On his overtly political ninth studio LP, Eminem is fueled by self-doubt. But with many bland hooks and cringe-worthy punchlines, Revival is another late-career album that does little for his legacy.

Revival

Few texts in hip-hop are as bizarre as Eminem’s debut LP, Infinite. Released on a local Detroit label in 1996, it was either ignored or dismissed by those who rejected his whiteness and his borrowed aesthetic. Were it released in 2017, it might be celebrated for its scholarship of the form’s early classics, a la Joey Bada$$ or Roc Marciano. Instead, he was written off as a swagger jacker who sounded too much like Nas and AZ.
The criticism burned, and from that fire he formed his alter ego, Slim Shady. A manifestation of Marshall Mathers’ inner turmoil, the persona served as a vehicle for his darkest, most violent thoughts and helped him step out from the shadow of his forebears to channel the darkest parts of himself. On 1998’s The Slim Shady EP, he found his unique and disturbing voice. It caught the ear of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, who spent the next five years molding him into one of the biggest pop stars in the world.
In those early years, for all the controversy his lyrics caused, Slim Shady helped Mathers focus his energy, a cathartic outlet that was both messy and intensely fascinating. But after more than two decades, he’s older, well-fed, and in possession of pretty much every accolade there is to acquire. The Slim Shady suit no longer fits; once the outsider, he’s now the establishment. If Slim Shady fed on hate, what does he do now that he’s beloved? What motivates a healthy, sober, 45-year-old father with enough money for several lifetimes?
On Revival, his ninth studio LP, Eminem is largely fueled by his own self-doubt, a creeping fear that we might forget he was once one of the best to ever hold a mic. The only thing the battle-tested, Oscar-winning, best-selling hip-hop artist of all time has to prove is that he’s got another classic in him, the one thing that he hasn’t proven since the curtains closed on 2002’s The Eminem Show. On the records that followed—his 2004 Encore, the inevitable Relapse in 2009 into Slim Shady, and his eventual Recovery—Eminem struggled to reconcile with the aftermath of his rapid ascent to stardom. The confessional nature of his storytelling, often featuring his mother, his daughter, and her mother, laid bare his deepest insecurities and most twisted fantasies. By the time a sober Marshall Mathers dropped the sequel to his defining work, he seemed desperate to prove he still had the ability to shock, disturb, and amaze with his skills on the mic. But by then, it was already apparent that he’d run out of stories to tell. Having freed himself of substance abuse, he reconciled his toxic relationship with the mother of his child and the effects of incorporating his daughter into his art. He’d matured into a more evolved human. But the music didn’t grow with him.
For the past 15 years, Eminem has been stuck in a feedback loop, revisiting different versions of his former self. Musically, Revival is no different, chock full of piano ballads and pop-star features that echo the most cynically commercial corners of his catalog. The shock value comes not from the album’s overwhelmingly bland hooks or cringe-worthy humor (of which there is plenty), but from the moments where his growth as a human is most apparent. Much of early single “Untouchable” is indeed unlistenable, but how many other rappers are reminding us of KRS-One’s teachings that “there can never be justice on stolen land?” And did the man who once mocked Lady Gaga with the lyric, “She can quit her job at the post office, she’s still a male lady,” really just diss the 45th president’s ban on transgender service members?
That being said, Eminem is due no accolades for having thumbed through a copy of Between the World and Me or for finally acknowledging the humanity of non-binary people. Nor should he be deified for mackling about the privileges of whiteness and how hard it is to be black in America. These are not new topics in hip-hop lyrics, they’re just new for Eminem. In 2017, listening to an Eminem rant against police brutality or a racist president can feel like watching “60 Minutes” after spending the week on Twitter; a slow recounting of last week’s news. It’s certainly possible that these screeds could be revelatory for Eminem’s most delusional racist fans, but for those who’ve long since arrived and put in the work, it just sounds tired.
And if the beats knocked, it would probably be tolerable, too. But legendary executive producers Dr. Dre and Rick Rubin managed to stuff a bloated tracklist with uninspired production and instantly forgettable pop hooks. Even Beyoncé couldn’t save “Walk on Water,” a stale piano ballad that undercuts Eminem’s attempt to explore the weight of his self-doubt. The Alicia-Keys-featuring “Like Home” is equally limp and toothless, defanging Eminem’s attempt to battle Donald Trump. He sees himself as a crusader against his influence, champion of the bullied, a notebook full of disses at the ready. It’s not his fault that all Trump has to do to beat him is ignore him, but it is his fault that the beat makes it so easy to do so. Rubin’s contributions are particularly embarrassing; his re-hash of hits from the Rush/Def Jam days (“Heat,” “Remind Me”) suggest he’s completely out of ideas.
But while the long tracklist and equally protracted verses make for an exhausting listen, there are rewards for those that endure. The eponymous interlude features a short verse from the late Alice and the Glass Lake that sounds like a sketch for something potentially great. And on an album full of poorly matched beats and verses, the delicately morose guitar melody and heavy fuzz of the Cranberries “Zombie” suits his flow on “In Your Head” perfectly—even if the hook was pretty much cut and pasted from the original.
It’s not until the album’s final tracks that we see a glimpse of the masterful storytelling he exhibited on early hits like “Guilty Conscience” and “Stan.” “Castle” is structured as three letters to his daughter, who, for better or worse, tends to inspire some of his strongest work. It’s hard not to be disarmed by his apology for the big ears he gave her, or his acknowledgement of how he fucked up by hashing out their family’s domestic strife in public. When it ends with his very real 2007 methadone overdose, he imagines the effect of his death on his family on the album closer, “Arose,” with a funereal beat that interpolates an elegiac backing vocal with the beeps and gusts of air from life support machines.
This is the contradiction of Eminem in 2017. The brat who once boasted how he “Just Don’t Give a Fuck” now has an abundance of fucks to give. He’s still firing off juvenile sex jokes (“Your booty is heavy duty like diarrhea”), but he’s clearly still tortured by his love for his child’s mother. He decries the president’s racism, then (jokingly?) admits he agrees with his stance on pussy grabbing (“Why do you think they call it a snatch?”). These multitudes might be reconcilable were his considerable technical gifts not consistently wasted on tired themes and lame attempts to revive an irrelevant persona he outgrew years ago.
Eminem’s consistent run of mediocrity over the last 15 years has not tempered his album sales, and it’s unlikely to start now—he remains one of the most bankable acts in pop. But sales and fame have never been his primary motivation. He’s always wanted to be the best, and ever since he conquered the music world in the early aughts, it’s as if he has no idea where to go. As he raps with precision on “Believe”:

Man, in my younger days
That dream was so much fun to chase
It’s like I run in place
While this shit dangled in front of my face
But how do you keep up the pace
And the hunger pangs once you’ve won the race?
When that fuel exhaust is coolin’ off
’Cause you don't got nothin’ left to prove at all
’Cause you done already hit ’em with the coup de grâce

These fears are relatable—what artist hasn’t struggled to find motivation?—if not necessarily interesting. But Revival is ultimately plagued by the same pitfalls as Infinite, which found him shadowboxing against ghosts, unable to land any punches. This time he’s competing with a version of himself that no longer exists. And though it’s easy to empathize with his creeping self-doubt, it’s tougher to swallow in the context of an album that ultimately proves that those doubts are correct.


Earnestly didactic “conscious” hip-hop is easy to mock but hard to do well. The Compton rapper’s rhyme schemes are persuasive even when his arguments don’t withstand close scrutiny.

Greydon Square: Type 4: City on the Type of Forever

Type 4: City on the Type of Forever

Greydon Square is a forty-something rapper from Compton who belongs to the time-honored lineage of wrinkled-forehead, pressured-speech word-nerd rappers. Think your Aesop Rocks, your Gift of Gabs, your Ras Kasses—anyone whose raps might fall into a tag cloud of “third eye,” “the plan,” and/or “the singularity.” The title of his latest album, Type 4: City on the Type of Forever, likely refers to the classic Harlan Ellison-penned 1967 Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Captain Kirk must let Joan Collins die in order to somehow stop Hitler (it’s complicated), and as the “Type 4” hints, it belongs to a series—in this case, a “quadrilogy” of albums inspired by the Kardashev Scale, which was invented by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardoshev in 1964 to measure a society’s ability to harness its technology. It’s… a lot, and so are the rapper’s verses— “Cosmic accosted/Obelisk hostage/monolith option from the ominous doctrine” is an incredibly representative stretch of rhymes.
And yet it’s a testament to Greydon, aka Eddie Collins, that even his nonsensical lines sound compelling. “I bet you didn’t even know that colors could move, did you?” he asks on the title track, and his baritone is so commanding that you might find yourself reflexively shaking your head: No, Greydon, I simply had no idea. With his deep, glassy monotone, he sounds a little like if Guru binged too many YouTube documentaries, and this smooth voice anchors him across some choppy waters where you’re not entirely sure what societal ills he’s addressing—complacency? Lack of empathy? Manufactured consent? (Probably all of those.) Greydon Square understands and exploits what I’ll call the Lupe Loophole, which holds that even your preposterously half-baked ideas will ring true if you flow slickly enough.
Earnestly didactic hip-hop in this vein is easy to mock but incredibly hard to do well: At its best, galaxy-brain “conscious” rap encourages you to make connections between disparate ideas not so much through demonstration as by suggestion. What does a stray shot like “open range, broken with nothin’ but hope and change” (from album highlight “Hindsight”) say, exactly, about the unfulfilled promises of the Obama years? I have no idea, but the urgency in Collins’ voice makes me ponder the question for half a beat longer than I would if he lectured me straight, as does the fact that he’s onto something else in the very next bar.
Like a lot of conscious rappers, Collins’ music feels most magnetic when he keeps the outlines of his critiques broad, allowing his music to remain slippery, allusive, suggestive. The production, from a number of sources including Collins himself, helps, wreathing his voice in profundity-boosting astral synths that heighten the atmosphere more than any single bar. The narcotic pull of conspiracy theorizing, after all, has nothing at all to do with details and everything to do with that heady sensation that all of your troubles are linked in a pattern whose broad outlines are just becoming visible. Or, in other words: No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative; it gets the people going.
Collins is a fascinating character—a military vet who served in the Iraq war; a fierce atheist who regularly discusses the subject on talk shows; a former physics major and an outspoken antinatalist, or someone who believes fervently in not having children. He’s dropped a number of songs directly espousing these beliefs, laying out powerful arguments that probably matter very much to people caught up in the debate but have limited use outside those arenas. He dials back that tendency on Type 4, but on “6th,” for example, he raps pretty directly about his political disillusionment, railing against the “false duopoly” of the political system, the tokenizing paternalism of “limousine liberals,” the hypocrisy of “corporate socialism,” the fruitlessness of voter-shaming a disenfranchised populace. All cogent points, and yet I find there isn’t much to do with them other than to shrug and say “yeah.” Meanwhile, when he raps, “There in the crease, we buried it—a vision, lifted into position/A neo-view, often too vivid! I’m the illest to ever convert oxygen into CO2,” I am left awestruck, the afterimage of the words (a neo-view, too vivid!) dancing across my brain.


