songs from their debut, the Nots still make songs out of black mold and white noise—a combustible, crudely rendered fusion of ’60s garage-rock, ’70s post-punk, ’80s hardcore, and ’90s riot grrrl. But where the shout-along chants of We Are Nots were at least hooky enough to not completely scare away the bookers at Memphis morning talk shows, Cosmetic is uninterested in cultivating any crossover territory the band may have been accidentally trod upon the first time around. Like a boxer who’s just taken a gulp of water and had their cuts jellied, the Nots have leapt right back into ring angrier, bloodier, and eager to do more damage.
Where their debut attacked such pointed trash-culture targets as televangelists and psychic talk shows, Cosmetic is fueled by a more existential angst. While she still deals in terse Morse code melodies, Hoffman’s invectives are even more distorted and less decipherable, though song titles like “Inherently Low” and “No Novelty” leave little room for confusion. Melodies rumble and roil like an upset stomach. Before, keyboardist Alexandra Eastburn complemented the band’s trash ‘n’ bash with the standard synth-punk effects of ray-gun zaps and carnivalesque swirls; on Cosmetic, she lurks lower in the mix but her presence is all the more amplified through disorienting drones and queasy oscillations that permeate these songs like a thick fog.
From the all-tension, no-release surge of opener “Blank Reflection” to the creepy, echoing incantations of “Fluorescent Sunset,” Cosmetic conjures the white-knuckled feel of careening down a bumpy backwoods road in the dead of night, Eastburn’s quivering keyboards serving as the lone, flickering headlights. But the Nots’ growing affinity for sonic experimentation never feels at odds with their innate punk-rock primtivism. Rather, Cosmetic’s stewing textural undercurrent intensifies the band’s outer antagonism by highlighting the trembling, deep-seated dread within. It’s riveting and ruining in equal measure.


The Bajan-British rapper’s debut tackles the UK’s pressing crises—a looming Brexit, class hostility, widening poverty—with great jokes and writerly candor.

