Kevin Barnes and co. follow the excellent Satanic Panic in the Attic with a self-described "foray into 21st century A.D.D. electro cinematic avant-disco."

The Sunlandic Twins

One drawback of being a great songwriter is that consistency is often mistaken for monotony. Witness: Of Montreal lead man Kevin Barnes, who has made his name on mirthful choruses that often sound suspiciously similar. But Barnes is anything but short on ideas, as Satanic Panic in the Attic, the band's 2004 chef d'ouvre, attests. Cumulative yet innovative, the album douses classically saccharine and vaguely psychedelic indie pop in gratuitous amounts of syrup. The key: Of Montreal handle the powerful flavors with soufflé-like gentleness.
By contrast, The Sunlandic Twins, the band's new album, is like a restaurant with multiple Michelin stars serving Sno-Cones. Missing Satanic Panic's multidimensionality, the album feels like the hollowed-out shell of something great. Barnes can sleepwalk through a book of staff paper and come away with a set of leakproof pop songs-- or, in this case, a "foray into 21st century A.D.D. electro cinematic avant-disco-- and that effortlessness lends Of Montreal's music a sort of indifference. The high-glucose diet that fueled the band's previous outings has landed them in a sugar coma. Blissfully adrift, The Sunlandic Twins lacks the essential reflexivity of Satanic Panic in the Attic's ethereally silly pop gems.
The Sunlandic Twins isn't without its share of coruscating hooks and major-key shenanigans. "Requiem for O.M.M." is powered by a galloping bass line, which draws back to let the succinct two-line chorus take center stage. Barnes' kaleidoscopic artwork (somebody give this man a larger format) complements the music, especially "I Was Never Young": both seem plucked from the overripe fantasy realms of "Sonic the Hedgehog". The song features a laid-back, strutting rhythm, onto which the instrumentation gradually builds until a trumpet fanfare calls in a tempo change. Abetted by handclaps and a bopping guitar line, the section recalls Satanic Panic's snaking, poperatic song structures.
Elsewhere, "Forecast Fascist Future" and "So Begins Our Alabee" are airy but satisfying, meeting their melody quota while managing to have some fun with synthesizers. But around its midway point, The Sunlandic Twins takes a strange turn. "So Begins Our Alabee" initiates the second act: a self-styled electro pop opera with a startling lack of, well, songs. This independent, self-contained experiment has no business intermingling with the respectable opening set. A few tracks outshine their surroundings by dint of simplicity. "Oslo in the Summertime" rescues a glistening chorus from the maw of wandering pianos, twittering drum machines, and synth glides sandwiching it. "October Is Eternal", meanwhile, is admirable only for its titular appositeness: The song milks a discordant piano dirge for nearly three minutes before fizzling out in an ululating vocal loop and cheap-o MIDI instruments.
Of Montreal have always been silly, but The Sunlandic Twins is plain daffy. "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" and "The Party's Crashing Us" are condescendingly aloof, piling on excessive amounts of sound: On the latter, a traffic jam of synths produces the oversaturated colors of a mangled paint palette. Particularly annoying among the record's contrivances is its frivolous use of drum machines, which skip and stutter when the songs call for simple beats.
Barnes is still an impeccable craftsman, but these songs won't make your brain spongy like Satanic Panic's "Lysergic Bliss". This time, it sounds like Barnes is the one whose brain is gummed up. Of Montreal have accomplished the rare feat of honing an unusually nuanced signature sound. But with such a skilled songwriter at the helm, they should be making great records, checking the conceptual dalliances at the door.


The Detroit singer-songwriter’s second album is sparser, lonelier, and more patient, allowing the candor of her lyrics to shine through.

If You’re Dreaming

From the outset of If You’re Dreaming, Anna Burch sounds deliberate. The steady pace of opening track “Can’t Sleep” is a confident introduction to a new sound: one sparser, lonelier, and more patient than the jittery folk-pop songs of her 2018 solo debut, Quit the Curse. On her second album, Burch is more confident, even as her subject matter becomes more introspective. The wordless, uplifting chorus of “Can’t Sleep,” a song about insomnia, stretches out like a long road ahead. It’s a strong new direction for the Detroit singer-songwriter, though it doesn’t always maintain the same momentum.
Where Burch’s debut often layered her vocals with scratchy guitar riffs to evoke 1960s girl-group harmonies, If You’re Dreaming mellows out the sound. Burch takes a more stripped-back approach, soaking her voice in echo. The image of her sitting beneath a spotlight, alone on stage—as in the Scorsese-inspired video for “Tell Me What’s True”—lingers in the mind’s eye. Over that song’s doleful electric piano, Burch leans into the foreground so that you can’t miss the candor of her lyrics: “When I used to hate myself/I saw things so clearly.” Likewise, the sense of social anxiety she evokes on the bluesy, mournful “Go It Alone” is heightened by how starkly her voice seems to stand on the fringes of the party.
Just as spending a lot of time in your own company gives small interactions a feeling of outsize significance, the record’s pared-back palette allows the tiniest variations to feel startling and fresh. When the woodwind flutters on the interlude “Keep It Warm,” or when a second vocal track enters on “Every Feeling,” it hits like a stiff breeze. A subtle swell of saxophone lifts “Not So Bad,” a dreamy soft-rock tune about admitting you enjoy someone’s company; it might easily have tipped over into schmaltz, but Burch masterfully keeps the mood light-hearted and restrained.
That deliberate simplicity doesn’t make for a consistently invigorating listen. The second half sinks into a slower pace after “Keep It Warm,” while Burch’s lyrics shift from dwelling on anxiety towards an acceptance of her lonely, quiet state. An extra interlude, the fuzzy “Picture Show,” only slows the momentum further. “Here With You,” the album closer, is serene and slight, and nowhere near as satisfying as the richer, angstier first half.
But what resonates most is the clarity of Burch’s emotional world. The lyrics of her debut were tantalisingly guarded, offsetting the drama of her melodies with wry one-liners. That humor still lives in If You’re Dreaming—it’s there in the nonchalant shrug of the title “Not So Bad” and in her resigned cry of “I’m so tired” on the sunny “Party’s Over”—but like the overall tone of the record, it’s softer. In Burch’s minimalist musical landscape, each lyric she pushes to the foreground becomes loaded with meaning. It’s as though she’s smiling knowingly as she sings, while also feeling every word.

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The UK band’s enormous third album is pristine and emotionally extravagant, the platonic ideal for contemporary big-tent rock music.

Blue Weekend

Not everyone has the energy, confidence, or money to be among the crowd at Glastonbury or Primavera, playing Tetris with the festival schedule, shuttling between three different stages trying to catch the best 10 minutes of every set. Wolf Alice’s extravagantly emotive third LP, Blue Weekend, is a safe substitute for the experience, not just for 2021 but for virtually any year between 2017’s Visions of a Life and now. Blue Weekend is fluent in both alt-rock and the domain of pop artists that are most likely to headline alt-rock festivals. They’re the platonic ideal for big-tent rock music in 2021: lead singer Ellie Rowsell gives 20-somethings the megaphone of a superhuman, working through vices, crises of confidence, and a pervasive misogyny that success has only worsened, upending UK lad-rock supremacy while staying firmly within its lineage.
Blue Weekend makes ample use of the big Wolf Alice jukebox. When the negative space is flooded with reverb, Wolf Alice flaunt the glitziest production values ever heard on a shoegaze album; turn the reverb down and they’re a more guitar-centered version of big-budget bedroom-pop. “Safe From Heartbreak (if i never fall in love)” is Wolf Alice’s entry into indie-adjacent, twang-free country-pop; strip away the floodlit harmonies that make Rowsell sound like a one-woman Staves and the 12-string overdubs and it’s an Elliott Smith song.
But if there’s any overarching pop culture trend defining Wolf Alice’s existence, it’s how they repackage existing IP to reflect modern sensibilities. This is where Wolf Alice’s impact feels most distinct: Rowsell eyerolls her way through “Last Man on Earth,” which variously recalls Bowie, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd as she mocks the mythos of male genius that animates classic rock boosterism. “Smile” barely conceals its disdain for critical condescension as the band works through a funk-metal groove that could serve as the theme song for a gender-flipped reboot of Entourage.
In the context of popular alternative rock, Blue Weekend is inspiring, maybe even life-changing for anyone who hears “Smile” alongside bands like Royal Blood or Catfish and the Bottlemen. But Blue Weekend can seem a bit circumspect compared to their Dirty Hit labelmates. The 1975 or Rina Sawayama’s eclecticism is far messier and riskier and no matter where it takes them, they never leave any doubt whose song it is. Three albums in, Wolf Alice still lack a quintessence that immediately establishes a song as Wolf Alice rather than bending to its influences first. Rowsell can sell the feeling of being inelegantly wasted on “Play the Greatest Hits” (“I leave the present empty/But I make it gift wrapped”), but similar to Visions of a Life’s “Yuk Foo,” its foray into a noise can feel a bit tokenized.
On “Delicious Things,” Rowsell dips into a husky lower register to outline a debauched stay in Los Angeles. It all turns on one brilliant final line where Rowsell calls her mom to check in, taking “Delicious Things” out of the realm of musical tourism and into a sad and very human drama; as she takes ownership of her capitulation to the illicit charms of various party favors and wolfish bullshit artists, “Delicious Things” proves the endurance of basic Hollywood fantasies for people who should probably know better.
For all of its obvious ambitions towards creating a “cinematic” scope—quoting Macbeth on opener “The Beach,” ending with “The Beach II,” and fitting a loose breakup narrative in between—Wolf Alice work more on an episodic level, each track creating a specific mood easily separable from the whole. That’s not really a figure of speech—with no way to road test these songs, the band played them against muted YouTube clips to see if they got the vibe right. Blue Weekend always nails the vibe, they nail everything, but often in a way that sounds micromanaged. It’s easy to scapegoat the fussy production of Markus Dravs, which leaves Rowsell like so many of our gifted and versatile actors vying to stuff themselves in a CGI bodysuit for Marvel. But if Blue Weekend sounds too big to fail, he’s doing his job. This is the guy bands call to get that extra boost from “Mercury Prize nominee” to “Grammy winner”: The Suburbs, Viva La Vida, those first two Mumford & Sons albums, Florence and the Machines’ How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, all of which sound like GarageBand scratch tracks compared to Blue Weekend.
There’s one exception tucked away towards the end, enough to question the album’s entire approach. “No Hard Feelings” mostly consists of Rowsell’s voice backed by bass guitar and almost nothing else—none of the triple-tracked vocals, no guitarmonies, no bleats of synthesizer or Sistine Chapel reverb. Not that it lacks for drama: Rowsell spends the second verse heartbroken in a bathtub, listening to Amy Winehouse, trying to siphon the pain in her music as her own. A few lines later, she realizes “there’s only so much sulking the heart can entertain,” and “No Hard Feelings” emerges as an unusually mature and forward-thinking breakup song.
But nothing less than a masterpiece was to be expected of Wolf Alice’s third album. That’s just how it goes for a certain kind of artful and ambitious British rock band, even if they hadn’t respectively earned a Grammy nomination and the Mercury Prize with their first two. Look, I don’t make the rules, the British press do, and their handiwork has already placed Blue Weekend on a critical echelon occupied by the likes of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and To Pimp a Butterfly. You can’t blame anyone for going overboard at a time when Wolf Alice are ever so close to returning to their natural habitat playing to great lawns across the globe, yet the only thing that seems to prevent them coming off like the biggest band in the world on Blue Weekend is that they also want to be every band in the world.