The Cleveland band puts thrills front and center on its second album, slotting monster riffs into gruesomely switchbacking arrangements.

200 Stab Wounds: Manual Manic Procedures

Manual Manic Procedures

Fun isn’t necessarily one of death metal’s chief attributes, but it’s one of the defining characteristics of 200 Stab Wounds; you don’t name your songs “Skin Milk” and “Stifling Stew” if you don’t enjoy playing around in the grotesque. (They say that the title “Release the Stench” was inspired by a bandmember slipping off his shoes in the van.) The Cleveland quartet’s 2021 debut, Slave to the Scalpel, was an immediately accessible album of gritty riffs and sinewy grooves in a cartoonishly gruesome sleeve, and it established 200 Stab Wounds within a new wave of death-metal bands like Creeping Death, Necrot, Undeath, and fellow Ohioans Sanguisugabogg—bands that use hardcore’s relentless forward thrust to power traditional death metal in the vein of genre heroes Cannibal Corpse and Bolt Thrower. The music is dark, ugly, compact, and covered in grime. If Blood Incantation’s brainy sound explores the cosmos, and Tomb Mold’s visionary approach pushes aesthetic frontiers, then 200 Stab Wounds’ sinister, concentrated music plumbs the Zodiac Killer’s basement.
Slave to the Scalpel was recorded before 200 Stab Wounds began playing live, and its songs occasionally suffered from not having been road tested; there’s a fine line between relentless and monotonous that not even the nastiest riff can overcome. In the years since, they’ve toured ceaselessly with death-metal legends like Obituary and Dying Fetus, and it’s clear that hearing songs like “Slowly We Rot” and “Born in Sodom” every night for weeks—and discovering how their own music fared before a skeptical crowd—helped 200 Stab Wounds figure out how to turn a great riff into a great song. On Manual Manic Procedures, they chop their sound to pieces and sew it back up into meticulously arranged music played with speed, precision, and obvious glee; they’re inflicting all those wounds as efficiently as possible, but you can sense them enjoying each and every thrust of the knife.
Right from the start, it’s clear that Manual Manic Procedures has been built to keep a crowd on its toes and a pit in perpetual motion. After an intro that recalls both “South of Heaven” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” the rhythm of opener “Hands of Eternity” changes five or six times in the span of a minute, from head-banging piston-pumping to thrashy swing to ’90s jock metal and back again; later in the song, they shift from a gallop into D-beat into a nu-metal drag. It’s nothing new for a metal band to combine subgenres, but making such a show of presenting the menu at the beginning of the meal shows the band’s fresh intent: Here are all the ways your body can and will respond to this record.
200 Stab Wounds pulls tricks like this throughout Manual Manic Procedures—setting patterns in motion, then upending them while you’re distracted by some musical sleight of hand. In “Defiled Gestation,” the missile scream of a pair of pinch harmonics flashes across the opening mid-tempo riff, and while you’re still partially blinded by the flare, the band pitches up the pace in mid-measure, launching into the song’s full-throttle attack a quarter-second or so earlier than it feels like they should. Even when they’re at cruising speed, they keep tinkering with the groove, finding new ways to voice the riff without losing momentum. Steve Buhl rips into “Release the Stench” with a melodic neon sneer of a solo that turns into a snarl before spinning out in aggression, his flailing knocking out the rest of the band and allowing them to reset the song as chopping sludge.
While these newly intricate arrangements could come off as a fussy overcorrection, the sophistication of the songwriting makes the changes mostly feel natural rather than forced or showy. The title track scrolls from knuckle-dragging X Games groove to staccato grindcore and then into old-school death-metal riffing so elegantly, you sense it more as a change in tone—wound-up testosterone and clenched-teeth tension giving way to ecstatic release—than form.
Andy Nelson’s rich, almost glossy production heightens the album’s fluidity. Without blowing the soundstage up to stadium proportions, the Weekend Nachos mastermind creates just enough space for the instruments to speak clearly to one another. The effect is like seeing being in a tiny club with a pristine sound system: When Buhl and Raymond MacDonald’s guitars chug together in “Gross Abuse,” the thickness is suffocating. They open things further in interlude “Led to the Chamber / Liquified,” whose light-blue keyboard melody haunts the track’s Argento abattoir synths like a naive specter. These are mostly subtle touches—minor adjustments to what was already a compelling aesthetic—that the band incorporates without sacrificing the swagger of Slave to the Scalpel.
At times, listening to Manual Manic Procedures can feel like being put through a death-metal HIIT workout: 25 reps of two-stepping, 25 reps around the circle pit, 25 reps of headbanging, Keep up, let’s empty the tank for the wall of death! But by offering themselves up to the blood of the crowd and allowing it to reshape how they fashion their music, 200 Stab Wounds makes their priorities clear. Manual Manic Procedures is vicious in its attitude and surgical in its precision, but at its pulpy core, it’s an album that wants you to dance.


Dr. Dre's latest prot?g? boasts not only an impressive set of producers (Dre, Kanye, Timbaland, Just Blaze, Scott Storch, Hi-Tek) and guests (Eminem, 50 Cent, Busta Rhymes) for this highly anticipated throwback to early 90s West Coast gangsta rap, but also a hoarse, guttural vocal style that commands more presence than precedessor 50 Cent.

The Documentary

A couple of months ago, Vibe published an article lamenting the decline of New York hip-hop. With Southern and Midwestern rappers rising to prominence over the past few years, the birthplace of hip-hop has only constituted about a third of rap radio playlists. But the article's unspoken question was: What's going on with the West? A pie chart showed that California rappers only constituted around 3% of those same playlists-- a far cry from the early 90s, when Dr. Dre, 2pac, and Snoop Dogg all but owned the rap landscape. Since then, 2pac's been gunned down, Snoop and Ice Cube have fallen off hard, and DJ Quik and the Bay Area scene have had little success breaking through to the mainstream. Dre's kept his name in circulation by producing Eminem and 50 Cent-- but even he hasn't released material under his own name since 1999, constantly delaying the release of his supposed masterpiece, Detox.
So The Game, Dre's newest protégé, has a lot riding on him. The Compton MC made a name for himself on the mixtape scene that made 50 Cent a star; it made perfect sense for him to become the first West Coast representative of G-Unit. And having spent the past few months embroiled in pointless beefs with also-rans like Joe Budden and Yukmouth-- and getting hammered from all sides-- Game needs more than ever to deliver a debut to back up his talk.
Now he has: The Documentary is the best West Coast street-rap album since DJ Quik's 2002 LP Under tha Influence. All of the G-Unit solo albums thus far have been aesthetically unified, a rarity in hip-hop; the tracks on The Documentary actually sound like they belong on the same album. Dre produces five of the album's 17 songs, applying his recent stripped-down cinematic style, and many of the record's other producers follow his lead. Superstar beatmakers like Timbaland and Kanye West hold back on their signature tics, fitting their usual approaches into the album's fabric. The end result is a rich, triumphant sonic tapestry; you can hear every dollar that went into it.
The Game is not a particularly singular rapper. His hoarse, guttural voice doesn't possess any of the relaxed menace of classic West Coast rappers; he sounds more like Tha Dogg Pound member Daz Dillinger than Eazy or Snoop or The D.O.C. He has an appealing confidence and an unforced lyrical toughness, though: "I spit for the niggas doing 25 on they fifth year, ready to throw a nigga off the fifth tier/ For the white boys in the Abercrombie & Fitch, yeeah/ And every nigga who helped me to get here," he rhymes on the dramatic and brutally hard Just Blaze banger "Church for Thugs". Unfortunately, he also frequently sounds awkward on hooks, seemingly hoping that simply repeating the same phrases a few times will suffice. In fact, many of the best tracks are the ones on which 50 steps in to deliver the hook, like the bananas single "How We Do", where 50 pushes the music-box Dre beat perfectly.
Throughout the album, Game seems obsessed with his place in rap history, constantly name-checking Dre and Eazy-E; on "Dreams", he spits, "The dream of Erik Wright, that's what I'm giving you/ Who walked through the White House without a business suit/ Compton hat, jheri curl dripping on Ronald Reagan's shoes." But the impeccable beats and The Game's authoritative gruffness carry him through the album; he never sounds like anything less than a star on the rise. Only at the album's end, however, does he reveal his greatest gift: a powerful, heartfelt vulnerability. On "Like Father, Like Son", the album's final track, he tells of the birth of his son. Over Needlez' melodramatic, string-laden track, he raps, "Nose, ears, eyes, chin just like your daddy/ I'll die before you grow up and be just like your daddy." Same rhyme or not, it lends a stark humanity to Game's sometimes empty braggadocio.


Jace Clayton, better and more-often known as DJ/rupture, pays tribute to a pioneering figure in minimalism and an influential member of the 1980s Downtown New York scene.