Nothing Great About Britain

The release of slowthai’s debut album, originally planned to coincide with Britain’s exit from the European Union, did not go exactly to plan. A familiar story: lazy management, a PR disaster, and industry pushback prompted a rethink of the release schedule. And since Brexit was delayed, slowthai let the album breathe, too.
The 24-year-old rapper born Tyron Frampton used the extra couple months wisely, proving politically savvy in interviews and putting his money where his mouth is: On his recent tour of small-town Britain, tickets sold for 99p, or about $1.30. In his canny press campaign, the Bajan-British rapper positioned himself as the “Brexit Bandit,” a social renegade lampooning the political calamity and its role as a weapon of mass distraction. Britain has a healthcare crisis, a housing crisis, and a giant stake in the climate crisis to be getting on with, but the constitutional crisis dominates feeds. With Nothing Great About Britain, slowthai springboards from the Brexit charade to riffs on nationalism and poverty, redistributing wealth across the attention economy.
As a product of a precarious Northampton upbringing, slowthai is well-versed in crisis management. He has a knack for writing his grievances into first-person tirades with subtle designs on our economic system. For those who grew up in the remains of Britain’s welfare state, it doesn’t take a big leap to join the personal and political. On “Slow Down,” a bruiser from last year’s Runt EP, slowthai recalled spending a miserable Christmas asking Santa to fix his dire living conditions. Even in adulthood, his plea to an indifferent higher power resonates. Why does poverty exist? To what authority do we complain? There’s no hotline for capitalist despair.
Instead, slowthai comes out with a verbal guillotine and a point to prove. First for the chop is Queen Elizabeth—a “cunt,” in his reckoning, on the incendiary title track. The jibe holds up a mirror to classism (“I will treat you with the utmost respect only if you respect me a little bit, Elizabeth,” he jokes in a mock-bourgeoisie accent) but it’s primarily an exhibition of glee. By debasing the royals, he rejects the social mores of an imperialist institution that shackled his grandfather and spawned the far-right English Defence League, both invoked in the song’s vivid opening scenes.
Growing up, slowthai says, he was “always zoning out but also mad observant,” a paradox familiar to introverts with the outward appearance of vacancy. But as a teenager, he scuffed social borders and dropped macho postures, refusing to honor the stratified rules of the playground. One result is a rejection of high- and low-culture distinctions: He begins the record necking a “bottle of Bucky in Buckingham Palace,” then, on “Doorman,” demands entry to a millionaire’s mansion, with class war-waging urgency.
Another consequence is his omnivorous musical style. Helped by dextrous lead producer Kwes Darko, slowthai spits on grime beats, blazes through stoner jams, barks over Mura Masa-produced electro punk, and schmoozes through hip-hop ballads. Skepta turns up for a slightly stiff cameo on UK drill taunt “Inglorious”—part of a brief mid-album sag, the only spell where slowthai sounds reined in—but by the following track, he’s spooling out a disarmingly sweet homebody anthem in “Toaster.”
He’s also a genius character writer. The dopey outlaw narrator of “Toaster” derides authority and preaches the virtues of weed smoking, individualism, and domestic sanctuary. But in a twist that’s equal parts Mike Skinner and Nabokov, he begins to let slip delusions of grandeur. By the end, the game’s up: Cops bang the front door and incarceration beckons. Still, in slowthai’s telling, it’s hard not to side with the harmless mope in his Gucci loafers.
It says plenty about slowthai’s ego that the most autobiographical song, “Northampton’s Child,” is actually an admiring portrait of his mother. With flip-book concision, he shows the teen mom leave home and survive an avalanche of romantic and domestic upheavals, only to lose her youngest son (slowthai’s brother) to muscular dystrophy. Inhabiting these childhood scenes, slowthai swings from big picture to small, visceral reaction to candid reflection. One moment he balls up with fury, landing off the beat to threaten his stepfather: “You’re lucky I’m not as big as you/I would punch you till my hands turn blue.” A line later, when the stepdad kicks the family out, slowthai spits: “Now we’re living at Tasha’s/Funny how good vibes turned that room to a palace.” The memory is depressingly beautiful, in its specificity and then, after so many years, in its endurance.
For all his cartoonish videos and stage theatrics, slowthai’s role as a single character in this ensemble cast shows the integrity he brings to the task. Though he nods to the mannerisms of Dizzee Rascal and JME, Nothing Great About Britain avoids cross-generational pandering and bypasses territorial arguments over the borders of grime and UK rap. What binds the album is slowthai’s soul: his meticulously drawn characters, his affinity for left-behind outsiders like the glue sniffers sampled on “Doorman,” and his impatience with a profit-motivated world where, as he once put it, “You’re competing constantly without wanting to.” The Britain he envisions is fairer, more leisurely and attentive, and united in its resistance to authority. It’s who our society overlooks, he suggests, that determines what we need to overthrow.


Now mostly famous for being famous, Snoop releases his latest reminder to the world that he's still an active musician.