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Matty Healy, the enfant terrible of pop-rock, pushes his band all-in with a long, messy experiment that just so happens to peak with some of their sharpest songs ever.

Notes on a Conditional Form

The 1975 are distracted. They are drifting in and out of a podcast while reading the news; putting on a movie and spending half of it scrolling through their phones; living through a pandemic while worrying about the death of our planet—all while finding time to post inane memes on Twitter. Like few working bands, the Manchester quartet has made an art out of multitasking. Their albums are big, hyperactive statements that embrace the mechanics of our fragmented minds: half-evolved and half-destroyed, cyborgs acting out base desires. They never tire of sharp juxtapositions—airtight pop songs and meandering interludes, noisy tantrums and orchestral motifs, computerized mayhem and naked confession—because their very essence lies in the whiplash.
If Matty Healy, their 31-year-old frontman and outspoken avatar, had his way, the band’s fourth album, Notes on a Conditional Form, would have arrived mere months after 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. The goal was to satisfy his own need for constant stimulus: “I watch something on Netflix,” he explained at the time, “and it’s like, ‘That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Next?’” It was an exciting proposition considering the myriad breakthroughs of Brief Inquiry: its heartfelt reflections on addiction and recovery, its attempts at generational statements and pop perfection. It was the sound of a band with uncontainable ambition on a creative roll. Like U2 after Achtung Baby or Radiohead after Kid A, they wanted to keep going.
But, well, life happened. They got distracted. Following a series of delays, Notes arrives a full year after its proposed release date and makes no effort to hide its complicated genesis. Written mostly on tour and recorded across 16 different studios, it is the band’s longest and most uncentered album; their funniest and most earnest. It features numerous guest appearances (Phoebe Bridgers, FKA twigs, Jamaican reggae DJ Cutty Ranks) and an EP’s worth of tracks with no vocals at all. Just to get to the second actual song, you have to make it through two symphonic pieces—one of which is almost five minutes long and features a sobering speech from climate activist Greta Thunberg—and the early single “People,” a throat-shredding alt-rock manifesto that suggests we might already be doomed.
The album’s remaining 70 minutes are more introspective but no less sprawling: From radiant, thumping dancehall to the barest folk songs Healy has ever sung, Notes ups the ante on every challenge the 1975 have posed since debuting as a polarizing emo band in the early 2010s. It is neither their Zooropa nor their Amnesiac; at times, it doesn’t quite know what it is. But once again, they mostly pull it off. The band’s secret weapon remains drummer and producer George Daniel, who has grown increasingly adept at matching Healy’s every whim as a songwriter. It’s easy to take for granted by now that, no matter what style the 1975 attempt, it will at least sound great. A slapstick country-emo travelogue? Go for it. A shoegaze snippet with Auto-Tuned ad-libs? Why not. A lush, futuristic Americana story-song? Fetch the pedal steel.
From a production standpoint, Notes is their most intricate and impressive work. It seems they have learned the success of a song like “Love It If We Made It” wasn’t just due to Healy’s grand, unifying lyrics: It was the pounding drums, the anxious string arrangement, the sheer momentum that made it not only read like an anthem torn from the headlines but also feel like one. The music on Notes is a narrative unto itself, a spiral into a haywire, alienated mind. “Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)” spills late-night heartbreak to a pitched-up Temptations sample; the exquisite “Frail State of Mind” ascends from glitchy two-step as Healy sings about a loosening sense of security. “Go outside? Seems unlikely,” he sings in its opening lyrics, and, from that transmission, the record only grows more isolated and uncertain.
This sense of solitude unifies the vast changes in production, and even pop turns like “What Should I Say” feel more geared for dimly lit bedrooms than mass gatherings. Healy’s writing takes us to settings that match: alone at the computer, at parties he is desperate to leave, on dates full of boredom and resentment, amid conversations he can’t escape. A verse in the acoustic song “Playing on My Mind” goes as follows:

I met one of your friends
And it was dead nice, he was fine
But he said, “Things that interest me exist outside of space and time”
Now I know I should have left it but, who says that?
What a sigh

Earlier in his career, Healy might have been the one babbling on. Nowadays, he seems more interested in observing from the sidelines, lending a familiar, unglamorous intimacy to his portraits of relationships. The couple in “The Birthday Party” bicker about each other’s bathroom habits, while the Britpop rom-com “Me & You Together Song” finds its starring characters smiling through an underwhelming Christmas outing: “It was shit but we were happy.” The most purely romantic moment arrives in the closing “Guys,” where Healy reflects on his friendship with his bandmates, who he’s known since high school. “You’re the love of my life,” he sings sweetly. On an album that spins from societal collapse through personal catastrophe, it is a small, uncomplicated gesture: an unlikely ode to consistency from a songwriter who has spent his career at war with this very notion.
For all its sonic experiments, Notes is filled with these quiet, self-affirming moments. If the 1975’s early work felt like pop music compulsively interrupted with provocations and footnotes, then Notes takes an inverse approach: It is a long, messy experiment that just so happens to peak with some of their sharpest songs. I imagine them piecing the whole thing together like a family moving to a new home, knee-deep in the clutter, where they might come upon a wholesome duet between Healy and his father (“Don’t Worry”), a six-minute extension of the band’s flirtations with UK garage (“Having No Head”), or a self-referential cry into the void about fame (“Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied”). It can feel indulgent. Yes, they have expressed some of these thoughts more succinctly in the past; and yes, the tracklist could be condensed so that you don’t have to clear your schedule to get through it. But when everything clicks, their work has never sounded so patient, so personal.
Take, for example, “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know),” a late-album highlight and their highest-charting single to date in the UK. Evolving from a slow-building intro into a mechanical chug, it is the record’s closest thing to a typical 1975 song—a glittery ’80s arrangement, a ridiculous saxophone solo, a charmingly sleazy hook. All the while, Healy sings about communing with the camgirl of his dreams. In each verse, he makes his way toward the laptop; in the chorus, he is seduced into a kind of digital heaven. “I need to get back,” he sings with bravado. “I’ve gotta see the girl on a screen.” Is it love? Will it last? Does it matter? Of course not. He’s doomed, as usual. And yet, backed by a band who can transform into whatever symphony blossoms in his head, a group who have settled into a personality so distinctly their own that a hundred genre exercises couldn’t strip it away, Healy seems focused, present in the moment. It sounds a little like devotion.


On their second record, the Orlando duo create a world of cozy, minimalist pop.

forever & ever

In SALES’ world, everything has its place. Unlike the messy shelves of a discounted goods rack or the garish neon stickers on clearance markdowns that the moniker suggests, the Orlando duo make shipshape indie pop with a sleek packaging. Since forming in 2013, singer/guitarist Lauren Morgan and producer/guitarist Jordan Shih have taken their time sharing music as an independent and self-managed entity, releasing a steady stream of singles and EPs before dropping their self-titled debut in 2016. Before SALES, the band’s every element was coordinated: the color-block collage artwork, the tight-knit trip-hop production, Morgan’s insouciant singing style. The aesthetic-heavy product gained them a following online, all without the help of a label or promoter. Now, as the duo return with their sophomore album, forever & ever, SALES’ mellow perfectionism is beginning to loosen, allowing their songwriting to capture a wider emotional range.
Written, recorded, and mixed between their two bedroom studios, forever & ever spends as much time exploring dream pop airiness and electronic minimalism as it does romanticizing its guitar parts. A song like “You Look Well” centers around a simple guitar melody and Shih’s thudding electric drums, creating a heavy fog over the course of the song as the melody lodges itself in your brain. Much of that haze comes from Morgan, who sings in a nonchalant manner that favors the plump yet hushed enunciation of Beach House’s Victoria Legrand. On standout single “Off and On,” her voice skates across the bare and looping guitar lines, transforming what could be misread as an homage to the xx into a more personal song. The duo’s dexterous guitar-work prioritizes sparse melodies and every song sounds comfortably bare, steeping in its own cozy, minimalist pop space.
The skill with which SALES employ their drum machine (cheekily referred to as their “third, uncredited member”) gives the conventionally robotic instrument the illusion of being ambulatory. During “Talk a Lot,” short hi-hat taps and staccato bass-drum kicks take on the life of a jazz drummer while Shih and Morgan harmonize guitars. It sounds like there’s room to improvise, but every note and its delivery feels purposefully chosen to give the album its crisp, clean sound.
The album pulls focus toward the blasé emotion in Morgan’s voice. She overcomes day-to-day problems, sanding them down until they lose their edge, but her words are too breathy to completely decipher. So as the album opens with one of those reflections (“You work in the mornings/A boring 9-to-5/And you’re spent”), SALES make it clear that this time around they’re zoned in on a larger feeling, not a smaller moment. By setting abstract emotions against a perpetually chill backdrop , SALES create a world of lo-fi pop on forever & ever that’s perfectly pristine yet easy to get lost in all the same.


The latest record from the UK electronic musician is built primarily on the guitar synthesizer, setting a tone that feels gently euphoric, whimsical, and bittersweet.

How Was Your Life?