Jace Clayton: The Julius Eastman Memory Depot

The Julius Eastman Memory Depot

The composer Julius Eastman lived his life veering between irreconcilable extremes. A pioneering figure in minimalism and an influential member of the 1980s Downtown New York scene, Eastman studied at the Curtis Institute, sang with Meredith Monk on Dolmen Music, sat on symposia with Morton Feldman and John Cage. He also battled alcoholism and crack addiction and lived the last months of his life homeless, rattling between Manhattan's Tompkins Square Park and a shelter in Buffalo. When he passed away, alone, some of his closest friends and associates did not know of his death until months afterward. The potted-history of his life story is of a promising, mercurial talent who thrashed himself apart trying to live too many contradictions.
A black, gay man rattling around loudly in the white, constrained world of classical music, Eastman was a living testament to unbounded American opportunity and woeful American inequality. To describe him in stridently political language is not to hang an unwanted frame around him; Eastman saw himself this way, and discussed his music and life explicitly in those terms. He was, by most accounts, an acrid, seething, and occasionally impossible man, a temperament you can detect in his music as far away as the titles themselves: "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich". "Evil Nigger". "Gay Guerrilla". The language was so acidic it ate away at the concert-hall universe like stomach lining, a fitting gesture for someone who saw as much rank hypocrisy as opportunity within its walls.
This is a difficult, self-annihilating temperament to pay proper tribute to. On The Julius Eastman Memory Depot, Jace Clayton-- better and more-often known as DJ/rupture-- goes about it exactly the right way. "Reverence can be a kind of forgetting," he writes in the album's liner notes, and Memory Depot meets Eastman on his own slanted playground, toasting to acid with acid."Evil Nigger" and "Gay Guerrilla", two solo piano pieces from 1979, form the core of the album, performed here by David Friend and Emily Manzo. Clayton feeds the results of their performances directly into his laptop and scrambles them, spitting out a third stream of input that is often altered beyond recognition. You can never quite tell, listening to the album, where the sounds are originating; the sound is a tempest with no center. The result honors the intentions behind Eastman's trickster spirit to the point that Clayton and Eastman seem very much to be making this music together in real time.
Clayton's take on "Evil Nigger" begins with a stammering single note on piano that gets its resonance choked off, until it's just a hammer hitting in dead space. The piece's smallest piece of DNA is a jittery, repetitive nervous trill, and Clayton sends this little figure through a series of frightening transformations: the trill jingles like glass shards in a grocery bag in the second, dissipates into queasy smoke in the third, flits through irradiated air like mutant fireflies in the fourth. In the fourth movement, it's nearly swallowed by a forbidding boom of undertones that well up from the echo of the piano's foot pedals; Clayton pans this roar back and forth in your headphones until it sounds like an air raid. The effect is not so much "prepared piano" as "piano cut free from the time/space continuum."
The second work Clayton dissects, "Gay Guerrilla", has the name of a manifesto, and Eastman once said of its title, "Without blood there is no cause. I use 'Gay Guerrilla' in hopes that I might be one, if called up to be one." But the piece, which contains a reinterpretation of the Martin Luther hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," feels less like a call to arms than a meditation. Leaning hard into the piano pedals, pianists Friend and Manzo build a calmly hurtling sense of forward motion that is similar to John Adams' "Hallelujah Junction". As the sound of the piano starts to leech out bits of its essence in the recording, it becomes, steadily, a music of ghosts. Considering both the state of the NYC gay community during Eastman's life, and how Eastman spent the last few years of his own, the feeling is mournfully appropriate.
Clayton contributes one original piece to Julius Eastman Memory Depot. The "Callback from the American Society of Eastman Supporters" posits a different outcome for the memory of Julius Eastman, a world where supporters of Eastman are so legion that they are turned away via robo-call. "The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner is an equal-opportunity employer," the narrator (sung by Sufi vocalist Arooj Aftab) chirps brightly, before the piece breaks open into a cool-blue drone and meditation. "Regardless of age, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of creed and disability, sexual orientation, political affiliation" Aftab sings, searchingly. It is a supremely Julius-Eastman moment, a short sharp bark of wry laughter fading into dead seriousness, and it caps Clayton's searingly immediate communion with Eastman's vital, contrary spirit.


The soundtrack for Harmony Korine's new film features new and old tracks from Skrillex along with contributions from Cliff Martinez, and fills out the selection with songs by Waka Flocka Flame, Meek Mill, and Gucci Mane. The disparate parts work together surprisingly well.

Spring Breakers OST

Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers was a media phenomenon before anybody had seen so much as a promotional still. For starters, Korine, the mind behind cult classics like Gummo (his directorial debut) and Kids (he wrote the screenplay for Larry Clarke's film), cast Hollywood wildcard James Franco as the uncannily RiFF RAFF-like rapper/dealer Alien while Gucci Mane makes his screen debut as his drug kingpin rival. Meanwhile, Korine tapped Disney Channel star Selena Gomez as the conflicted Spring Breaker, Faith, and former High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens as the reckless, dangerous Candy. An early teaser features the leads belting out Britney Spears' "…Baby One More Time" and that's not the only (nor the most memorable) Spears homage in the movie. And then, to top it all off, Korine hands the soundtrack to EDM figurehead Skrillex, a former Warped Tour band member turned posterboy for dubstep's more malignant cliches.
It's clear from the opening credits of Spring Breakers-- the most cartoonishly turn't-up Spring Break scene you could possibly imagine, accompanied by the drop-heavy debauchery of Skrillex's calling card "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites"-- that Sonny Moore was the man for the job. His music, old and new, serves as the spine of Spring Breakers, a compilation that also features carefully selected rap tracks and his remix of Birdy Nam Nam's "Goin In'" along with contributions from electronic musician and soundtrack veteran Cliff Martinez. The latter, who also steered 2011's well-received and similarly tense Drive OST, is a critical presence. Both musicians contribute their own ambient-leaning, instrumental originals to the soundtrack-- Martinez handles the curious, searching electronic interludes "Pretend It's a Video Game", "Your Friends Ain't Gonna Leave With You", and "Never Gonna Get This Pussy", while Skrillex handles the relatively more aggressive textures of "Ride Home" and "Park Smoke"-- but the fiber of Spring Breakers is the sonic influence that they have on one other.
Skrillex, in particular, benefits from Martinez' presence. Though Moore has recently attempted more laid-back approaches to composition, songs like "The Reason" didn't sound as idiosyncratically him, and don't prove as captivating or recognizable as his contributions here. The new music, stitched between previously released tracks (like Skrillex's "With You, Friends (Long Drive)" and Gucci Mane's Ferrari Boyz cut "Young Niggaz"), achieves an important headspace for both the dramatic arc of the film as well as the soundtrack as a piece of music. Between the blurry revelry and the careening rush of consequence borne of violent impulse, Spring Breakers is all about the state between that original drug-fueled adrenaline burst and the depressing comedown crush. By cleverly interspersing the soundtrack with their original arrangements, Skrillex and Martinez successfully find that headspace throughout.
Most importantly, Spring Breakers teases out the connections between songs that would be difficult to hear otherwise, offering new entry points. Take Waka Flocka's "Fuck This Industry"; on Flockaveli, the track comes across as repentant and desperate, a song that finds a self-doubting Flocka siphoning out his signature bellow in favor of a restrained, contemplative whisper. Here, it serves as a momentary sense-collecting pause before the chaos. By leading into Martinez pieces, Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" gains a pensive new tone, a fresh context that's only underlined by the orchestral back end redux of that track, as well as the Martinez/Skrillex sequel "Son of Scary Monsters". On Ferrari Boyz, "Young Niggaz" is known as one of the only tracks where Gucci and Waka didn't sound totally asleep, but here, it's a flag-bearer for shaking away the dark thoughts and getting back to the party; after all, it's spring break.
There's a turning point of the film, where some characters decide they're overwhelmed and scared by this neon fantasy world and others find it all the more captivating. The question arises: Do we leave the party, or stay? Given its relatively seamless mesh of spiky, aggro party music and the more contemplative electronic moments created by Martinez and Moore, Spring Breakers is the rare soundtrack that covers both extremes and makes it work as a whole.


The members of Low retreated deep into rural Wisconsin with producer BJ Burton and recorded their latest album at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Eau Claire. The band hasn’t sounded this lively in years; maybe not since its Sub Pop debut The Great Destroyer from a decade ago.

Ones and Sixes

Low will always be considered the quintessential slowcore band, but their real mastery, and the secret to their decades-long vitality, lies in something more intangible than tempo. They have a preternatural mastery of arrangement and dynamics, an instinct for when and how to pick the exact right moment to lift the volume a bit, to accent a repetitive moment with this synth line or that fuzzed guitar. The steady pace and the melancholy atmospherics are important, but without their keen ear for detail, the music would simply be a haze.
Admittedly, Low’s last album The Invisible Way, produced by Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and released in 2013, could have benefited from a few more of those lively punctuations. But it seems as though the fallout from that experience woke the band up, and Ones and Sixes is a far more interesting record for it. To create their new one, the members retreated deep into rural Wisconsin with producer BJ Burton and recorded at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Eau Claire. It’s hard to tell what might have triggered it, but the band hasn’t sounded this lively in years; maybe not since its Sub Pop debut The Great Destroyer from a decade ago.
The opening track "Gentle" is a discomfiting funeral dirge that sets an unnerving mood early on. The instrumentation combines static-y bits of industrial percussion with rich, elegant keyboard accents, as Mimi Parker’s near-falsetto flutters in and out, sometimes multi-tracked and sometimes padded out with as much reverb as can conceivably be applied. The song's verses feel like free-associative jumbles of words like, "gentle, battle, torture, stable and silence", underscoring the song's fitful, uneasy energy.
That mood settles into the album, which otherwise doesn't offer dramatic shifts. Airy, luscious backing vocals and sparse, gritty instrumentation remain the mainstay of Low’s sound, and they are used to wondrous effect on the nearly 10-minute long penultimate track "Landslide". But there’s a real immediacy and liveliness to Alan Sparhawk's vocals and playing there that’s been missing from the group’s more recent records. His singing is so full and present on songs like "Spanish Translation" and "Lies" that it feels like a renewed bid for your undivided attention. And as much as they are able to make a conventional "pop" song then "No End" is it. For all intents and purposes it’s a pretty standard, under three-minute, get-in and get-out love song, and based on the words alone, a very treacly one at that: "I couldn’t wait to come back through/ To you." Not exactly a left-turn, but a welcome, additional flavor.
Most bands don’t have either the stamina or the creative drive to make it up to and past the 20-year mark. The ones that do rarely find new things to say. As its enters its third decade making music, Low has reached a comfortable but engaging stride creating music that consistently seems to be at odds with itself. Ones and Sixes is all at once beautiful, ugly, tense, warm, inviting and repellent. It’s an emotional and sonic juggling act where even the slightest bum-note would draw attention to itself. As always with Low, the beauty is all about the details.


On her debut, Polly Jean Harvey matched Patti Smith’s incandescence with Bessie Smith’s lasciviousness, outplayed everyone on the British indie circuit, and became an instant star.