Doggumentary

Last summer, Snoop Dogg headlined the backpack-centric Rock the Bells tour, performing his classic debut album, Doggystyle, in full every night and drawing rapturous reviews. This year, Snoop will make a few stops on Charlie Sheen's continuous-trainwreck Violent Torpedo of Truth tour, performing a song that he and Sheen have apparently recorded together. That duality is pretty much circa-2011 Snoop in a nutshell. He's a rap legend, and he's also an unapologetically inane public figure, someone who's more famous for being famous than he is for rapping. He seems to enjoy both roles in equal measure. And so late-period Snoop albums become weird, uncentered artifacts, with no real idea or consistent personality pulling them all together. You get sweeping attempts at crossover hits, nasty street-rap throwbacks, and bizarre cross-genre collaborations that any self-aware A&R never would've allowed. And even though Snoop is nowhere near the commercial force he once was, he can still round up a fuckton of famous people whenever he decides to record an album. Not too many artists would bury their Kanye West collaborations on track 18 of their albums, but that's what Snoop does on Doggumentary, his latest reminder to the world that he's still an active musician.
More than many of Snoop's recent efforts, Doggumentary has something of a sonic identity. Snoop mines slick, slapbass-heavy 1980s R&B and computer-funk on the album, working with producers like Fredwreck, Jake One, and Battlecat to conjure the smooth soul of the early Reagan era. Another rap veteran recently did great things with that same loose aesthetic playground: Big Boi on last year's excellent Sir Lucious Left Foot. But where Big Boi and his collaborators attacked that stuff with a giddy sense of experimental joy, Snoop just lets it sit there, as if his older-than-time persona will be enough to sell whatever he wants. And so vast stretches of the way-too-long Doggumentary drift by, making no impression whatsoever.
Snoop is still a perfectly capable rapper, but he doesn't let off a single memorable line on the whole album. Instead, his greatest strengths now are his delivery-- he can stick right to whatever beat the world throws at him-- and his wizened, familiar voice. Since neither of these things has changed in the past decade, every new Snoop verse feels like a verse we've heard before, with the possible exception of the parts of the gently moralistic "Peer Pressure" where Snoop tells kids to project inner strength and resist alcohol and drugs-- messages that directly contradict almost every other song on his album.
With Snoop more often than not acting as a big blank at the center of his own album, many of the best moments on Doggumentary belong to his collaborators: E-40 letting loose tumbling flows over chaotic Rick Rock production on "My Fucn House", R. Kelly bringing regal grace to an eerie Lex Luger beat on "Platinum", Devin the Dude's loping everydude warmth on the otherwise shameful "I Don't Need No Bitch". As for Snoop himself, the best parts come in the moments where he stops rapping altogether and sings instead, or where he raps so easily that he might as well be singing. It's surprising that he doesn't do that more often here, since the mostly-sung "Sensual Seduction" was his last serious solo hit. And here we get "Boom", with Snoop skipping lazily over a sample of Yazoo's deathless electro classic "Situation", and "Wet"-- a song inexplicably written for Prince William's bachelor party-- where Snoop intones freaky come-ons through heavy Auto-Tune over the Cataracts' spaced-out synth squirts.
And then there's "Superman", the acoustic-ramble Willie Nelson duet that absolutely shouldn't work but somehow does. Snoop and Willie are both braided, weed-addicted elder-statesman outlaw figures, so it makes sense that they'd get along. But this song, like the supremely silly 2008 Everlast collab "My Medicine", shows that Snoop's gravelly drawl is pretty well-suited for country music. If he ever decides to push himself again, that's one direction available to him. But let's be serious: Snoop Dogg is not pushing himself anytime soon.


The debut LP from Boston indie rock band Palehound is inspired by leader Ellen Kempner's breakup. But like her former camp counselor and roommate, Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis, Kempner never lets a sad jam wallow. Her songs are full of odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare.

Dry Food

On 2013's Bent Nail EP, Palehound's Ellen Kempner sang about taking a carrot for a pet in order to stave off late-teen loneliness. She makes similarly childlike gestures on her debut album. "You made beauty a monster to me, so I'm kissing all the ugly things I see," she seethes at an ex in a so there voice on Dry Food's title track. It's the most deliciously futile form of revenge and reclamation: doing the opposite.
Dry Food is partially a product of the 21-year-old Boston-dwelling songwriter's first big breakup—the deeper kind of solitude of having known and lost someone. Its sound captures the Herculean efforts required to survive the ensuing slump: "All I need's a little sleep and I'll be good to clean and eat," she sings in a medicated sigh on "Easy", her acoustic guitar rising and dipping with the methodical pace of someone trying to make a new routine stick. But like her former camp counselor and roommate, Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis, Kempner never lets a sad jam wallow: she kicks the end of the song into shape with a zippy electric guitar motif and some awkward, itchy squall.
It's followed by "Cinnamon", which takes the opposite tack, hooked around the kind of amiable, waterlogged psych burble that Mac DeMarco noodles in his sleep. Kempner sings dreamily about her worst self-defeating impulses, but is stirred from her reverie by a divine revelation that her life is becoming "a pretty lie". Frantic drums force the song somewhere agitated and ascendant, but instead of bursting into some bright new phrase, the furor falls away like a captivating slo-mo bellyflop.
Kempner has a knack for these odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare. And like her old roommate, she often obscures her intentions between appealingly twisty language. "Mouth ajar watching cuties hit the half pipe/ I only feel half ripe/ Around healthier folk," she sings on "Healthier Folk". She distils her disgust at her own post-breakup malaise with perfectly understated images: "The hair that's in my shower drain/ Has been clogging up my home," she sings on "Dixie". "And I try to scoop it up, but I wretch until I'm stuck." It's maybe the most straightforward song here, just fingerpicked acoustic guitar, but she messes at it like a cat dragging a mouse into a dark nook.
Saddest of all is closer "Seakonk", where Kempner protests that she's not alone, actually; she's home watching TV with her parents, sister and their dogs. There's a blithe fairground pirate ship sway to the song, which she closes with a jaunty "doo doo doo" that could have come from the credits of one of the cartoons she's watching—only she lets the final note deflate with a groan. It's at this point that Dry Food confronts the point it's been evading: kidding yourself is no way to recover, and comfort offers little impetus to move on. Palehound's discomfiting, unflinching debut suggests she knew it all along.