Bristol’s Will Yates makes music inspired by folk rituals and ley lines—music of landscape and weather, of legend and myth. Recording under the aliases Half Nelson, O.G. Jigg, and, mainly, Memotone, he has made records based on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the 19th-century Scottish poet James Hogg; he has written for chamber ensembles and soundtracked a short film about his father’s first fishing rod. It is electronic music, but it runs counter to the genre’s futurist thrust. In the tradition of Boards of Canada, he uses obsolete technology to capture both bucolic calm and elegiac nostalgia, and it’s not always clear where the catgut ends and the circuitry begins. Woodwinds are frequently refracted through eerie digital processing, conjuring the parallel fifths of Jon Hassell’s horn lines. Memotone’s hyperreal medievalism feels suited for post-apocalyptic ceremonies. It’s the kind of thing you imagine the troubadours of Station Eleven getting up to—powering salvaged synths and cassette decks with jury-rigged solar batteries, and capturing fading echoes of 20th-century recorded history (jazz, minimalism, exotica, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) before the last tape can crumble to dust.
On How Was Your Life?, Yates turns his attention to a more recent artifact: a Roland GR 33 guitar synthesizer from the 2000s. The secondhand purchase afforded him a newfound freedom, unlocking a range of tones that mimicked instruments outside his skill set: double bass, fretless bass, even tabla. He fashioned the album out of extended studio improvisations, abandoning his frequently conceptual way of working. In recent years, much of Yates’ music has been heavy on murky, dissonant frequencies, as though he were rooting around for something in a peat bog. But How Was Your Life? is marked by a newfound clarity, buoyed by the silvery tendrils of guitar; it is his lightest and most unburdened record in some time, imbued with an almost Balearic spirit of ease.
The opening “Paradise Drips” lays out the record’s palette. Feedback shrieks like a seagull; digital mallets establish a bright rhythm that drips like the eaves after a summer storm; a guitar melody with heavy glissando invokes the Durutti Column’s liquid fretwork. Structurally, it just sort of drifts, more moodpiece than song: The guitar bobs and weaves over steady, lackadaisical conga slaps, and guitar figures slip sideways and unravel into dissonance. “Open World” is similarly freeform, led by an ersatz stand-up bass solo and pitch-bent flute synths that wander blithely through a glowing field of layered pads. Its movements are pleasantly aimless, vacillating between melody and meandering, happy to linger on the idyllic vistas of Memotone’s uncanny valley.
Yate’s characteristic Hassell-like harmonies occasionally wear out their welcome. They’re so reliably eerie, they feel a little bit like an emotional cheat code, as well as faintly cloying. Fortunately, there are enough ideas in play that any such momentary distaste quickly dissipates. “Forest Zone” rides a loping water-droplet rhythm and understated funk bass. “Carved by the Moon” is a gorgeous soundtrack miniature for strings that reveals remarkably sophisticated chord progressions and voicings. “Canteen Sandwich,” on the other hand, is a kind of bell-tone techno, like Jeff Mills gone gamelan, while the pensive clarinets and pulsing mallets of “Lonehead” evoke Talk Talk covering Steve Reich.
What’s most convincing about How Was Your Life? is neither the technological tricks nor the record-collector references, but rather its understated emotional register. The precise mood is as impossible to pin down as a spring breeze, but it is by turn gently euphoric, whimsical, and bittersweet. The album’s title suggests a deathbed glance back, and, given Yates’ ecological interests and the perilous state of the planet, perhaps that’s just what it is: a fond sunset appraisal of a beautiful place out in the country, before the skies darken one last time.


The hip-hop collective’s sixth album refocuses on melody and economy, resulting in the group’s most focused and impressive record yet.

BROCKHAMPTON: ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE

ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE

Something changed for Brockhampton with “Sugar.” The unobtrusive and charming 2019 ballad was the group’s most successful single by many metrics—their lone entry on Billboard’s Hot 100 (No. 66), it was certified platinum by the RIAA and the band’s first song to get an official remix, featuring Dua Lipa, no less. “Sugar” is also their most traditional song, structured to give the showcased members a fitting role. Guest Ryan Beatty sings the inviting chorus; Dom McLennon and Matt Champion rap solid verses; Bearface handles a pre-chorus and the outro; and leader Kevin Abstract sings the bridge. No one is rapping about One Direction, there aren’t loud, conspicuous production gimmicks, and it’s finished in a tidy 205 seconds. In the best of ways, it could be anyone’s song.
Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine, the boisterous yet sensitive hip-hop collective’s sixth album, keeps this focus on melody and economy, resulting in their most impressive record. This is Brockhampton at their most efficient, paring back the instrumentals and woebegone attempts at self-examination. Previously, Brockhampton songs were long and incoherent, which made their albums long and incoherent. A signature Brockhampton beat was built with a unique, often wacky, loop: “Boogie” has a whooping siren; “Gold” has an arpeggio; “Boy Bye” has what I can best describe as pizzicato MIDI violin.
The beats are subtler on Roadrunner, with the flourishes dialed down and the emphasis placed on mood: wistful bliss on “Chain On” and “When I Ball,” impassioned swagger on “Bankroll.” Without the vestigial honks and boops cluttering the foreground, the music is sturdy and even sumptuous, as with the suite of “Bankroll,” “The Light,” and “Windows,” all co-produced by Abstract, Romil Hemnani, and Jabari Manwa. On these three songs, the strongest run of the album, you feel the rappers’ brash confidence, no matter if they’re spitting bluster or opening up. It’s enthralling.
Since their inception, Brockhampton have prioritized unchecked creativity and unfiltered self-expression over discipline or structure. It’s why their songs have too many verses, their albums have too many failed experiments, and it’s how you get something like Iridescence’s “Honey,” which feels like a collection of rough drafts sewn together. Roadrunner pressurizes this scattered energy. Only one song—the well-earned posse cut “Windows,” with a thumping Houston-style beat—features a glut of verses, while the others emphasize members’ specific talents, as when Merlyn Wood plays hype man on “Buzzcut.”
The group also continues to blur its line between hip-hop and pop. The rap beats are polished enough to complement the boy-band cuts, which maintain a metronomic quality. The pop song “I’ll Take You On,” in particular, is a triumph, balancing a quietly skittering backbeat with lovesick harmonies. For all of their focus on colorful individuality, they sound best when they finally cohere into a synchronized unit.
Their newfound discipline extends to their signature confessionals. In the past, a Brockhampton song felt like an opportunity to excavate and explicate every possible trauma, but on Roadrunner, their lives peek through in compelling fragments. On the opening “Buzzcut,” Kevin Abstract threads his colorful rapping with evocative mini-scenes: “Thank God you let me crash on your couch,” “My whole family cursed.” He does the same on “The Light,” rapping stray lines like, “I was broke and desperate, leaning on my best friends.” We don’t need much more.
The darkness shows up most strongly on “The Light,” where operatic wildcard Joba describes his father’s suicide and its tormenting aftermath. Joba’s story is not linear, placing the listener into his maelstrom: “At a loss, aimless,” “Hope it was painless,” “I know you cared,” “Heard my mother squealing,” “I miss you.” His vocals are tactfully fuzzed in the mix, not burying Joba’s words so much as submerging him in the music. It’s maybe the most poignant moment Brockhampton have ever recorded.
Elsewhere, they sound liberated. Matt Champion is their best rapper, and he shines here. His lines might not mean a ton, but they’re wonderful to mimic, like when he raps “Nightmares, it’s fright-filled the moment Freddy tuck you in” on “Windows” or the way he punctuates, “This a jam for you whims and you woes/For the people in the back standin’ on they tippy toes,” on “Don’t Shoot Up the Party.” Everyone sounds like the best versions of themselves—focused, committed, inspired. The joy of being a collective bleeds into every bar and hook. For a change, it’s a Brockhampton album that isn’t telling you what to think or feel; it just sounds good.

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North Carolina singer-songwriter Justin Morris writes with a sense of offhand intimacy, shading familiar Appalachian guitar textures with memory and ambiguity.

Radial Gate

Sometimes it seems like Justin Morris wishes he were an eagle. Planes and birds of prey soar above Radial Gate, the Durham, North Carolina folk musician’s second album as Sluice. From the ground, Morris sings of dirt paths sooted with millworkers’ boots and creeks deep enough to drown in. “I am a cartoon Callahan,” he sings on “Fourth of July,” describing a beer-soaked riverside setting like that of Smog’s “Drinking at the Dam.” Though the premise of Radial Gate might threaten Bill Callahan pastiche, Morris is more like Callahan’s tenderhearted, New Sincerist cousin. He’s a Callahan without the temperance of a wise and wizened disposition, without the sourness; a Callahan who would sing about watching his friends’ girlfriends get ready for a party and conclude, “It’s a precious thing,” as Morris does on the album’s closer.
Morris comes by this eagle-eyed sense of wonder not out of naivety, but as a preservationist. He inscribes serene and untroubled memories into the bucolic details of Durham’s forests, skies, and bodies of water, before gently gesturing toward industrial violence. “That damn chainsaw’s still trying to rip us out,” he sings with a soft lilt on “Mill.” Radial Gate isn’t as saccharinely single-noted as Morris’ honeyed voice and major-key Appalachian guitar melodies suggest. Each song is flooded with ambiguity. Natural beauty is underpinned by a cruel dramatic irony; Morris acquaints you with each tree, knowing that they—alongside the unsullied memories of his childhood—will be chainsawed down.
There’s a constant feeling of spontaneity in Morris’ voice, which sounds like the meeting point between Peter Broderick’s cajoling timbre and Jason Molina’s cool unnerve. He occupies multiple states and time frames at once; he is both an eagle and a dormouse on the ground, simultaneously 9 and 25. Sometimes the switch is as fast as a jump cut. “What’s that, is that a bald eagle? No, that’s a crow,” he sings between soft peals of pedal steel on “Fourth of July.” With pacing that is often surprising, listening to Radial Gate feels like watching a watercolorist paint a landscape in real time. “And it feels…it feels,” Morris sings with masterfully performed reluctance on “Centurion.”
Contrary to the project’s namesakes—which suggest a systematic control of (water)flow—the songs on Radial Gate leak out like a small flood, unfurling without a hook or central focus. At times Morris’ songwriting can feel piecemeal, as when he hurries between scenes of people, weddings, and travel on “New Leicester” (with its aforementioned “beautiful girlfriends” tableau). Morris is a curious, sometimes revelatory songwriter, but his revelations need more refinement to really land. On “Acts 9:3” he takes “a surprise shit” in the woods and is “struck by the beauty and the comedy of attempting to exist,” an attempt at cosmic pithiness that reads more like AI-generated Neutral Milk Hotel. Still, Radial Gate feels like a re-education in sincerity, a lesson in the perception of beauty. Justin Morris is no Bill Callahan, but that’s something to be thankful for. A pair of open eyes above a simple open heart is also capable of opening the floodgates.