Dry

If PJ Harvey had her way, she would have made her public debut on Slint’s Spiderland. At age 20 or so, she answered the Kentucky five-piece’s call for a female backing vocalist, but never heard back. In one way, you can imagine it: both subtly violent acts from their respective south, with the accents to prove it. But even at the turn of the 1990s, the idea of Polly Jean Harvey bringing up the rear is hard to fathom—her Westcountry leer would have unleashed the devil incarnate into Slint’s whispered intimations of evil. Instead, Harvey’s debut single, which came nine months after Spiderland, in December ’91, confronted the danger of fulfilling someone else’s ideal.
Released on indie label Too Pure off the back of a mailed-in demo and John Peel’s enthusiasm, “Dress” is a young woman’s desperate and naive attempt at seduction. Where riot grrrls in the Pacific Northwest were pouring acid on the grotesque mating charade, Harvey, fresh out of her first relationship, intensified the danger by playing the willing ingenue. In the song, she struggles against femininity’s constricting bodice; Eve drowning in apples, “spilling over like a heavy loaded fruit tree.” For all her efforts, it’s the wrong outfit: “‘You purdy thang,’ my man says, ‘But I bought you beautiful dresses,’” she mimics, sneering like the creep in a western. Her “clean and sparkling” dress instantly becomes a filthy rag, her identity abject: “Better get it out of this room/A falling woman in dancing costume.” Harvey’s identity, though, was immediately forged: Funny, furious, and capable of writing hooks—the taunted “If you put it on, if you put it on”—that burned like lit fuses.
Two months later, in February 1992, Harvey followed “Dress” with second single “Sheela-Na-Gig,” a vocal tour-de-force: wheedling as she implores a man to gaze upon her “ruby-red ruby lips,” puffed up on revulsion—or is it awe?—as he dismisses her with a comparison to the titular Celtic fertility carving that depicts deranged women spreading their engorged vulvas: Her shout of “You exhibitionist!” sounds at once like a Puritan splutter and a belly laugh__.__ She vamps through a line from South Pacific (“Gonna wash that man right outta my hair”) and has her paramor recoil at her “dirty pillows,” like the mother in Stephen King’s Carrie, reinforcing her portrayal of a young woman doomed to humiliation through mimicking the candied sexuality of films and magazines. Capable only of seeing her as virgin or whore, this guy’s dismissal is horrifying, but Harvey’s extremes make it funny, and she channels her beloved Pixies’ loud-quiet dynamic into thunderous slapstick.
After just two singles, it was obvious that Harvey didn’t fit anyone’s pre-existing rock ideals. Marrying brutal heft and deft melodies, she became Britain’s first viable answer to grunge’s iconoclasts and their underground ’80s forebears. She matched Patti Smith’s incandescence, Bessie Smith’s lasciviousness, Angela Carter’s grim subversions of feminine archetypes. She outplayed everyone on Britain’s indie circuit—the long-shorted weak piss of Carter USM, Silverfish, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin—and became an instant star.
Her dark humor seemed to go in tandem with her Dorset upbringing, where she wrung sheep’s testicles on her parents’ farm, cropped her hair, and peed standing up to fit in with the boys. The rest of Britain has a limited understanding of the country’s south-west, perceiving it as a desolate cultural backwater. This daring, skinny thing from the sticks fearlessly singing about sex and subjugation was a media curio. She was from the tiny village of Corscombe, but where she had come from felt like a different matter altogether.
Her background offers some clues, although nothing can really account for this shy girl’s self-possessed power. Harvey’s stonemason parents had taught her to create her own culture. Her hippy mother was fed up of missing out on live music and invited rock and blues bands down to play in the local village hall—“sixth” Rolling Stone Ian Stewart was a regular visitor to the family home. The artists earned their keep by teaching the young Harvey guitar and saxophone. She had been raised listening to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica over dinner, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which upset the very young Harvey so much it soon went out of rotation. She briefly rebelled against her parents’ tastes, embracing Duran Duran for a heartbeat in her early teens, before realizing that their record collection was golden: Howlin’ Wolf, Dylan, the Stones. Carnal music fit her extreme surroundings—the sheer Jurassic coast cliff faces and easy familiarity with death on the farm.
After a brief stint touring Europe with Automatic Dlamini, she quit that band to pursue her own music, planning to pack it in the following year and take up her place studying sculpture at London’s Saint Martins College. The PJ Harvey Trio were undeterred when, at their first gig, the proprietor offered them money to stop playing because everyone was leaving. (They took the cash and split.) Off the back of “Dress,” Too Pure gave her £2000 (then $5000) to make an album, and she went to the Icehouse in nearby Yeovil to record with her core band, bassist Steve Vaughan and drummer Rob Ellis.
Dry is a volcano and the scorched earth surrounding it, ripped with landsliding guitars, cowpunk mania, twisted blues, profound extremes, and power chords that hit like boulders dropped from on high. She never thought she’d have the opportunity to make a record, “so I felt like I had to get everything on it as well as I possibly could, because it was probably my only chance. It felt very extreme for that reason,” she told Filter in 2004. It was also a reaction against the “lame” music around at that time, she told The Telegraph in 2001. “I’m somebody who looks for something that’s going to shock or excite me; that really shakes me up in some way inside, so you have to stop and really take a look at what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it. And nothing was doing that for me. So I had to do it for myself.”
From Dry’s first line, Harvey relishes in that ambiguity, forcing the listener to figure out what they’re feeling and why. “Ohhh myyy loverrr,” she rasps in her thick accent, as if seducing someone with her dying breath. She’s assuring her man that it’s fine for him to see another woman simultaneously, promising she’ll soak up his troubles while he can take whatever he likes: Her character understands that his time is limited, his satisfaction paramount, and that compromise is the fate of all women. The bass thuds like a domino line of falling oak trees, while a harmonium’s eerie whine makes the song feel like a dark, lost folk standard.
She follows the streak of subjugation: A frenzied prayer to the Virgin Mary on “O Stella,” to guide her through the night on “Dress.” Then comes “Victory,” where she’s a post-punk Vera Lynn lustily imploring the boys to “sweat, dig—I’ll mop it right off your brow.” On the earthy lurch of “Happy and Bleeding” she loses her virginity and turns from fresh fruit to rotten peach both “long overdue” and “too early,” her “idle hole” then rejected on “Sheela-Na-Gig.” That’s the first half of Dry: blitzing the rigged path young women must walk from innocence to sullied castoff. It’s rife with disappointment and violence, but Harvey treats the double standard for the absurd cabaret it is, making perfect sense of it through her formative blues vocabulary. She plays victim in her words and aggressor with her guitar, adopting a libidinous swagger that’s as nasty and thrilling as the abuser who keeps her coming back for more. Nobody sings like PJ Harvey sings on Dry, veering perilously (but exactingly) between wheedling, raging, vamping, always with a sly wink.
These extreme contrasts confused critics at the time: Dry played like a feminist statement but she refused the label, wondering why anyone remarked on her sexual lyrics when plenty of rock and blues bands had gone further before her. Mostly dressed in black, her hair scraped back severely, she seemed to eschew image, but then posed topless on the cover of NME. She insisted that there was no depth to the lyrics, and professed to being baffled by people’s attempts to interpret them, but her considered use of female archetypes to depict a woman’s fall and subsequent vengeance told a different story. All of these things were true at once, part of her distancing push-and-pull. As she told Spin in ’93, “The biggest protection you can have is if people think they’ve got you and they haven’t got you at all.”
She pulls the same trick on Dry’s scumbag subject, going into the record's vengeful second half. She’s Delilah to his Samson on “Hair,” flattering him into submission and cutting off his mane. “I’ll keep it safe,” she sings, sounding emboldened by power, before flipping on a knife edge, realizing: “You’re mine.” The bass zooms as if mapping the swift transfer of power; the rhythm section pounds like Samson’s impotent rage. “Joe” is the record’s most manic moment. There’s no quiet-loud shift, just pure piledriver dynamics as she spits nails at the treachery she’s experienced: “Always thought you’d come rushing in to clear the shit out of my eye/Joe, ain’t you my buddy, thee?”
But rather than commit bloody murder as you might expect, she retreats on “Plants and Rags,” “[easing] myself into a body bag,” and finding solace at home: “Who thought they could take away that place?” she asks as the violin swirls to a deranged squall. Her love of Slint comes through on the menacing fretboard harmonics of “Fountain,” where she washes herself clean and a Jesus-like figure shrouds her modesty in leaves. On “Water,” her first utterance of the word sounds like she’s dying of thirst. By the chorus, when she’s walked into the sea, invoking Mary and Jesus again, she sounds as though the crashing waves are emanating from her own throat.
Critics have theorized that she drowns herself at the end of the album, to rid the shame from her body. But it sounds more like a rebirth; the cure to her dryness, finding satisfaction on her own terms and eradicating the need she had looked to someone else to fill. Dry is an exciting, scary joyride through the dawning realization that learning to please yourself yields far greater pleasure than relying on others to do it for you: These gory myths are her lover’s discourse, an apocalypse—in the revelatory sense—that she would push even further on 1993’s Rid of Me (after her immediate fame resulted in a nervous breakdown). Following the NYC gloss of 2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, she attempted to tap back into this sound on 2004’s Uh Huh Her, but the lack of her debut’s extreme urgency limited its success. On Dry, Harvey’s character may appear to subjugate her gratification, but it’s all there, bursting out in the zeal of her playing.
“It’s the same kind of excitement, playing music, as in a sexual relationship, and the two go hand-in-hand,” she told a French TV show in ’93. “And I think I find music physically exciting as well—actually playing loud music and standing in front of a bass amplifier is quite a sexual experience, I think.” She tells a story about playing in Chicago, and how every time Steve Vaughan hit an A, she got vibrations right up to her middle. “Wonderful,” she muses. “We play a lot of songs in A as well, so it was a good night.” The French journalist gurgles like a stunned baby, unable to process this frank, feral waif who’s got it all figured out.


The English and French musician makes crystalline electro-pop songs about mistakes, heartbreaks, and relationships that never got far enough to be either.