The low-profile Houston producer and singer utilizes elements of contemporary trap music as a jumping-off point for R&B at its most abstract. His blurry portraits offer uncanny clarity.

BC

Not much information is readily available on Bwoy Coyote. All that can be gleaned from his Bandcamp page is that he is a producer and artist who lives in Houston. A sense of mystery also animates his music, which utilizes elements of contemporary trap as a jumping-off point for R&B at its most abstract. It’s easy to get lost in his maze of minimal production and meandering thoughts. On BC, his most recent EP, Coyote distinguishes himself by only gesturing at what he feels, providing the briefest glimpses of his inner world.
Coyote frames his complex lines with the most rudimentary trap essentials. Mirroring the rocket hinted at in its lyrics (“I go takeoff James Harden/Houston Rocket, how I’m balling, takeoff”), “Starpower” launches upward on hi-hats and blinking swells of synth. Coyote trails along behind, establishing a singular statement of purpose in his cryptic lines: “I don’t need no starpower/Just cut me my check.” He speaks these lines first, and then he sings them, doubling for emphasis. His melancholic determination is reflected both by the sparse production and his plaintive vocals. The muted trumpets on “From Here” don’t signal triumph as much as they do resignation, and the song’s slurred, slowed-down percussion sounds mired in the muck of the chorus: “Where do we go from here, baby/Said, where do we go from here.”
Coyote hides his inner conflicts in these cavernous, deceptively simple productions. On EP opener and trunk-rattler “Page” (jointly produced by Bwoy Coyote and Cubeatz), Coyote ruminates over a recently ended relationship. The cluttered hi-hats and reversed synth melodies reverberate with Coyote’s urgent warbling, a discordant mixture that matches the ambivalence of the recollection. Across the release, Coyote sounds like he’s looking back at a past event, determined not to carry the same mistakes with him to the present. He makes his resolve clear on “Spirit=Free” when he hums a halting affirmation to himself over the song’s ticking clock snare and toy-like melody: “Your spirit is free/Be all you want/Be all you can be.”
Coyote finds freedom within the self-imposed limits of his productions, luxuriating in their bounds. Over the whistles and noodling synth pads of “Ben” (co-produced with VVS Chris),  Coyote transitions seamlessly from singing to rapping, moving from mocking posers to mourning Nipsey Hussle in the span of a few moments. When he mutters the chorus, “We might be coming up fast/We might be coming up slow,” he’s not embracing apathy as much as he’s narrating a moment in progress. His blurry portraits offer uncanny clarity. He doesn’t provide specifics; instead he allows his impressions to generate a logic of their own. The almost-ballad “Make U Understand” starts with what seems like a chorus (“I can’t make you understand/You just gotta know”), but Coyote quickly tires of it, preferring to list a series of non sequiturs instead: “Cream Russian/Fees coming/Feel like Pharrell/They frontin’.” In Coyote’s telling, love feels as transient and random as the words that get stuck in your head.
Coyote maintains a Drake-tier distance between himself and his emotions, and Lil Uzi Vert’s shadow looms over his mournful melodic choices, but his form, or rather his formlessness, is unique. His drum patterns and sedate melodies stand out because of their stark simplicity; they flash in the dark, drawing you, moth-like, toward them. His lyrics point at images and emotions, leaving any sort of final observation up to the viewer. It’s the nighttime music your mind makes before you drift off into sleep.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