Six years after their breakout album, the Brooklyn chiptune veterans turn inward and re-assess their hedonism.

[USA]

Six years ago, Brooklyn chiptune band Anamanaguchi—beloved for their blend of guitars and low-bit video game sounds—crowdfunded $277,399 in support of their second album, Endless Fantasy. Newly flush with cash, they set to work sending pizza to space. Footage of the lonely cosmic slice eventually made its way into a music video, but it’s hard not to roll your eyes at the whole scenario: Four men in their mid-20s convince their extremely logged-on fans to give them a quarter of a million and proceed to blow it on a dollar slice in the name of art. Yet, goofy as the space pizza was, the stunt netted Anamanaguchi a level of press coverage they’d never seen before. It landed them a slot on Fallon, a landmark moment for chiptune devotees. The album itself was a riotous genre masterpiece full of cutesy cat sounds, Weezer-esque turbo-punk, and square-wave synth-pop.
But no fantasy is endless. In 2014, as the band announced that their next album would be titled [USA], the country’s reality began to visibly splinter. That same year, the reactionary ideology behind Gamergate sent shockwaves through the gaming community and laid out a blueprint for the online culture wars. Amid all of this, Anamanaguchi began to look inward, troubled by the “indulgent” daydreaming of their 75-minute double album. “When people ask why it was so sugar-coated before, it’s because things were more sugar-coated,” guitarist Ary Warnaar recently said. “I wasn’t losing friends that were dying when I was younger. I am now.”
Five years in the making, [USA] addresses these “unavoidable realities” for the first time. Neither Warnaar nor co-leader Peter Berkman, who share songwriting duties, sing on the album. Instead, they recruit a handful of female vocalists—former tourmate and virtual Japanese Vocaloid pop star Hatsune Miku among them—to lend their voices on certain tracks. Still, with the exception of Grimes collaborator HANA’s star turn on the blown-out synth-pop anthem “On My Own,” the vocal features are inessential. It falls to Berkman and Warnaar to compose intentional arrangements that demonstrate just how Anamanaguchi’s perspective has shifted.
Endless Fantasy was predicated on a slapdash marriage of power-pop and vintage video game palettes, and while the premise remains, [USA] feels more purposeful and less hedonistic. The previous album’s neon-soaked aesthetic is replaced by a more refined synthesis of those same musical influences, capable of capturing anxiety as well as joy. No longer simply mining the nostalgia archives for inspirational SoundFonts, Anamanaguchi are now interrogating what it means to be the most prominent representatives of chiptune, a niche genre predicated on recontextualizing the escapist magic of an entirely separate artistic medium.
Like some of the most celebrated games in recent memory, [USA] uses breaks in the fourth wall to subvert expectations. For every anthemic breakdown, there’s a jab of melancholia, a taste of the real world. The jagged synthesizer cliffs of “Tear,” the album’s emotional centerpiece, fall away at the beginning of “We Die,” replaced by a cascade of non sequiturs: flashes of acoustic guitar, synthesized vocal fragments, muted handclaps. “Speak to You [Memory Messengers]” is an innocuous interlude until it abruptly cuts off with the digital equivalent of a guitar cable jiggling in its socket. The video for another highlight, “Air On Line,” opens with a 3-D rendering of the space pizza from 2013, before the camera pans out to reveal an entire field of space debris floating in Earth’s orbit. The message is clear: It doesn’t matter how sheltered you want to be. You can’t hide forever.
Nowhere is this more direct than on the opening title track, where dreamy NES peals are interrupted by a murky, vocoded chorus reciting the well-worn patriotic chant now more commonly associated with nationalist rallies: “U-S-A. U-S-A. U-S-A.” As the voices grow louder, the eight-bit plucks glitch and fade, leaving a harsh grind of textures against a barren, warped soundscape. When the chant returns later on “Tear,” this time voiced by a text-to-speech bot, it feels like a pointed reminder: In this life, ugliness and beauty will always exist in equal measure. But the band is quick to clarify that the title [USA] is not actually about the United States of America; it’s more of a shorthand for working through their own identities, “American” included. “It’s about being from somewhere and having like a label attached to you, your personal relationship to it, and your personal relationship with any assumption,” Warnaar has said. “We could’ve called the album [Chiptune], because it’s a genre that’s always attached to us from the beginning.”
They also could have also gone with [Gamer]—after all, it was in this decade that “gamer” really coalesced into an identity. It was gamers behind the targeted harassment campaigns of Gamergate, and it’s also gamers who recently gathered to protest the censorship of a professional esports athlete who spoke out in favor of pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. Games, sports, fashion—none of the trifling leisures of modern life can feign political neutrality anymore. In the attempt to find themselves, Anamanaguchi have made their most emotionally grounded record, one that speaks to the fragmented state of their environment. [USA] may rarely achieve the melodically overstuffed giddiness of Endless Fantasy, but it reveals more humanity than first meets the eye.

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Gregg Gillis continues to do what he does better than anyone on the planet: crafting a truly communal pop experience at a time when such things are rare.

All Day

The simplest way to a successful and rewarding career: Find something you love doing, then get paid to do it. This is why people talk about Gregg Gillis with a tinge of envy; as Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal has said, Gillis has figured out exactly what he was put on this earth to do--transforming five decades of pop music into seamless, well-paced mixes, and then, live, turning those mixes into a sweaty, tribal celebration of pop music itself. But while 2008's Feed the Animals proved his staying power and solidified his aesthetic, there was a creeping worry that as long as Gillis stuck with this maximalist mashup thing, we'd be stuck having the same arguments for and against him over and over again. So, the question with his fifth album,All Day: In 2010, is a newly minted Girl Talk fan someone who just simply hasn't heard of him before? Or is Gillis capable of converting those still on the fence?
If there are still holdouts, the arguments against Girl Talk are getting slimmer.All Day is a reminder that, despite the number of party DJs and bedroom mashup artists, nobody does it better than Gillis; here he makes the strongest argument yet for himself as a master of his craft. Initially, Gillis comes off like he's baiting his detractors: his "legitimacy" as a DJ has been brought into question on account of having the cleanest hands of any cratedigger, but Gillis goes even more mainstream with his source material (we're talking John Lennon, the Rolling Stones, the Jackson 5...). Compared to All Day, Girl Talk's calling-card LPNight Ripper might as well be Endtroducing... And even those who've enjoyed his work will admit that it's a hell of a lot to take for extended periods of time, yet All Day clocks in at a titanic 71 minutes, almost 20 minutes longer than Animals.
Against those odds, Gillis turns these perceived weaknesses into strengths; as his most fussed-over and carefully plotted album, All Day paradoxically sounds like his most effortless. He's still operating within a "if it's not fun, why do it?" ethos, but fortunately, it doesn't have the same relentless pacing of his prior work, offering a couple of cooldown moments to collect yourself before spazzing out again (the most notable is the "Imagine"/ "One Day" comedown that closes out All Day). Which is crucial, since All Day is meant to be listened to as a whole. (Gillis admits that the seemingly arbitrary track breakdown is solely for ease of navigation.)
But if I need a five-minute fix, "Get It Get It" is the best illustration of how the roomier confines of these songs allow the samples to breathe, evolve, and take on a life of their own without wearing out their welcome. Scoff at the supposed "wackiness" of matching "Pretty Boy Swag" with "Windowlicker" and you'll miss what is arguably Gillis' most inspired musical arrangement. It's not great because of novelty, it's great because it totally makes sense-- it's almost eerie how perfectly Soulja Boy's halting cadences match Aphex Twin's fidgety programming, amplifying the implicit weirdness of the former and the skewed pop instincts of the latter. If M.I.A. realized that agit-pop is greatly enhanced with kickass guitar riffs, she might realize how perfectly tailored Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" is for her protégé Rye Rye. Later in the track, Gillis pairs up the hyper machismo of Pitbull's "Hotel Room Service" with Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough" as a musical illustration of Girl Talk's general outlook, a unity borne of the search for hedonistic pleasure.
Befitting the party-starting functionality of All Day, it doesn't ever go into the chin-stroking appeal of obvious precedent Plunderphonics, and the samples aren't given new contexts so much as new purposes. It's pretty much impossible for "Sunshine of Your Love" to sound new, but it's a blast to drop the flower-power lyrics and have Biggie's "Nasty Boy" bring out the lurid appeal of the riffs (lolz at Eric Clapton's soloing beginning with the line "then I whipped it out"). And of course, there's the Easter eggs, the knowing winks and the in-jokes-- an instantly recognizable clip from "One More Time" sneaks in for a split second, but Daft Punk lay low for a minute or two before resurfacing for "Digital Love". Or chopping up Big Boi's "Shutterbug" to stress the line "I'm double-fisting/ If you're empty you can grab a cup." Personally, I think the funniest moment is intentionally using the commonly misheard chorus of "1901" (it's not "falling," people!) as a punctuation to Ludacris saying "how low can you go?" And the instrumental from "Mr. Big Stuff" allows the listener to clown Wale's noxious "Pretty Girls" hook without saying a word.
Yes, the headslap moments aren't completely eliminated, just far less frequent ("Jane Says"/"Teach Me How to Dougie" sticks out the most), but even the perceived "mistakes" have a plan-- at first, the indelible drum sound from "Idioteque" sounds horribly beatmatched with the Isley Brothers' "Shout", but that's just the second-long windup before hurtling into a crazed strip-club banger. And while some might see the use of the piano coda from "Layla" backing B.o.B.'s "Haterz Everywhere" as sacrilege, the two achieve a bizarre, complex harmony with each other. As far as what the use of Fugazi's "Waiting Room" as the foundation for a "Rude Boy" mashup is supposed to "mean"? I'll allow that Gillis is fucking with us sometimes.
When Girl Talk broke through in 2006 with Night Ripper, the album was often credited for reflecting the new listening habits afforded by the Internet, where long-held grudges were dropped and pop, indie rock, classic AOR, and mainstream rap were on equal playing fields. If only that were true; it's easier than ever to wall yourself off from music you dismiss on principle alone, and if we're living in a time when Arcade Fire fans don't want to have their sincerity questioned when they ride for the cause of Waka Flocka Flame or Birdman ("Wake Up" bridges the gap here between "Hard in Da Paint" and "Money to Blow"), I must've missed it.
What All Day and Girl Talk himself are nostalgic for is not a specific sound or even a specific period of time, even though Gillis' sweet spot is alt-rock and pop-rap from the 90s. It's not "hey, remember 'Thunder Kiss '65'" or, "whoa, what happened to Skee-Lo," but rather nostalgia for a time when MTV and radio were the primary methods of conveyance. They weren't perfect, but there was a certain thrill to being something of a captive audience, of letting yourself go and being impressionable for just once, finding out that "Possum Kingdom" was pretty rad while waiting for a new Beck single, that both "Flava in Ya Ear" and "Liquid Swords" were great in their own way and that your parents liked some cool shit after all once you discovered the classic rock station. It's fitting that Gillis went old-school and "released" All Day so that everyone could have it at the same time: He wants nothing more than to recapture the thrill of a true communal pop experience.