forgive too slow

Oxford and Lyon musician Julia-Sophie makes music about the temptation to relive your past: the more regrets that remain, the stronger the gravitational pull. Julia-Sophie dates several of her own regrets back to Little Fish, a short-lived garage frock’n’roll duo she led at the turn of the 2010s. Little Fish toured with Hole, Blondie, and Juliette Lewis (2010 was a time)—names splashy enough that, over a decade later, interviewers still ask about her stint in the band, thirsty for anything that might resemble Courtney Love goss. There are stories—a book-length mythology of this band exists, called Fuck the Radio, We’ve Got Apple Juice—but years later, Julie-Sophie remembered her time as a twentysomething industry scrapper not with rock bravado or “happy to be here” tact, but as a life that “broke [her], both as an artist and a human.”
Julia-Sophie spent the intervening years learning to unbreak herself—and to reconstruct her music. Little Fish sounded about what you’d expect from triangulating Hole, Blondie, and Juliette Lewis: solid, in a kitschy sort of way. Julia-Sophie’s next project, pop-adjacent collective Candy Says, similarly sounded about what you’d expect from a band that recorded a dark electro cover of “Running Up That Hill” for a Netflix movie. Then she went mostly solo, working with a collaborator credited only as “B,” and her music got stranger. Julia-Sophie and B share an affinity with downtempo artists like Four Tet and Nicolás Jaar for heady sounds and studio work engineered like a puzzle box. Percussion sounds like nervous flutters; arrangements sound like the claustrophobic interiors of bathyspheres.
“I feel like it’s been pretty intense listening to Julia-Sophie so far,” Julia-Sophie told The Quietus in 2021. Basic themes can be extrapolated from the titles of her past EPs, y? and </3, but the levity doesn’t extend past these cutesy winks at heartbreak and existential questioning. She hinted that the follow-up record might be “warmer”; that didn’t happen. forgive too slow is as grueling a listen, and as good an introduction, as either EP: songs, crystalline like teardrops, about mistakes, heartbreaks, and relationships that never got far enough to be either.
On paper, this doesn’t sound much different from the tastefully emotive pop that can be heard every week on BBC Radio 6. (Her singles have also been playlisted there.) But Julia-Sophie’s confessionals actually confess things. “Numb” makes a statement with a Depeche Mode synth-throb that goes past “chilly” to “unforgiving” and an equally self-lacerating monologue: “Instead of loving you back, I cheated and I lied, I lost myself in drugs and I lost myself inside.” The track derives its power not from raw emotion but from the dispassionate tone of a disaster surveyor itemizing wreckage. Preceding this is “Lose My Mind,” an electro track with an arrangement that sounds like it’s periodically overclocking and a mood heightened to the point of horror. Preceding that is “I Was Only”: a withering melody, a repeated shuddering chord, and a cocoon-like arrangement tuned for maximum 3 a.m. languishing.
That kind of stuff isn’t sustainable, of course. Just as evolution pulls animals ever closer toward becoming crabs, market forces pull downtempo artists ever closer toward crossover pop. To its credit, forgive too slow complicates what could have been mid, sadgirl mush. “Falling” is a slow-burn yearner, but it doesn’t enter the bedroom chorus without flipping “O Superman” first. “Comfort You” is essentially an adult-contemporary ballad—gloss over some of the lyrics, and it could soundtrack a slow dance. But its arrangement is bookended by a hesitant click track and an ominous buzz, and Julia-Sophie’s vocal never quite sounds present in the romantic moment.
And then there’s “Wishful Thinking,” one of the most overt Body Talk rips in a truly crowded field; the synth intro is right out of “Hang With Me,” and the general situation is reminiscent of a “Call Your Girlfriend” halfway-affair. Julia-Sophie’s song is more introverted than Robyn’s, and her story far less hopeful: This love triangle won’t be fixed by a phone call. But as a single, it just sounds like a ruthless pop pivot—one so effective that it actually misrepresents the album. “Wishful Thinking” makes much more sense in its proper sequencing. The following track, “Better,” is the bleakest on the record: plainspoken misery over a flatline buzz. But it ends with a reprise of the “Wishful Thinking” intro, not spangly but frantic, not neatly packaged but ricocheting all over the place. The two songs feel like halves of a complete story: having an illicit crush, giving it up or failing at it, then trying to summon the leftover energy to pull yourself out.


The psychic bond between Kanye West and Kid Cudi yields a spacious and melancholy album about brokenness—thoughts are fragmented, relationships are ended, and societal ties are cut.

Kids See Ghosts / Kanye West / Kid Cudi: Kids See Ghosts

Kids See Ghosts

He just turned 41, and Kanye West still craves nothing more than to make a big mess, plunge into it headfirst, and take us with him. This impulse unites him with his dragon-energy brother in the White House, who similarly revels in just saying it out loud to see how it feels. It must be intoxicating to open your mouth and say whatever occurs to you, knowing you will endure mild censure at worst before reaping your rewards. For Kanye, the rewards are already here: Despite being the least finished-sounding recording of his career, last week’s Ye marked some of his biggest first-week returns in years; at one point, its seven tracks doubled as the seven most popular songs on Spotify. Big messes, it turns out, work for guys like him.
So here we are, in week three of the big mess he is currently making. After Pusha T’s compact and sturdy Daytona and the hobbled and confused ye, we now have Kids See Ghosts, Kanye’s collaborative project with Kid Cudi. Three down, two to go, or so we tell ourselves, like beleaguered parents boarding a series of connecting flights with a small child. West has turned the album cycle into his version of Calvinball, jubilantly inventing rules while the rest of us hop along desperately in his wake.
Flail hard enough and long enough, though, and you will hit some targets. On Kids See Ghosts, the mess at least feels more purposeful, and the songs are the most intriguing ones to emerge from this Wyoming project thus far. Since 2013’s Yeezus, West has been testing the line between “daringly raw” and “unfinished,” but on Kids See Ghosts, he vigorously erases it. G.O.O.D. Music label boss Pusha T assures us “the details is ironed out” on the album opener “Feel the Love,” a particularly poignant promise considering the track itself was delivered to all streaming partners mislabeled. It is an eerie arena in which to watch an Event Album unfold, one where the silences resound as deafeningly as the screams, where the props are missing or moved into place a beat too late.
A lot of the energy that ye seemed to be gasping for fills the lungs of this project, and it’s humbling to consider how much this material might have enlivened West’s own album. They aspire to the same frayed edge: cut-off stumps of song bits bleeding into the next. “You should quit your job to this,” West shouts on “Freeee (Ghost Town Pt. 2),” a continuation of “Ghost Town,” the emotional peak of Ye. As he does on the original, he equates total numbness as freedom, and as a buzzing cello pecks at its tendons and the distorted drums smash into bone, you are left to contemplate the scary sort of freedom West prizes. It is the freedom of mania, of letting your mind gallop off its leash in as many directions at once. For anyone with personal experience with mania, there will be a pang of recognition in this exhilaration, as well as the understanding of how quickly the sensation curdles into another dead end.
The most powerful moments on Kids See Ghosts underline this freedom with a wistful bite, suggesting it comes with a lasting price. This is an album about brokenness—thoughts fragmented, relationships ended, societal ties cut. “Reborn” is the most unhurried and atmospheric music of this chaotic cycle, a long spacious breath of a drum track that opens onto one of West’s best verses in years. In it, he offers something close to a full explanation for his recent behavior: “What an awesome thing, engulfed in shame/I want all the pain/I want all the smoke/I want all the blame.” There is an emotional honesty, at least, to the admission that he is nakedly grasping for whatever oxygen the public will give him, no matter the contaminants he takes in along the way.
Hovering uneasily over the project, as it has over this entire Yeezy Season, is the specter of mental health. On the one hand, West has shown bravery in talking about his apparent bipolar diagnosis. But there is also danger, and potential stigmatization, in equating Kanye’s celebrity lawlessness—available only to him and those in his orbit—with mental health. Most people, after all, whatever their private struggles, don’t have the resources to stage their free falls into the arms of an entire industry built to placate them. Mental health, its effects on you, on those who love you: This is not a topic to be touched on lightly, and apart from scrawling his diagnosis on the cover of ye, there is a very real sense that he is simply bringing up these issues, not probing them.
One of the revelations of Kids See Ghosts is how Cudi emerges as a better angel, a concerned but empathic friend who provides emotional ballast. Cudi, of course, has a few years on West in acknowledging his struggles with mental health. “Keep moving forward,” Cudi sings gently on “Reborn,” adding, “peace is something that starts with me.” His presence feels calming, cooling. The two men have always been better together than apart, lending depth and weight to each other's on-record presences. Cudi’s presence girds West's wild energy with a melancholy that adds some highlight and shadow to the weightless cartoon West has offered us. Cudi’s always struggled with being two-dimensional on his own records, but here he brings a soul and depth that his mentor can't muster.
“Cudi Montage” even relocates a precious, nearly vanished quantity of Kanye’s music—empathy. The song samples Kurt Cobain’s “Burn the Rain,” a home-recorded scrap that was unearthed to soundtrack the 2015 documentary Montage of Heck. The movie was uneasy viewing, splitting the line between revelation and violation, and the music that wallpapered it felt intensely private, doodles that were meant for one mind, not the world. It is an oddly appropriate source for Kanye, a combination of ingenuity and bad taste that suits the man who sampled “Strange Fruit” so he could moan about child support.
In his verse, Kanye revisits the wages of cyclical violence—“Everybody want world peace until your niece gets shot in dome piece.” The images are well-worn, down to their grim details (“auntie crying on the concrete”), but it is one of West’s most sustained efforts to imagine someone else’s life since he gave us the “Public visitation, we met at Borders” scenario in “All of the Lights.” The verse concludes with a namecheck of Alice Johnson, the African-American woman whom President Trump pardoned on Kim Kardashian’s urging, just last week. Like everything else in this wildly unstable political moment, the pardon (and its mention in song) slides across a tilted stage filled with compromised actors. What remains solid is the song itself, which opens into a simple plea after the verse fades: “Lord shine your light on me; save me please.” For the first time in years, Kanye sounds at peace. Here he is, again, where he has always yearned to be: damned, on the brink of irredeemable, gazing directly into some abyss from which he could never climb out.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Pimp C and Bun B’s 1996 masterpiece about a weekend in Houston that became a touchstone for Southern rap.