This restrained collection of solo piano instrumentals evokes Satie, but the often-overlooked experimental touches presage Sakamoto’s subsequent work.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: BTTB (20th Anniversary Edition)

BTTB (20th Anniversary Edition)

Sometime in the late 1990s, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto was stuck in a Tokyo traffic jam. A melody had popped into his head while he was driving; during the standstill, he called home and sang it into his answering machine, he remembers. At the time, Japan was still in the grips of “The Lost Decade,” a period of economic downturn following the inflated tech optimism and conspicuous consumption of the 1980s. Y2K anxiety was gathering momentum. Amid the stress of busy city streets, the melody harbored a yearning for the reflective pleasures and possibilities of meandering. The little tune eventually grew into “Opus,” the opening track of Sakamoto’s mid-career solo piano album, BTTB.
BTTB, an acronym for “Back to the Basics,” has generally been remembered as homage: Sakamoto doing Satie, painting impressionistic scenes to speak to the subconscious. Memory, however, has a tendency to behave like water—one minute flooding the senses, the next smoothing away details. In BTTB’s case, the weirder, more prescient, and occasionally humorous moments have been washed from the public record. To be fair, the album’s form was fluid from the start. First released in Japan in November 1998 with 14 tracks, it was reissued just four months later with the addition of the somber “Snake Eyes” and a four-handed piano version of the 1979 song “Tong Poo,” from Sakamoto’s hugely influential Yellow Magic Orchestra. Subsequent European and U.S. versions did away with some experimental tracks to make room for more commercial offerings.
This new 20th-anniversary edition feels like Sakamoto’s director’s cut. With 18 tracks, it combines the 1999 Japanese release with two cuts from the 2000 stateside version: the ad-soundtrack-turned-hit-single “Energy Flow” and a beautifully looping closer called “Reversing.” At odds with much of the plaintive piano playing, “Do Bacteria Sleep,” omitted from European and U.S. releases, uses a mouth harp to bring to life a microscopic world of sound. The mouth harp’s peculiar vibrations decay at more or less the same rate as a piano’s notes, so the track’s mid-album position offers a palate cleanser within the stream of familiar sounds. Still, the curio reminds the listener of the piano’s stringed interior, the mechanics of its timeless appeal.
As if to emphasize the point, Sakamoto lifts the piano’s lid on a trio of compositions during the album’s back half, using a prepared piano to channel Satie via John Cage. During “Prelude,” rubber erasers blunt the vibrations of the piano strings, conjuring a xylophone rusting in a well. “Sonata” applies a similar process to a tripled pace, forcing the overlapping notes into dissonance. The energy suggests the mating call of some undiscovered bird, tripping over itself to find a receptive partner.
“Uetax” raised the most eyebrows among classical listeners and critics expecting only pretty piano pieces. Watery gurgles, not unlike a stomach mid-digestion, obscure a very faint voice. One imagines a mic inside a container of water atop the piano strings; the track even shares a name with a waterproof microphone designed for hurricane conditions. But the process is less important than the feeling—in its swerving of convention, it tickles and delights. It also clears the way for “Aqua,” a piano version of a synth instrumental Sakamoto wrote for an album by his daughter, Miu. It is as close to balladry as BTTB gets.
“Uetax” and its prepared piano siblings predict Sakamoto’s 2017 album, async, which found him in an introspective yet adventurously ambient zone; their reintroductions here are reminders that he’s been breaking boundaries between music and mere sound for decades. While the fingers of Ravel, Brahms, and, yes, Satie all amble alongside Sakamoto’s on BTTB, his appetite for nesting experimental sonics within atmospheric meanderings mark the album as a contemporary treasure. Snatching a moment of pause, BTTB suggests, is the surest path to a fresh perspective.