On J. Cole’s refreshing and lively new album, the rapper relaxes his grip around the mic and thrives when he’s collaborating, not when he’s making deadly serious legacy raps.

The Off-Season

Since 2011’s Cole World: The Sideline Story, every J. Cole album has been completely obsessed with being the one that earns him his place on the podium next to his idols Biggie, Jay, and Nas. It was like he read a copy of How to Make a Classic Rap Album for Dummies and has been trying to replicate it ever since. It never quite happened, but it had nothing to do with his skill. He’s a clever lyricist who can make lines stick for both good and bad reasons, the type of a storyteller who could get you to pull up a chair and listen, and his beats may sound familiar but they have this warmth to them that can produce the rare Billboard hit that feels intimate.
It’s just that he’s so deadly serious that he can make rap sound like studying for the SATs. In a recent interview with Slam, he opened up about how he was once so tormented by aspirations to make long-lasting music that he wouldn’t even allow himself to complete watching a full season of television. Imagine not letting yourself binge-watch Bob’s Burgers or whatever because you’re too busy trying to make the next The Blueprint! Sounds terrible! Well, finally he’s come to the realization he needs to chill out. Refreshingly, his latest album The Off-Season isn’t so damn uptight.
The Off-Season is a much-needed break from the heavy-handed preachiness that made KOD and 4 Your Eyez Only such slogs to get through. He pulls back slightly from the narrative form of writing (sorry, to the “Wet Dreamz” heads but no virginity tales on this one) in favor of more punchlines and wordplay. This switch doesn’t suddenly turn him into a Flint rapper, but it does sound like he’s having fun for once.
That liveliness comes out on the album’s collaborations. On “My Life,” Fayetteville crooner Morray’s hook repurposes Pharoahe Monch lyrics through vocals that sound like he’s leading a church choir, 21 Savage’s guest appearance is filled with the warmest death threats, and the smoky beat is done by Cole with help from Jake One and Wu10. This gives him the freedom to pour most of his energy into his verse, which catches a nice balance between the sort of shallow but earnest introspection he’s known for and more trivial things that just sound cool: “Wanna be in the spot like where every bitch want me like Rihanna droppin’ new Fenty,” he raps. The same could be said for “Pride Is the Devil,” where, annoying-Cole-singing aside, his thoughtfulness is complemented by Lil Baby being much less thoughtful: “Got my feet up, I paid silly bands to have sex on the jet.”
But you can still subtly feel that weight on Cole’s shoulders. “Applying Pressure” feels tense, made worse by a lifeless self-produced boom-bap instrumental that sounds like the background music for a ’90s UPN sitcom and some bars that have become expected of the out of touch rap elite: “If you broke and clownin’ a millionaire, the joke is on you.” (Nas, would approve of this one.) Some choices feel incredibly forced as well. Most notably the intro where he squeezes some cliché flexing in between a half-assed Cam’ron monologue and the jarring tonal shift into Lil Jon chants. Likewise “Let Go My Hand” would probably fall similarly flat if it wasn’t so funny. In what is supposed to be a sincere moment, he reveals that he once got into a scuffle with Diddy and in the very same song, Diddy shows up to speak some sort of fake enlightened prayer. None of this works, because no one cares about this beef, especially Diddy, who instead uses his studio time to promote his rebrand into Tony Robbins.
In the build-up to this album, Cole put out a mini-documentary that asks the question: Why is it so hard to be great in rap as you get older? Cole, now 36, believes that he’s solved it, though his answer is actually meaningless motivational speak about hunger and putting in the work and other sayings that belong on a Nike T-shirt. But actually getting older in rap is difficult because life is not the same. Many hugely successful rappers have struggled through this phase, not because they became worse lyricists, but they were clinging to the old days instead of reflecting this change. It happened to Jay on The Blueprint 3, Nas back during his “Hip Hop is Dead” era, and Kanye sometime before or after The Life of Pablo. Lots of finger-wagging and résumé raps about their accomplishments and outside endeavors. By taking a step back on The Off-Season, Cole mostly avoids that, even if he still doesn’t have a spot in those conversations he dreams of.

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Earl Sweatshirt used to make you sift through the mud to find the gold. On his latest album, the nuggets are gleaming right on the surface.

Sick!

Since 2013, Earl Sweatshirt has been committed to drawing out his thoughts in the fewest words possible. Both his debut album, Doris, and 2015’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside refined the verbose rhymes the California rapper made his name on while under Odd Future’s wing in the early 2010s. His love of words remained but he was searching for clarity, a quicker route to the sources of his anguish: his then-damaged relationship with his mother; the loss of his grandmother in 2013 and his father in 2017; and the constant negotiations of being young, Black, and in the limelight. His latest handful of projects—2018’s firestarter Some Rap Songs and 2019’s foreboding Feet of Clay—settled into language both blunt and poetic while burying themselves in soupy vocal mixes and tar-soaked beats. Their lyrics ventured into the deep waters of Earl’s mind and funneled back undiluted grief, trauma, and joy.
Those thoughts haven’t gone away on Earl’s newest album, Sick!, but there’s more talk of acceptance, balance, and moving forward in the face of new challenges. “I came from out the thicket smiling,” he says on the opening “Old Friend,” like a man home from war. “Link up for some feasible methods to free yourself/Split it with my hand like cigarills.” Earl used to make you sift through the mud to find the gold. On Sick!, the nuggets are gleaming right on the surface. The raps are as thoughtful and tightly coiled as ever, but now he’s clearer and more confident, approaching his past and his future with hope.
Two of the album’s major influences—new fatherhood and the ongoing pandemic—represent Earl’s own pondering of the orbs of life and death. COVID looms over every song, with overt references to masks, vaccines, and isolation throughout, but the responsibility he feels for his son drives his response to this strange and perilous present. It’s what inspired him to scrap a more “optimistic” 19-track version of the project: “This has been another crash course in the fact that this shit ain’t about me no more,” he recently told Rolling Stone. Dread of COVID dovetails with the album’s broader understanding of truth as the remedy for whatever ails. “This game of telephone massive/I do what I have to with the fragments,” he says on “Tabula Rasa.” It’s urgent and calming all at once.
Regardless of the subject, it’s still a marvel to hear Earl rap. His writing has only grown more concise and his sharp wit and varied delivery conjure detailed images. “Titanic” is a truncated retelling of Earl’s return from Samoa in 2011 that flips references to the late MF DOOM and the biblical Book of Daniel into a tense collage of memories. The verse that closes out “Tabula Rasa” is a technical powerhouse; Earl stagger-steps through the crevices of Theravada and Rob Chambers’ creaky beat, elongating words and phrases for emphasis and creating his own carefully sewn pockets. He makes rewiring a song as it’s playing out—and keeping pace with world-class talents like billy woods and ELUCID of Armand Hammer—look easy.
Duality—nurturing new life while surrounded by death, reconciling old actions with new perspectives—powers the album’s every thought and action. The beats are split evenly between the lo-fi-adjacent work he’s favored for the past five years and the darker side of contemporary trap preferred by artists like Lucki (who Earl’s produced for in the past) and Young Nudy. Tempos and aesthetics change from song to song, sometimes from verse to verse. Alchemist’s more traditional-sounding sour horn loop on “Lye” melts into the synthetic horns and ticking 808s of Samiyam’s “Lobby (Int).” But it’s Detroit producer Black Noi$e who walks away with the MVP title, displaying enviable range over four beat placements—the kaleidoscopic snap of “2010,” the moody trap of “Vision” and “Titanic,” and the simmering guitar samples of “Fire in the Hole.” The whiplash of rap styles emphasizes Earl’s growing confidence in his craft, as does the decision to bring in legendary engineer Young Guru for a decidedly clean mixing job. Compared to Earl’s earlier work, Sick! is literally and figuratively crystal clear.
The title track ends with a quote from the 1979 documentary Music Is the Weapon, spoken by Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti: “As far as Africa is concerned, music cannot be for enjoyment. Music has to be for revolution. Music is the weapon.” Earl has used music as a weapon for reasons both intuitive and juvenile in the past, but on Sick!, he’s more capable and no longer holding back. Healed scars and lessons learned have pushed him to this point as much as love from his son and kindred spirits like New York rapper AKAI SOLO, who gets a shoutout on “Fire in the Hole,” and longtime friend Na-Kel Smith, who provides ad-libs on “Titanic.” They’re as vital to Earl’s revolutionary spirit as anything passed down from his parents or his surrogate brother, Tyler, the Creator. Sick! doesn’t recontextualize the genre in the same way Some Rap Songs did, but it’s an act of self-revolution. It magnifies a newly assured Earl Sweatshirt, skin shed and free to ascend.

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Back from retirement again, the polarizing, meme-powered pop singer takes up “cowboy emo”: breakup songs with a cartoonish twang and schlocky Western aesthetics.