Ridin’ Dirty

On December 4, 1995, Pimp C and DJ Screw sat in the parking lot of a Houston convenience store and began plotting for the night. After an uneasy first encounter at a local record store years prior, they’d become fast friends. Pimp, one half of the duo Underground Kingz, was the producer known for wild boasts and determination. Screw’s sound—a slowed-down drag of the world to a hallucinogenic crawl—engulfed the city.
The night was supposed to be about bullshittin’—slide to a neighborhood joint called Carrington’s with Lil’ Keke, a member of Screw’s famed Screwed Up Click outfit, party, and then record a version of a song Pimp had been working on. Inside the car, Pimp was bemused about life. Weeks prior, he was in Chicago on behalf of Jive Records, recording material for Underground Kingz’ then-untitled third album. None of it sounded good enough to compare to the group’s previous effort, 1994’s Super Tight. Even his mother, UGK’s manager Mama Wes, called the demos “boo-boo.”
But the two never made it to the studio to record. They never made it past Carrington’s. Instead, the two stopped to pick up styrofoam cups and Swisher Sweets to further activate the night. Screw and Pimp parked next to an undercover police officer outside of a convenience store neighboring Carrington’s. As the cop smelled the weed smoke in the air, he radioed for backup. Within moments, Pimp C and DJ Screw were in handcuffs and headed to the Harris County Jail. They bonded out two days later.
The arrest—coupled with a tragic house fire in Dallas four days later, claiming the lives of four children, including the son of UGK hypeman Bo-Bo Luchiano—became the basis for “One Day,” the peak and tone-setter of 1996’s Ridin’ Dirty. Pimp lamented on the child’s death as if it were his own son, questioning God with the fearlessness of a sinner (“Why you let these killas live and take my homeboy son away?”)
The base of Ridin’ Dirty aligns with the ethos of UGK as a whole: perseverance in the face of a mountain of unfortunate circumstances. At first, “One Day” didn’t even belong to UGK. The rumbling guitars that lurch like impending sorrow from the Isley Brothers’ “Ain’t I Been Good To You”—and Ronnie Spencer’s near-perfect Ronald Isley impression —was initially in the possession of Mr. 3-2, a Houston stalwart and Rap-A-Lot Records artist known city-wide. Before Snoop Dogg uttered, “We don’t love these hoes,” he learned it from 3-2. Before Roc-A-Fella crafted a posse cut in “1-900-Hustler” to highlight Freeway on The Dynasty: Roc La Familia, it belonged to 3-2 and Big Mike of the Convicts in “1-900-Dial-A-Crook.”
UGK’s other half, Bun B, was hesitant to rhyme over “One Day,” seeing that the song initially belonged to 3-2, and rhyming over a dirge of production like “One Day” disrupted the bouncy, even-keeled production UGK was known for. But, compelled by the belief that UGK needed a song that people felt, Bun relented and recorded a verse. He mourns over a friend lost to a “funky ass dice game” and sneers that the prison-industrial complex was nothing more than an endless cycle for Black men. 3-2 barely even raps: His voice contorts into a sullen waltz that moves between understanding the bleakness of his reality and seeking protection while navigating crack transactions and potential death. He considered himself a wayward soul since his mom kicked him out; he wanted a proper burial in his neighborhood right next to the gas station.
“As far as Pimp and I are concerned, it’s the first real UGK album,” Bun would later tell journalist Sama’an Ashrawi on his The Nostalgia Mixtape podcast. “Ridin’ Dirty is, in our mind, the first actual complete thought of UGK as far as an album is concerned.” For four years and across two prior albums, the group fought with their label, Jive Records, and had bruises to show for it. There was a disconnect; UGK would rather the label send them studio equipment to record Ridin’ Dirty as opposed to a standard monetary advance. Dating back to their debut album, Too Hard To Swallow, UGK knew Jive for shady, underhanded business. The label reproduced songs behind Pimp’s back in order to avoid paying to clear samples. Grandiose album concepts were scrapped due to the label, once again, being fiscally conservative. Even when it came time for Ridin’ Dirty, Jive refused to make a video for either of the two proposed singles, “One Day” and “Fuck My Car,” or even ship them for radio airplay. By the time UGK shot a video for “Wood Wheel,” a single from the Rap-A-Lot compilation album RNDS in 1999, it had been five years since their last video for “It’s Supposed To Bubble.”
When Bun and Pimp first met KRS-One at the label’s New York offices in 1992, they came with a point to prove. KRS, long a protector of what hip-hop truly meant, felt that if the music wasn’t made within New York’s five boroughs, it wasn’t rap. And UGK, according to KRS, was country rap.  Now, they were labelmates. Instead of a gracious embrace, UGK were met by a warning from KRS that came too late: Don’t sign to Jive. “We were happy for about 15 minutes and then … reality set in,” Bun would later tell journalist Matt Sonzala. “We never even had the chance to be disillusioned about having a record deal. We regretted it right after signing.” UGK weren’t commercial darlings, they were fixated squarely on making music for the people. But by sheer word of mouth, Ridin’ Dirty sold over 850,000 copies, earning UGK their first and only gold plaque. It gave the South, a region already galvanized by André 3000 at the 1995 Source Awards, a blueprint for how a soulful rap album could sound and feel.
The situation with Jive, the storm of emotion and strife internally affecting the group, would manifest itself into a moment of show and prove for UGK. No producer in the South felt more proudly about his creations than Pimp. The son of a trumpet player who eventually learned piano by ear, he went from performing in New York with his high school choir to using the Meters’ guitarist Leo Nocentelli as a session musician. Sampling records, from the Stax sound of Isaac Hayes to the psychedelic crawl of Bootsy Collins, from the groove of the Fatback Band to Wes Montgomery’s virtuoso guitar work, was as mutually important as the reality UGK conveyed in raps. After hearing Dr. Dre master the cinematic style of music production for N.W.A, it influenced Pimp to make every sound feel like a score to a film.
After the failed Chicago sessions at Jive’s Battery Studios, Pimp and Bun felt they needed to be home in order to fully embrace what Ridin’ Dirty was supposed to be. At the same time, the rush of creativity emanating from DJ Screw’s house made “home” feel like the center of the universe. In Screw, Pimp and Bun found a kindred spirit. UGK already spoke for Houston culture, crushing small aspects in car culture and laced cigarettes for their 1994 album Super Tight. The music had to align with the world they inhabited. Chapter 182: Ridin’ Dirty—a loose and free-wheeling tape of freestyles was the precursor to the album. Although Houston had wholesalers and marketplaces to pick up music, picking up Screw tapes was an entirely different journey. One had to personally drive to Screw’s house on the Southside of town, wait for his gate to be buzzed open around 7 p.m. and get their music. Pimp and Bun became further immortalized and endeared to Houston’s underground music culture rattling off rhymes about losing Eazy-E to AIDS, puffing their chests out with thick bravado, and echoing the slang that was wholly Houston and Southeast, Texas: slabs, barre, drank, grills, throwin’ up the deuce, comin’ dine, etc. Jive couldn’t understand the purpose of Screw music. As a middle finger to the label, the album version of Ridin’ Dirty is the glossiest version of a Screw tape ever imagined; a muggy and rich malaise of soul and everyman narratives.
A weekend in Houston became the underlying concept for Ridin’ Dirty. Pimp and Bun, seeing themselves already as established characters, worked around creations of partying, bombast, and reflection. The weight of “One Day” is guilt-ridden and remorseful. Inside the rolling thump of “Diamonds & Wood,” a lift from Bootsy Collins’ “Munchies For Your Love,” Pimp allowed his real-life drama with the mother of his son, Chad Butler II, to play out (“All we do now is fuck and fight”) and detail the frustration of family dynamics and faceless enemies. “I stopped smokin’ with them haters back in ’94,” he bluntly states. “Niggas talk a lot of shit in a safe place, I know cause he can’t look me eye-to-eye when he in my face.”
It was never about outright wordplay with Pimp—pointed directness with clarity was his calling as a rapper. He left his complexity for his production. Armed with N.O. Joe, the New Orleans-born producer who had helmed much of the bleak psychodrama of Scarface’s The Diary, Pimp dug deeper in his already chaotic mind to live up to the likes of Hayes and Curtis Mayfield. Smoke D, a UGK affiliate serving time in a Mississippi prison for manslaughter, operates as the album’s unsuspecting guide, offering comedy and reality in various interludes through jailhouse recordings. Bumpy funk transitions were layered underneath flippant guitar work for “Pinky Ring,” horror style piano stabs underscore the late-night creep of “3 In The Mornin.” Mellow guitar licks and drums pump through “Touched” where Bun indirectly gifts JAY-Z the basis for a story he’d use later (“Now once upon a time not too long ago...”). The mutated bassline of Detroit funk band the Brides of Funkenstein’s “Smoke Signals” was shifted around for “Murder,” morphing the track into the most sinister, yet defiant UGK record of all.
“I’m still Pimp C bitch, so what the fuck is up?” Pimp would declare on “Murder.” It’s tough, a merciless downhill jaunt of chaos where no one was safe. Pimp’s verse, rooted in the idea of bringing the outside world to UGK’s close proximity, is among the all-time hardest opening verses in rap. Discussions of cocaine prices and slinging dope quickly destroyed the myth that the group were just characters you heard on CD or cassette. Bun and Pimp didn’t want to exude the fantasy of mafioso kingpins in the vein of JAY-Z, Raekwon, or The Notorious B.I.G. Songs like “Cocaine in the Back of the Ride” and “Pocket Full of Stones” granted humanity and consequence to a trade New York made feel flamboyant; an elaborate con.
When Pro Tools evolved in the mid-1990s, it allowed artists to take a short cut in the studio and punch in vocals to help speed up the recording process. Ridin’ Dirty is the first album in hip-hop to ever use it, according to Bun. While recording his “Murder” verse with N.O. Joe, Bun woke up from sitting at the control panel, exhausted from a prior night of partying. With the reel still going, he began building a world with easy identifiers (“Well it’s Bun B bitch, and I’m the king of movin’ chickens”) and continued as if he were one man going up against 15 years worth of criticism about the South not having rappers. For nearly two minutes, Bun displays the nimbleness he picked up from ciphers with 3-2 and Chapter 182: double entendres and metered stacking of one-liners and demolishing everything within sight. He found pockets like this often, namely for “They Down With Us,” a 2000 romp with Scarface on top of Boogie Down Productions’ “I’m Still #1.” When he was done with the verse, Bun exited the booth and fell asleep; an implausible verse finished in one take.
Ridin’ Dirty never comes back to the ridiculous highs of its first two songs, or the ruminative “Diamonds & Wood” or “Hi-Life.” But its heart remains central to what UGK means as a whole, to a region once cast aside and now is at the forefront. They wouldn’t have a chance to deliver a proper follow-up until 11 years later due to Pimp C spending a large bulk of his final years in prison. They also never truly got the recognition they richly deserved from their label, and were too stubborn to allow industry politics to swallow them whole. Anger from watching a label attempt to sabotage and hijack their identity and regional disrespect were the anchors of UGK’s greatest work, and only they could give the levity it needed.

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Featuring collaborators from across the Drag City universe and a repertoire of gospel, country, pop, and rock covers, Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s lockdown double-album is playful and spirited.