Cowboy Tears

Oliver Tree swore he wouldn’t make another album, but here he is, howling away on Jimmy Kimmel Live, taking off his big blue cowboy hat to reveal a series of smaller cowboy hats. This is Tree’s schtick: inane gimmicks that overshadow his music and even his blatant pleas for streams. In recent months, he’s crowned himself the “Vape God” from a bathtub full of e-cigarettes and boasted of spending $20,000 on tinfoil twisted into the shape of an octopus. He promoted his new album’s first single, “Cowboys Don’t Cry,” by claiming his label wouldn’t release the track until 100,000 people pre-saved it. “I’m not good at goodbyes,” he wails at the top of the song—the same phrase he used back when he announced his “retirement.” It was a wink and a middle finger to fans who got the reference, a rebuke for anyone who took him at his word.
Cowboy Tears represents a new era for Tree’s sound and style, as he trades the synth throb of 2020’s Ugly Is Beautiful for a cartoonish twang and schlocky Western aesthetics. “Just an outlaw who only had one friend,” he proclaims on the opener. He calls this “cowboy emo” music, a mix that comes across more like an emoji mashup than a cohesive mesh of genres. There are twinges of acoustic folk (“Swing & A Miss,” “California”), but more often Tree borrows from 2010s pop-rock, with sludgy distortion and reverberating whines. “I was chasing the sound of a song I heard in a Taco Bell when I was five years old,” Tree, 28, said of the album. He comes closer to the shaggy sounds of Grouplove doing their best Pixies impression, or Cage the Elephant mimicking Modest Mouse. Travis Barker offers his requisite stamp on any TikToker-turned-artist’s album, and Tree’s nasally snarls tip into Machine Gun Kelly cosplay, especially on the Barker-produced “Cigarettes.”
Eager to convince his audience that absurdity is inherently nuanced, Tree defaults to disgust. On “Cigarettes,” he crams 20 cigs into his mouth at once. On “Playing With Fire,” he moans about “drool hanging down from my double chin.” “I’m a weirdo, I’m a freak,” he proclaims on “Freaks & Geeks,” with the sincerity of a Riverdale monologue. On “Suitcase Filled With Cash,” he narrates a pile of burning money by the side of the road, a supposed statement that’s more chirpy campfire singalong than anti-consumerist anthem. “Some people are so poor that all they have is money,” he wails. For all this gesturing at subversion, Tree stays within his comfort zone: Many other songs are breakup ballads with a side of country imagery and generic lyrics that leave the listener filling the blanks (“I miss the things we used to do,” he hollers on one; “Riding ’round this wagon wheel, if you catch my drift,” he croons on another).
Tree told an interviewer that his study of Pink Floyd inspired him to tackle the album’s range of weighty themes. According to Tree, these include “money, time, religion and addiction,” motifs that rarely manifest in the actual lyrics. There is a darkness underpinning Cowboy Tears: jarring asides about Tree’s longing for death and plans for his own burial. He never lingers long enough to elucidate whether they’re more than just a facet of a melancholy “emo” aesthetic. Even when he grasps at a compelling concept—like presenting “Cowboys Don’t Cry” as a challenge to traditional masculinity—he never fleshes out a narrative or truly articulates a stance. His character’s main trait is a lack of substance; the songs are almost an afterthought in the project of performing Oliver Tree. There’s only one real surprise on Cowboy Tears, a little pulse of self-awareness as he breaks through the fourth wall. “I’m a dumbass, but people love that,” he sings on “Freaks & Geeks,” sounding a little weary of the charade, a little sick of his own bullshit. But he couldn’t be Oliver Tree without it.


The decade’s most tantalizing pop enigma officially releases a trove of unfinished material that was originally leaked online six years ago.

Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones)

This is not the debut album from Jai Paul. It’s a collection of largely incomplete drafts that was stolen and illegally posted online in April 2013. Ever since, the 16-song release has lived on via dusty MP3s and cobbled-together YouTube playlists as a testament to boundless, unrealized promise. All the while, the London singer and producer stayed almost completely silent, creating a vacuum for an insatiable internet to fill with conspiracies, desires, and frustrations. That is, until last weekend.
On June 1, along with two totally new songs, Paul put this work that was once ripped from his hands onto streaming services as well as his own website, alongside a heartfelt note to fans. “I’ve grown to appreciate that people have enjoyed that music and lived with it, and I accept that there is no way to put that shit back in the box,” the 30-year-old wrote. “Looking back, it’s sad to think about what could have been, but it is what it is and I had to let go.” Elsewhere in the statement, he candidly discussed the seismic breach of trust he felt following the initial leak as well as an unmoored feeling of being perpetually misunderstood. He wrote of a withdrawal, a breakdown, and a slow trek toward recovery, aided by therapy. The official release of the unofficial document Paul has decided to call Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones)—Bait Ones being a slangy working title for the project during the original sessions—brings with it a sense of closure, of finally wrangling some dominion over chaos.
An ability to control the uncontrollable is part of what made Jai Paul’s music so mesmerizing in the first place. On the couple of songs he properly released before the leak, “BTSTU (Edit)” and “jasmine (demo),” he bent pop music to his off-kilter will. Both tracks, which also appear on Bait Ones, are at once propulsive and elusive, like quicksand pumping out of a speaker cone, with Paul’s mumbling falsetto self-consciously buried in the mix (in the recent note, he mentioned, “It will always be a little painful for me to listen to myself.”) Here was a guy in his early 20s spiking his obsessions with J Dilla, Michael Jackson, and D’Angelo with uncanny pauses, flyby instrument breaks, and laser zaps—a meticulous introvert whose slippery sound was soon being sampled by Drake and Beyoncé.
When Paul arrived at the start of the decade, he found himself among a vanguard of innovative and ambitious musicians who were opening up a dialog with the major pop establishment. James Blake was stretching Destiny’s Child songs into alien new shapes; Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon was wailing on Kanye records; Rostam Batmanglij was toying with Auto-Tune in Vampire Weekend and Discovery; Frank Ocean was covering Coldplay with startling sincerity. Leading up to the 2013 leak, some of the feverish anticipation surrounding Paul’s official debut album involved the widespread notion that it was high time for him to fully claim his place alongside such peers—and that, if things fell into place, he could very well surpass them all. Then, everything fell apart.
But the sketchy tracks that now comprise Bait Ones endured for good reason. To be clear, there are some differences between the original leak and this new version: Both are 16 tracks long and run around 38 minutes, but Bait Ones does not include some of the goofily endearing snatches of dialog from “Gossip Girl,” Harry Potter movies, and Tomb Raider video games due to sample-clearance issues. The fidelity of Bait Ones is sharper and richer than the low-quality leaked version, though the tracks were not remixed. Instead, an engineer combed through Paul’s archive of high-quality files in order to find the closest matches to each leaked song, according to his label, XL.
Generally though, perhaps the most surprising thing about this peculiar re-release is how much hasn’t changed. Paul himself commented on the awkwardness of the endeavor in his statement. “It’s completely surreal to me that this music will now exist officially in this form, unfinished, and even sequenced by the people who leaked it!” he admitted, adding that, “Much of the tracking and production work was there, but it’s a shame about the scratch vocals and the overall mix.”
The titles of 11 of the 16 songs here are amended with a word that serves as a lowkey warning, and a reminder: “Unfinished.” This is a little ironic, considering how the excitement of Paul’s music was always tangled up in its undoneness; official early singles “BTSTU (Edit)” and “jasmine (demo)” both had parenthetical notes in their names, suggesting eternal works in progress. All of it hinted at a keen understanding of the forever-tweaking online realm years before Kanye deemed his morphing The Life of Pablo a “living, breathing, changing creative expression” in 2016. But now, Paul’s tendency to leave threads dangling seems less like soothsaying and more like a compulsion: We may never know exactly how unfinished a lot of these tracks are, because Jai Paul may never know, either.
Throughout Bait Ones, Paul sounds like he’s battling his own tentativeness, as he oscillates between indecision and bravado. Like his hero D’Angelo, who sang about his own notoriously measured creative pace on Voodoo’s “The Line,” Paul could be commiserating with impatient fans with lines here like, “This ain’t no quick ting, I won’t lie/It’s gonna take time.” On “Zion Wolf Theme,” he offers up a host of questions about his own fate without any definitive answers. “Can I make you fall in love with me?” he asks over a syncopated, sinister beat that would make prime-era Timbaland envious, perhaps addressing a potentially adoring public. Given the internet drama—and police investigation—surrounding the leak, along with Paul’s subsequent vanishing act, another couplet in the same song now feels tragically prescient: “In the company of thieves/Will I stay or will I leave?”
Elsewhere, though, there are moments where Paul sounds exuberant, like he’s vanquishing his anxious demons one gargantuan synth riff at a time. If “jasmine (demo)” is a slurry drunk dial of a love song, “Genevieve” is its effervescent counterpart. Paul woos back an ex with confidence over a peacocking production jam-packed with cowbell, sci-fi blips, and orgasmic moans (it’s also the only song on Bait Ones with a notable addition compared to the leaked version, in the form of a pleading, minute-long outro). “100,000” is similarly preening, with Paul proclaiming his dominance over any and all competition while copping to the hard work he put in to attain that dominance; in his note, he mentioned that he had been working on the Bait Ones material for six years leading up to the 2013 leak. His conflicted attitude—hesitant but resolute—is stated best on the hook to “BTSTU (demo),” his first-ever release and the last song here, where he deadpans, “I know I’ve been gone a long time/But I’m back and I want what is mine.”
There is just one full track on Bait Ones that does not come with some sort of parenthetical disclaimer in its title: According to this Jai Paul-sanctioned release, “Str8 Outta Mumbai” seems to be, maybe, dare I say—finished. Which makes sense, because it would be impossible to improve upon this. The mind reels when imagining the colossal impact this song could have made if it was given a proper release years ago—the charts it could have climbed, the brains it could have blown, the joy it could have spread. Propelled by samples of Ravi Shankar’s soundtrack for the 1979 Bollywood film Meera, “Str8 Outta Mumbai” is a miracle of cultural synthesis, in which a young British man of Indian descent gloriously expands what pop music can be. At the song’s apex, right when you expect a Prince-ly guitar solo to hit, a Hindi vocal sample erupts instead. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times across the last six years, and that moment still fills me with awe. It’s the sound of borders breaking, of traditions mingling, of a utopian closeness that so often seems so far away.


A third of a century into their collaboration, Mekons have wandered so far down their own path that they don't seem to have much in common with anybody else anymore. The ostensible concept behind this new record is drawing parallels between the present day and 100 years ago, a concept that would be entirely opaque without the album's title.

Mekons: Mekons: Ancient & Modern 1911-2011

Mekons: Ancient & Modern 1911-2011

A third of a century into their collaboration, Mekons have wandered so far down their own path that they don't seem to have much in common with anybody else anymore. They're an art-and-literature collective that happens to play music too, a small community who used to be punks together, a hydra whose three heads each sing in a different voice. They've also effectively become process artists. The ideas that shape their songs, and the means by which they create them, are the important part; the songs themselves are basically just documentation.
That makes latter-day albums like Ancient & Modern very interesting in a contemporary-art context, and occasionally tough-going in a putting-on-recordings-and-listening-to-them context. If you're waiting for them to write another "Where Were You?" or "Memphis, Egypt" or "Now We Have the Bomb", don't hold your breath; it's hard to imagine most of these songs being the kind of thing grouchy old guys at Mekons shows yell for. (Mekons shows are heavily populated by grouchy old guys.)
The ostensible concept behind this record is drawing parallels between the present day and 100 years ago. It's a concept that would be entirely opaque without the album's title-- although, of course, with their ties to the art world, Mekons know that titles can carry a lot of weight. Opacity, though, is a persistent problem on Ancient & Modern. A lot of its lyrics might as well have been assembled exquisite-corpse style: "Calling All Demons" wanders from "a reptile thinking its first thoughts" to the head of John the Baptist to "a fan-club meeting down the steps on Briggate" to "ice cream, eggs and bread," and so on. A couple of its lines seem to allude to Oscar Wilde, but that's the only point of coherence to someone who wasn't in the room when it was written.
Still, Mekons know when they've come up with a good phrase, and how to build an arrangement around it. On the title track, it's "I had a minor breakdown," repeated as a refrain while a tiny, four-note figure loops and loops; on Jon Langford's splenetic rocker "Space in Your Face", it's "I was tempted to believe," howled by an ensemble with someone's devotional humming behind them; on the old-timey strut "Geeshie", it's Sally Timms ending some lines with "while there's still time" and others with "try to still time." (That last appears to be a tribute to Geeshie Wiley, the mysterious singer-guitarist who recorded her haunting "Last Kind Word Blues" in 1930. Again, the title's the only explicit cue.)
The other thing Mekons have picked up from contemporary art practice is the principle that, once you've established your voice, you can keep doing variations on the same thing indefinitely. Their lineup has been fairly stable for a couple of decades now, and it's hard to imagine a band more comfortable with each other's playing than they are. When they feel like it, they can conjure moments of disarming beauty. ("I fall asleep when I should pray," Timms and Tom Greenhalgh repeat together-- she's clear-voiced and reserved, he's quavering and sardonic-- and then the song briefly dissolves into a dubbed-out froth of piano and violin before resuming.) When they don't, they still sound like no one but Mekons: prickly, jovial, boozy, resistant to the bourgeois pleasures of rhyme and tune but sometimes seduced by them anyway. For anyone who's not already a Mekons enthusiast, though, this has to be an alarmingly forbidding, cryptic piece of work.


Expanded reissues of the Cars’ second and third albums capture the group running like a well-oiled machine, both refining and expanding upon their tightly wound new wave.

Candy-O / Panorama

It’s a tale as old as time: A band arrives on the scene with an album so fully formed, it seems impossible that they could improve upon it, let alone escape its gravitational pull. The Cars would seem to define this trope. Their eponymous 1978 debut contains so many classic rock staples, a modern listener could mistake it for a greatest hits collection. But the band is the exception that proves the rule: They managed to move forward from The Cars with a pair of albums that both refined and expanded their tightly wound new wave.
Those two records—1979’s Candy-O and 1980’s Panorama—received expanded reissues in July, 2017, roughly a year after the group’s entire catalog got boxed up by Rhino, and long after the debut received a double-disc deluxe treatment. Pairing the two helps escape the conventional wisdom that has reduced their respective reputations to a pair of blurbs. Candy-O is generally seen as the explicit sequel to The Cars, while Panorama is the dark detour that tanked on the charts. Both of these assessments have some grounding in reality, but the truth for both records is considerably more complex.
Take Candy-O, which followed their debut by almost exactly a year. Superficially, the album offers another dose of stylish, detached pop with hooks so finely honed, they may have come off an assembly line. Listen closely, though, and Candy-O boasts bolder production that emphasizes the band’s heavy attack and gives plenty of space for guitarist Elliot Easton to spin out composed solos. It sounds not just like new wave—the umbrella term for any pop-oriented counterculture music that arose in the wake of punk—but album rock. Indeed, Candy-O is where the Cars set up shop in the Billboard charts: It went all the way to No. 3 on the Top 200 (The Cars went no further than No. 18), and “Let’s Go” came close to breaking the Top 10, peaking at No. 14.
Despite this consolidation of mainstream success—something surely assisted by Ric Ocasek’s facility for pop hooks that feel at once icy and alluring—Candy-O pledges its allegiance to art rock and punk by slipping in salutes to the Cars’ peers on the margins. “Shoo Be Doo,” a snippet of dark, cloistered synths wedged in between two far more ebullient moments, evokes Suicide, while “Got a Lot on My Head,” assisted by the carnivalesque keyboards of Greg Hawkes, suggests the jittery, high-octane spite of Elvis Costello & the Attractions. But where Costello wears his bile on his sleeve, Ocasek and his co-lead vocalist Benjamin Orr specialize in dispassion. No matter how loud, furious, or, as in the case of “It’s All I Can Do,” lovely the band sounded, both singers—their timbres and phrasing so similar, it’s possible to play Candy-O a dozen times without realizing they’re swapping leads—rarely deign to convey anything approaching enthusiasm. This coolness gives the music a steely sexiness that suits the Alberto Vargas pin-up illustration gracing the album cover. This isn’t music for the heart: With its stylized surfaces, it appeals to the senses, offering satisfaction in its high performance.
Panorama doubles down on the Cars’ inherent disaffection, ratcheting up the precision of the rhythms to the point where they almost seem robotic. The introduction of synthesized drums enhances the impression that the band prefers mechanical movement to the swing and mess of rock’n’roll, which may be the reason why Panorama underperformed commercially: It went platinum upon its release, largely based on momentum, but its single, “Touch and Go,” barely scraped the Top 40, topping out at No. 37. By stripping away the stadium-rock affectations of Candy-O—thinning the beefy bottom end created by bassist Orr and drummer David Robinson, while pushing Hawkes’ keyboards over Easton’s guitars in the mix—the Cars wind up emphasizing their artiness while staying fixated on Ocasek’s sharp pop hooks.
In the context of Panorama, those hooks, whether guitar riffs or vocal melodies, don’t necessarily contribute to the kind of songs that would tear up the charts. Often, Ocasek appears to be writing meta-pop songs—“Don’t Tell Me No” and “Getting Through” even have passing lyrical allusions to oldies by Lesley Gore and Buddy Knox—as if he’s in the process of deconstructing pop to figure out how it works. That’s why Panorama feels like the logical conclusion to the Cars’ streamlined new wave: Even if it doesn’t deliver the pure pleasures of its predecessors, it captures the group running like a well-oiled machine.
Rhino’s expanded editions of Candy-O and Panorama, available both on vinyl and CD, are anchored by nice remasters of the original albums, but the bonus tracks are also noteworthy. Along with “That’s It” (a chipper B-side that sounds like a B-side), Candy-O is fleshed out with alternate, earlier versions that underscore the material’s harder rock edge. Conversely, the bonus material on Panorama—three previously unreleased songs (“Shooting for You,” “Be My Baby,” “The Edge”) plus the B-side “Don’t Go to Pieces”—offers further supporting evidence for the album’s dark charms. As welcome as it is to have these extra cuts, the truly valuable thing about this round of Cars reissues is how it shifts the focus away from the band’s enduring warhorses to the music that isn’t so well known. This lesser-heard material reveals what a smart, inventive pop group they were.


The Welsh quintet's seventh studio release is its most straightforward "rock" album, a record on which the departures underscore the band's long-established strengths.