Bill Callahan / Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Blind Date Party

Blind Date Party

In October of 2020, Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy posted a cover of the Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens’ 1967 protest anthem “Blackness of the Night.” “For this bad bad world, I’m beginning to doubt/I’m alone and there is no one by my side,” the Bills harmonize, Callahan low and steady, Will Oldham lilting above, over a gentle shuffle of acoustic guitar and synth courtesy of their labelmate Azita Youssefi. Though it’s a song centered on solitude and loneliness, sung from the point of view of an outcast, the recording exudes a spirit of camaraderie, longtime compatriots reaching across the digital expanse to connect, “Determined to make a new friend out of an old favorite.”
It would have been lovely enough on its own, but the covers kept coming, through the fall and into winter, each pairing Callahan and Oldham with a new collaborator from the diverse Drag City roster. All 19 are collected on the newly issued Blind Date Party, which functions less like a singles collection and more like an overstuffed double album: discursive, playful, and full of imagination. While a few selections hew close to the country, hushed-folk balladry deep cuts one might expect—songwriters include Leonard Cohen, John Prine, Lowell George, and Robert Wyatt—they often veer into new territory, bouncing from hard rock to fluttering electronic pop, from meditative groovers to gospel, from the avant-garde to raucous sing-a-longs.
The album’s concept was simple: Oldham and Callahan selected songs they wanted to hear each other sing and sent them off to a wide-ranging cast of collaborators—including Meg Baird, David Pajo, David Grubbs, and Sir Richard Bishop—who arranged and recorded contributions, returning them to the duo to finesse and eventually sequence into a full-length. Quarantine necessitated plenty of records assembled in a similar manner, but the “sight unseen” aspect—Oldham and Callahan gave no specific directions or input to their collaborators—injects a sense of spontaneity into the remote sessions. “If you give someone the freedom to make their own interpretation, then there’s a good chance that what they’re going to do is going to come from their heart, you know?” Callahan says in the album’s liner notes, noting Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas’ desire to give Iggy Pop’s “I Want To Go To the Beach” a reggae makeover.
Liberties are taken, from Bill MacKay’s almost samba-like approach to Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” to the psychedelic mantras of Wyatt’s “Sea Song” with Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner. Though there were eventually some notes traded between collaborators, there are countless moments of creative verve, especially when the two take on each other’s songs. Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny resurrects one of Oldham’s Palace numbers with crunchy drums and gnarly guitars. Meanwhile, Dead Rider transforms Smog’s “Our Anniversary” into a genuine ripper, boosted by Oldham’s soaring vocals. “Everything that can sing/Is singing its mating song,” he yelps triumphantly over Todd Rittman’s overdriven riffs.
The best songs here similarly evoke the most unmoored days of the pandemic, and perhaps that’s what informs the joyful whoop Callahan lets out at the start of Lou Reed’s ode to domesticity, “Rooftop Garden,” in which the Greek lutist George Xylouris stirs up John Cale-style drones. Those moments of levity are found throughout. Paired with his Superwolf bud Matt Sweeney, Oldham employs a clipped pronunciation of the word “cocaine” on Hank William’s Jr.’s “O.D.’d In Denver,” evoking the way Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland might say it. On Billie Eilish’s “Wish You Were Gay” with Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas, the two relish in the chance to go full-on synth-pop.
At an hour and a half, Blind Date Party could be trimmed into a slimmer volume, but it plays wonderfully as a longform epic. The best mixtapes are bound together by a hard-to-pinpoint but somehow felt logic, and these songs about faith, horniness, devotion, bottoming out, and rising up bear the mark of their assemblers. “Human beings, they do miracles,” Callahan sings, backed by Ty Segall doing his best Sly Stone on a cover of Johnnie Frierson’s moving lo-fi gospel “Miracles.” In Callahan and Oldham’s hands, the song speaks in concert with the bruised hope of David Berman’s “The Wild Kindness,” performed here with Cassie Berman (David’s former wife and bandmate) and dozens of voices. As the song crescendos and Pajo’s distorted guitar snakes frantically, Callahan and Oldham’s own vocals are nearly swallowed up by the big choir. And yet, you still feel them.

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Kanye West’s 10th album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.

Donda

Contending with Kanye used to be so thrilling. There was sport in watching a rapper go toe-to-toe with their own ego the way he did, all in service of passionate pop music that lived on the knife-edge of spectacle and solipsism. He was a tightrope walker in shutter shades and Louis Vuitton stockings. Now, something has dulled in his kingdom and the thrill of watching man vs. art has turned into a rote acceptance of Kanye and his stadium-sized album release events, shelved projects, billion-dollar sneaker empire, public grappling with bipolar disorder, devotion to Christianity and non-secular music, MAGA tryst with former President Donald Trump, and presidential run of his own. The subordinate clauses that are now required to contextualize the artist himself loom large over everything he does. The music of Kanye—who once said 400 years of slavery was a choice, who once tweeted that Bill Cosby was innocent, who revolutionized rap and has not made a truly great album in five years—sounds like an afterthought, some extra sounds to have as a treat.
Donda, his 10th studio album, named after his late mother, Dr. Donda C. West, came to life across three listening events held in two of the biggest stadiums in the country. Thousands of people in-person and millions more online watched as songs about God, family, divorce, and “throat coat for the throat GOATs” blasted through speakers while a masked Kanye did push-ups and frolicked with DaBaby, who recently spouted homophobic remarks, and Marilyn Manson, who is currently facing multiple lawsuits for sexual assault. Each session felt like market-testing disguised as performance art, and was somehow worse than both 2016’s Life of Pablo event at Madison Square Garden and his infamous Jackson Hole gathering for Ye. Like any album put on to streaming services without the artist’s approval, Donda arrived barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 1-hour-and-48-minute runtime includes euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.
On the surface, the themes Kanye’s ready to explore are obvious: the ways in which his mother and his faith have molded him. Christianity has played a role in his music since at least “Jesus Walks,” but now it seems to fuel every aspect of his creativity. Pablo’s concept was built around his attempt to connect Paul the Apostle to drug kingpin Pablo Escobar to revolutionary artist Pablo Picasso. He founded the Sunday Service Choir in 2019 and re-recorded clean versions of his classic songs. Shortly after, West declared that he would stop cursing in his music altogether, which might explain why the clean version of Donda is the only one currently available to stream. It’s easy to be evangelical when you’re selective about what parts of a religion to follow.
On Donda, West’s relationship with God does push him in a slightly more thoughtful direction. The closing verse on “Off the Grid” homes in on the Tao of Kanye by laying out his religious mission statement: “I ain’t delivering heavenly messages just for the hell of it/Don’t try to test me; I keep it clean, but it can get messy.” The opening verse on “Jesus Lord” is the most focused and raw Kanye’s been in years, a swirling mass of pent-up anxiety, drug addiction, and memories of his mother. There are lines about talking to, finding power in, relying on, and needing only God—which make moments like Kanye asking a hookup to text him “heyyyyy with a bunch of y’s” and sneaky odes to getting head curdle under the somber, youth pastor vibe around it. Outbursts about delayed croissants and references to The Waterboy on Yeezus were low comedy inside high art. With all the listlessness and confusion happening on Donda, Kanye’s infamous joke bars land with a thud.
An inherent flaw to beta testing your album in full public view is that everyone becomes a tiny little executive producer, each with their own thoughts on sequencing, versions, features. Here’s my piece: Apart from the title track missing its somber verse from G.O.O.D. Music President Pusha T, Donda herself is missing from a good chunk of this album. The first two iterations of Donda featured more vocal clips of Kanye’s mother, a guiding light and platonic ideal for he and his guests to strive for. (The grounding advice found on the cut track “Never Abandon Your Family” is a felt void on this final version.) Though she makes a few appearances, her truncated presence here robs the album of its initial tribute to confiding in maternal love and wisdom. The reverence he’s at least performatively after doesn’t land, exposed by the lack of women on the 27-song tracklist, the inclusion of a parade of men accused of sexual abuse—including Chris Brown and Manson—and others with a history of homophobia, like DaBaby and Buju Banton.
The guests, however, are Donda’s clear highlights. Roddy Ricch and Baby Keem croon and shout their way to owning their respective songs, but Texas vocalist Vory shines, his wavy melodies lingering like a ghostly presence on his handful of features. Veterans Jay Electronica and Yonkers trio the Lox match West’s contemplative poise on the great “Jesus Lord Pt 2.” The sheer amount of guests and jumps in production from trap and drill to boom-bap and gospel invoke the 2012 G.O.O.D. Music album Cruel Summer, but that at least gave us “Clique” and “Mercy.” “Off the Grid” and “Junya” come the closest to bottling that manic energy, but neither will tear down a Summer Jam stage anytime soon.
Kanye is great at A&R, and that’s part of the frustration here. We already know he can corral some of the best artists around on a charcuterie board’s worth of beats, even if Drake, Kenny Beats, and West’s own protege, Travis Scott, have since better wielded this mantle. Donda standouts like the soulful “Jonah” or the soaring “Pure Souls” work because they tap into the energy of the 2021 zeitgeist, but these moments are few and far between, set adrift in a confusing sea of post-marital anxiety and surface-level religious ideation. Strip Donda of most of its context—the constant editing, the laundry list of guests with real-life cases both alleged and confirmed, the last two decades of hip-hop’s largest ego—and a significant portion of this album still sounds incomplete, searching for meaning everywhere and coming up impressively short.


Following three mixtapes released in quick succession that contained some of the most influential and gripping R&B of the new decade, Abel Tesfaye's bleak and atmospheric project makes its major label debut.

Kiss Land

Think about how some other male R&B artists might have worked with a title like "Kiss Land": in the hands of R. Kelly, perhaps it becomes his latest conceptual dramedy, an inset of the geography surveyed on “Sex Planet”. For Robin Thicke, it could serve as more proof of his insatiable need to be liked and his utter inability to look cool. Like The 20/20 Experience, the name Kiss Land brings to mind a family-friendly theme park overseen by pop music’s most tireless crowd pleaser. And if Miguel made a song called “Kiss Land”, it could be delivered with a wink, total sincerity, or, most likely, some combination thereof. But it's the name of the Weeknd’s first true major-label release, and the title track boasts characteristically lecherous lines like "not really into kisses leading into nothing." As such, Kiss Land scans as unintentionally hilarious, a sign that the project is rushing headlong into self-parody and Abel Tesfaye seems to be the only one who doesn’t realize it.
Given that, it makes sense that Tesfaye has followed up Trilogy, a compilation of his highly influential and gripping 2011 mixtapes, with the rock'n'roll trope that results from ego and self-awareness becoming inversely proportional: a concept album about “life on the road." I could tell you that Kiss Land is dolorous, hook-averse, emotionally despondent, and says appalling things to women 85% of the time, but that was also true of Trilogy. Thing is, the earlier material also had some indelible melodies (mostly on House of Balloons), innovative textures (mostly on Thursday), and all-consuming atmosphere (mostly on Echoes of Silence). Kiss Land does manage some of the latter two qualities, but to seriously diminishing returns.
While it doesn’t stretch far beyond the boundaries established by Trilogy, Kiss Land is a reflection of the Weeknd’s new reality, of what happens when studio nerds have access to massive appearance fees and the finest engineers in the world. A disembodied Emika sample and lithe, menacing drum programming evoke an android sadness on “Professional” that makes Tesfaye actually sound believable when he tries to turn the V.I.P. into “Atrocity Exhibition”. On “Adaptation”, the Police sound as threatening as any of the dancehall apparitions that haunted Yeezus, while on “Belong to the World”, the percussion of Portishead’s “Machine Gun” is slightly reconfigured and jacked up to punishing speed. The best songs here bring the Weeknd closer to where the project started on the comparitively pop-oriented House of Balloons. “Wanderlust” is springy disco that moves with unusual vigor, and in pitching up its vocal samples rather than screwing them down, it imparts Tesfaye getting caught up in the moment, left a little breathless. And while the Drake feature “Live For” is more or less a rewrite of *Take Care’*s “Crew Love”, it signifies happiness even if it doesn’t express it. Otherwise, without any strong melodic tether, songs drift by like the window view from a redeye flight, where the free champagne blurs the bloodshot sunrises and indistinguishable cloud banks.
So while Kiss Land creates an immersive atmosphere, it rarely feels grounded with a sense of place. On Trilogy, Toronto established a tangible setting, where Tesfaye was beginning to become a “somebody in a nobody town”, to quote “Professional”. Sure, he was palling around with Drake and was a star by the time the set was halfway finished, but he was still subject to freezing winters, hanging around club kids still living with their parents, “drinking Alize with our cereal for breakfast.” On “Kiss Land”, Tesfaye moans “I went from staring at the same four walls for 21 years/ To seeing the whole world in just 12 months.” Judging from the results, it's as if the Weeknd has traveled the world only for Tesfaye to realize it revolves around him.
The lyrics are often embarrassing, occasionally nonsensical and not worth quoting at length-- just know that "You can meet me in the room where the kisses ain't free/ You gotta pay with your body" is representative. Everyone here is complicit and compromised, which is key to understanding the draw of such overtly nihilistic music. Overfamiliarity aside, its joylessness becomes some kind of perverse asset. The Weeknd’s world is cruel, but unbiased; the accusations of misogyny are tempered (somewhat) by the fact that Tesfaye appears to mistrust everyone equally, with the exception of Drake. After relaying his frightening regimen of vices during the title track’s unhinged coda, he can only offer the misanthropic defensiveness of an addict: “This ain’t nothing to relate to even if you tried.” Point being, steer clear unless you plan to be as high as he is and are ready to indulge in whatever sexual command strikes his fancy. That's the only lesson in Kiss Land, because Tesfaye at least realizes he’s in no position to judge and doesn’t even seek redemption or your understanding.
The deluxe version of Kiss Land contains a radio remix of “Wanderlust” that isn’t necessary to ensure the record’s success, not when the Weeknd is already playing Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre twice. Pharrell lends a funkier, lighter production touch to the song but his mere presence is revelatory. As post-Weeknd acts like Banks and PARTYNEXTDOOR crop up, Pharrell serves as a reminder that the R&B/pop zeitgeist consists of songs like “Blurred Lines”, “Get Lucky”, and “Take Back The Night”. These songs might not be a reaction to the Weeknd, but they do suggest that love is more than sex and sex is more than just a transaction. These loving and lovable songs serve as soundtracks for people who go on silly dates, make asses out of themselves at karaoke, get married, attend Bar Mitzvahs, and are capable as seeing everyone and everything as something other than an enabler.
And that turns out to be a lot of us. Kiss Land is technically the Weeknd’s fourth album in two and a half years, and without the ear-turning innovation of the earlier work, all you can muster in reaction to its worldview, the same one that's been delivered repeatedly without variation, is, “Maybe it’s you, man.” Which in a way, vindicates it: Kiss Land sounds every bit as isolated and singular as Tesfaye feels.


The minimalist acoustic palette of the 24-year-old actor and singer’s second album makes a calming backdrop for her diaristic songwriting and white-smoke soprano.

Moss

Maya Hawke’s success in Stranger Things and recent teen dramedy Do Revenge have solidified her as a promising new presence in Hollywood, or at least on Netflix. But she’s found another foothold in understated indie folk. Hawke’s second album, Moss, the follow-up to her 2020 debut Blush, sets endearing and melancholic self-reflection against warm, drumless instrumentation. She narrates each song in a white-smoke soprano, viewing herself and others through eyes both critical and kindly.
Hawke and co-producer Benjamin Lazar Davis created the album’s intimate, insulated sound with help from Christian Lee Hutson and Jonathan Low, whose respective past credits include Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher and Taylor Swift’s folklore. “We made sure that every sound we used on the record we used three times,” Hawke said in a recent interview. The recurring musical characters foster a sense of familiarity that’s comforting, if a bit monochromatic. The campfire-acoustic ethos doesn’t inspire much risk-taking, but the minimalist palette makes a calming backdrop for Hawke’s insights and brings her closer to forming an established identity as a musician. There’s less uncertainty in her direction now; she doesn’t, for example, attempt to emulate glam-rock swagger, as on Blush’s “Animal Enough.” Instead, Moss sticks to a diaristic indie-folk lane, a style that aligns well with Hawke’s intimate storytelling.
Throughout Moss, Hawke’s earnest, sincere lyricism interlocks the public and private, overlapping reality and fiction to reflect how she has had to negotiate both spaces in life. “All I really want is an actor of my own,” she sings on the gentle “Hiatus,” punctuating a bittersweet love story with references to Sam Shepard and the Wilhelm scream. In the wrenching “Driver,” she shares a wide-eyed plea to see her parents kiss in the back of a taxi (in real life, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke separated when Maya was 5). “Oh, I can watch it in the movies,” she acknowledges, but “I don’t want to see it that crafted and clear.” On the charming “Sweet Tooth,” she sings, “Saw a movie everybody hated in an empty theater in Duluth/Swear I really loved it, love is such a better thing to do.” It’s the kind of profound, obvious statement that adulthood often forces us to forget, and it rolls out as gently as a pen she’s dropped.
This industry-child introspection reveals a degree of maturity that comes through in even the simplest of premises, like the understated standout “Luna Moth.” With the help of her reliable acoustic guitar, Hawke describes how she has accidentally killed the titular creature. She apologizes; she had only come to the bathroom to cry. “I don’t need anyone to hurt me/I can do that myself,” she sings, and her airy, matter-of-fact delivery gives the impression that she’s finally voiced this thought out loud. Against a gently arpeggiating guitar that conjures the image of a dewy morning, Hawke opens “Backup Plan” by listing ordinary items: “Your pencils/Your dress socks/Your charger/Your bike lock.” It’s a seemingly innocuous series until she ties them with a ribbon: “I wanna be anything you’ve lost that you might be looking for.” The words encapsulate the feeling of offering yourself to someone (or, perhaps more importantly, to yourself), only to hope they aren’t careless with you.
As thematically complex as Moss can be, vulnerability sometimes gets lost: The spoken-word outro of “Bloomed Into Blue” feels reminiscent of college café poetry, and “Sticky Little Words” sounds almost like a rhyming exercise. Compared to the captivating “Thérèse,” where the dichotomy between representation and reality offers the album’s most vivid illustration of public versus private life, and hopeful closer “Mermaid Bar,” which tells the story of a girl who survived jumping off a bridge, these tracks don’t carry nearly as much weight. But even in the album’s less compelling moments, Hawke retains a delicate charm. She feels believable.
Correction: This review has been updated to credit Benjamin Lazar Davis as a co-producer of Moss.


James Ferraro’s latest album feels a bit like a didactic student art project; it finds the vaporwave pioneer doubling down on the themes of 2011’s Far Side Virtual with a much heavier hand.

Human Story 3

James Ferraro’s 2011 album Far Side Virtual stands as one of this decade’s most polarizing records. Depending on your perspective, it can read like a provocation, a joke, an incisive reflection of techno-utopian naiveté or some combination thereof. It was also, as it turns out, the unlikely harbinger of a New Aesthetic. To scroll through the vaporwave tag on Tumblr (or any of its wonderfully ludicrous sub-tags, which include troutwave, aloewave and simpsonwave), is to witness the world that Ferraro hath wrought, a warped reflection of ’90s futurism, computer-generated textures and postmodern culture jamming. Following recent detours into hip-hop, R&B and electronic dance music, Ferraro has now returned to the vaporwave aesthetic he helped define with his latest full-length, Human Story 3.
At the time of its release, Far Side Virtual was novel in Ferraro’s catalog for its clarity—most of its songs dispensed with the hazy, degraded tape sounds of his past work, embracing the production values of the commercial music that it sought to emulate. Human Story 3 goes further, jettisoning the last production artifacts of Ferraro’s experimental pedigree; every sound here gleams as if examined under the nauseating fluorescents of a big box store. The melange of noises that made up Far Side Virtual’s sensory overload are all represented here—conference call hold music, royalty-free sound effects, keyboard presets and chirping ringtones—though Ferraro balances out these elements with piano, synthesized strings, flutes, chimes and marimbas this time around. The result is a densely-composed record that vacillates between straigtfaced muzak, minimalist classical and manic hypnogogic pop.
Recent Ferraro projects have made use of vocaloid spoken word and every track on Human Story 3 is punctuated by these disembodied voices. The two primary “vocalists” on the album are a woman’s and a man’s voice, both of which straddle the uncanny valley—not quite human, not quite computer. These voices repeat a series of brandnames and phrases (“Ikea,” “GPS," “Starbucks,” “market crash,” “mobile payments,” “FedEx," “smart car,” “latte”) at seemingly random intervals throughout Human Story 3’s songs. These phrases sometimes feel like mantras (“protecting your data and your identity”, “embrace all individualism”), sometimes toe the line between credulous marketing speak and hilarious sendup (“cloud security, with ambition and passion!”) and occasionally serve up cutting critiques with an impressive economy of words (“buy now, pay later,” in this context, reads like a succinct motto for our consumptive society as a whole). For the most part, however, the vocals tend to wash over these tracks in a constant stream of babble, a torrent of audio pop-ups that can’t be blocked.
Unlike on his last few releases, Ferraro himself doesn’t sing on Human Story 3, though on a handful of tracks he does introduce choral arrangements, which cut a contrast against the album’s largely synthetic sounds. The record is bookended by such songs—“Ten Songs for Humanity” and “Plastiglomerate & Co”—both of which layer robotic sloganeering over human voices that reach for the sublime. These rank among Human Story 3’s more intriguing songs, providing a juxtaposition that complicates our reading of vaporwave’s now familiar tropes. It feels like Ferraro is trying to tell us something about the piousness with which market capitalism is applied as an organizing principle for human life, though we’re largely left to draw our own conclusions.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Human Story 3 is not nearly as subtle, and that’s where this album largely fails. The beauty of Far Side Virtual was that Ferraro never tipped his hand; whether the album was intended as a sincere homage to or cutting sendup of elevator music was left unsaid, at least on the record itself. Human Story 3, on the other hand, puts too fine a point on its critique. Its constant barrage of verbal rubbish makes the record feel something like a less artful, album-length version of Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier”. The aim here is fairly clear—to foreground the hollow dread that lurked just below the surface of Far Side Virtual’s slick, plastic veneer. In practice, however, these songs are often just as tiring as the commercial music they seek to skewer. That may well be Ferraro’s intent—he's never been afraid to make willfully ugly songs in order to get an idea across—though Human Story 3 tends to belabor its point to the detriment of the music.