Love Kraft

In the Super Furry Animals' world, each note, each word contains multitudes of meanings. So frontman Gruff Rhys's pre-SFA band name Ffa Coffi Pawb can mean either "Everybody's Coffee Beans" or "Fuck Off, Everybody." So 2003's "Venus & Serena" refers to the tennis sisters and/or two pet turtles beloved of a boy raised by wolves (sure, why not?). The recordings are pop, psychedelic, IDM, punk, funk, folk, soul, classical-- often all at once. "Citizens Band", a hidden track from the band's 1999 album Guerrilla required a liner-note glossary to decode its playful lyrics, as Rhys sang: "So many ways to communicate what you want to say."
Love Kraft, then, the Welsh quintet's seventh album in 12 years, may be an homage to the bands Love and Kraftwerk. It may signal the band's love for its craft, or acknowledge the eternal sense/sensibility, passion/prose, Speakerboxx/The Love Below dichotomy. Is it an expression of affinity for "master of the macabre" H.P. Lovecraft, whose novels sometimes took place in an SFA-OK "Dreamlands" setting and are familiar to Re-Animator fans? If you believe Rhys' press clippings, it's either a sex shop in Cardiff, Wales, or a "hovering vehicle"-- a fitting replacement for the band's Radiator-era "peace tank." Heck, maybe Rhys just really digs cheese.
Whatever its etymology, Love Kraft is a utopian epic, a sweeping musical argument for love in the time of Fallujah. In that sense, it's vintage SFA, with even its departures underscoring the band's long-established strengths. The leftist politics are less overt, but just as potent; the compositions more focused, but still mad as a Lewis Carroll hatter; the pop more rockin', yet probably more accessible to noobs. The splash that begins the album is at once a baptism and an immersion, and the band doesn't come up for air until High Llama Sean O'Hagan's final flitting string arrangement.
Politically, fury has given way to fantasy. Gone are direct polemics like antiwar parable "The Piccolo Snare" or Bush-burner "Out of Control", both from 2003's Phantom Power. With the world "slipping away"-- "Kiss me with apocalypse," Rhys mourns on opener "Zoom!"-- the Furries throw up their hands and invent a new one, full of dinosaurs, chickens, horsenappings, unwanted pregnancies, and, yes, love. The intergalactic Prince workout of lead single "Lazer Beam" proposes "no more romantic comedies" (take notes, Dems!) and a weapon to wash away evil-- as practical, when you think about it, as convincing certain voters they were misled into a downward-spiraling war. On "Frequency", Rhys' target is clear ("You say history will be your judge/ But the jury's whipped, gagged, and drugged"), but a sumptuous "Turning Tide"-style hook dilutes the venom. The songs are at once lovely and full of impotent dread; if you can't beat 'em, they seem to decide, beautify.
For the first time, four of the band's five members sing and contribute songs-- including keyboardist Cian Ciárán, ostensibly the force behind the band's past trackier, IDM-influenced efforts-- and together they grasp the narrative arcs that sometimes have eluded Rhys. The tripartite "Cloudberries", with its "Took a circle of friends to the village square/ Oh, love triangles" and samba-like midsection, ranks among the band's finest. Ciárán's "Walk You Home" starts as shy, string-laden Avalanches lounge before swelling into a delicate payoff. Drummer Dafydd Ieuan's "Atomik Lust" leads languid "Feel Flows" keyboards unwittingly into a radioactive wall of guitars; "I'd love to see the ending someday of Citizen Kane," Ieuan sighs. Guitarist Huw "Bunf" Bunford's Wings-esque road tune "Back on a Roll" is the lone disappointment.
"Lazer Beam" aside, the guitar-heavy Love Kraft may be the Furries' most straightforward "rock" album. Even as "Psyclone!" riffs on space invaders and tyrannosaurs, it boasts the most enormous na-na-na-na chorus this year-- Beck's "E-Pro" swathed in Moroccan samples and brazen strings. "Ohio Heat" steps from Phantom Power's Byrdsian twang to an America-esque trot, with harmonies and acoustic guitars spooning sugar onto lyrics involving a fictitious Welsh emigrant's 19th-century Midwestern suicide. Bunf's "The Horn" must be among the catchiest songs ever to prominently feature the dulcimer.
Even beyond the album title, everything Super Furry means more than it seems. "Atomik Lust" is apparently about Ieuan's fear of flying as well as "if-it's-not-love-then-it's-the-bomb" apocalyptic romance-- complete with "turbulence" sound effects. Jurassic, galactic goof "Psyclone!" can also be about Creationism, re-branded these days as "intelligent design." "Zoom!" was originally performed in a 2001 Peel session with inscrutable nonsense lyrics instead of its current ashen-faced wordplay.
On "Walk You Home", Ciárán sings, "The future ain't what it used to be." The line has been attributed to Yogi Berra, French symbolist poet Paul Valery, and Arthur C. Clarke. At its essence, Love Kraft is an assertion that the future-- and the present-- don't need to be that way at all; indeed, they can be however we imagine them. On album-closing "Cabin Fever", a piano comedown worthy of Dennis Wilson's overlooked Pacific Ocean Blue, Ciárán gets the last word, so refreshed, so clean: "The future now is wide open and clear." Anything's possible.


Fresh off her hypnotic LP The Magic Place, Barwick collaborates on a live set with experimental music vet Ikue Mori.

Ikue Mori / Julianna Barwick: FRKWYS Vol. 6

FRKWYS Vol. 6

Up to now, Julianna Barwick has not often engaged in collaboration. Her process, which involves layering her voice with a Loop Station, is defined by solitude; a feeling that comes across in her music with full force. So it was a nice surprise to hear that she would contribute to the Rvng label's FRKWYS series of 12" records, which pairs contemporary and classic electronic artists. Barwick drew Ikue Mori of the seminal no-wave band DNA, who has ably kept up with new technology, evolving from trap sets to drum machines to computer software. The four extended, improvised movements that compose FRKWYS Vol. 6 are familiar turf for Mori, but a whole new world for Barwick.
The music was recorded in New York's White Columns gallery last fall-- half with the musicians each isolated in a cubicle; Mori with her laptop and Barwick with her looping console. (A video documenting the performance can be found here.) Right away, with "Dream Sequence", fans of Florine and The Magic Place will find themselves in new territory. Barwick's voice is lightly scattered amid an array of computerized slide whistles and metallic resonance-- not an enveloping presence, but a thing among things. Several minutes elapse before she unleashes one of her trademarked melodious shrieks. Playing against Barwick's usual placidity, it's almost chaotic, but still has a clear build, climax, and resolution.
Mori's music comes from machines but evokes the natural world, pulling in sounds like dripping water, crackling electricity, and warped chimes. This is consistent across all four tracks, though each has a singular arc and feel once you get past the uniformly distressed surfaces. On "Stalactite Castle", Barwick's voice competes with mechanical vortices that call to mind Ellen Allien and Antye Greie. Then she takes a more leading and openly songful role on "Rain and Shine at the Lotus Pond" and "Rejoinder", with an almost choral home stretch bringing the record to an arresting close.
Barwick fans may feel an initial wave of disappointment that this doesn't bash you over the head with holiness the way her records do. And those who appreciate her music through the filter of Enya, rather than Brian Eno, may find Mori's haywire electronics simply indigestible. It's not the sort of thing you just throw on in the background, as The Magic Place could be. But taken on its own terms, it's a sneakily bewitching record that bodes well for Barwick's future. Until now, we knew that she was very good at one thing-- FRKWYS Vol. 6 is an encouraging sign that she's willing and able to branch out.


On their debut album, twin sisters Inez and Ella Johannson are immersed in their own charming, sometimes too insular alt-pop world.

Bird Hour

On the cover of Bird Hour, twin sisters Inez and Ella Johansson have their backs turned as they hunch over a sparsely furnished dollhouse, blissfully unaware of the camera. The music they make together as 7ebra is similarly insular, immersed in a secret language. Listening to the whispery sketches on their debut feels like peering over their shoulders as they work in communion, piecing arcane alt-pop tunes together out of rudimentary guitar riffs and odd turns of phrase.
Though slightly more legible than a hissy Sentridoh compilation or Secret Stars tape, several songs are built from similar blueprints as DIY tape releases from Shrimper Records or early Dirty Projectors albums. Plunking power chords and gentle fingerpicked arpeggios lock into hypnotic loops, while Ella’s organ wanders down aimless, freely associative paths. The twins’ short, cryptic lyrics act as wayposts through the ambiguity: “I could tell you we were born to care for each other,” they repeat on “Born to Care,” sometimes solo and other times in harmony. By keeping the backdrop relatively static, they move this shared truth around like furniture, offering different glimpses of its features as it’s pushed into new corners of the room.
The songs Bird Hour are simple but arranged with handcrafted intimacy. The percussion on “I Like to Pretend” is composed only of a digital kick and snare that Ella triggers with her feet beneath the keyboard when the duo plays live. “Tell me a story, I like to pretend,” the twins sing to each other in a cozy, Alex G-esque verse, prompting a whimsical keyboard riff. Here, the duo is a jam band on a microscopic scale, scrawling weird shapes. On “I Have a Lot to Say” and “Lighter Better,” they zap delicate pop tunes with a jolt of electricity. There’s a tongue-in-cheek charm to their blown-out guitar solos.
The Johanssons seem to take pleasure in toying with their audience, and their attempts at more conventional, wordier songs are still beguiling. “If I Ask Her,” driven by a simple, post-punk guitar line, first scans as an overheard argument. “Please,I love to fulfill your needs… you seem to think I enjoy to be unheard,” they sing sardonically. But the story’s details feel incomplete, as if the monologue is being rehearsed in front of a mirror. The anonymous figures that 7ebra pine for, fret over, or secretly resent across Bird Hour often appear out of focus: “Want to give you everything, but I know I can’t I cant give because there’s nothing in here,” they sing over the creeping arpeggios of “Stripey Horsey,” conjuring a state of vague anxiety. Within the charming, homespun sound they’ve constructed, there’s still plenty of room for the duo to flesh out their private world.


On their third album, the industrial noise-rock group Pop. 1280 get closer than ever to their Big Theme: the dehumanization at the core of the technological strides toward a Big, Bold, Bright Future, the rottenness and hollowness of a world which we’ve been told is full of promise, but in which all of those promises of economic stability and cultural prosperity are consistently broken.

Paradise

Pop. 1280 aren’t shy about their love for generic conventions, from the witty and nasty noir of their namesake to Cronenbergian body-horror lyrical material to consistent references to '70s speculative fiction. It is the dystopian landscape where these worlds intersect that makes this Brooklyn group's industrial noise-rock click and hum; it is vital in its grimness.
On their third album, Paradise, Pop. 1280 get closer than ever to the theme that unites these genres—the dehumanization at the core of the technological strides toward a Big, Bold, Bright Future, the rottenness and hollowness of a world which we’ve been told is full of promise but in which all of those promises of economic stability and cultural prosperity are consistently broken. In truth, this is less speculative fiction than the constant reality of our modern lives—less a warning than an observation. "Chromidia," the album’s second single, is a meditation on the constancy of surveillance—"Are you my best friend/ Are you the camera lens?" singer Chris Bug intones, the line growing more sinister upon each repetition.
They also hew closer to the conventions of mid-late '80s dancefloor industrial, more Front by Front than Songs About Fucking. Tracks like "Phantom Freighter" and "In Silico" wouldn’t feel out of place at all on the pre-TVT Wax Trax! roster. This is a deeply rhythmic record, as any exploration of the tension between man and machine must be, drum machines and samplers supplementing Andrew Chugg’s live drumming.
Good genre work requires a certain amount of heavy-handedness in order to be recognizable, and dancefloor industrial has always relied on obvious metaphor, big beats for stompy boots and a sizeable dose of relatively simplistic teen-style angst. Paradise certainly isn’t lacking in these ingredients but it makes up for dynamism what it lacks in subtlety. It is more skeletal and raw in places than their two previous albums, and more lush and thick with synth and guitar in others. This production is ultimately what makes Paradise such a standout; there are plenty of young industrial and noise-rock bands running hard on all cylinders, as Pop. 1280 did on their prior efforts. The extra gears and moving parts in their sound feel like necessary moves to avoid quick and certain burnout.


The Washington, D.C. trio make visceral, minimal punk that’s as stripped down as a roadkill carcass, and almost as gross.

Family Party

Knife Wife’s music is not for the fainthearted. The Washington, D.C. trio make visceral, minimal punk that’s as stripped down as a roadkill carcass. Billed as the “diary of a teenybopper translated and recited by freaks,” their new EP Family Party envisions a teenage brain where boredom and escapism fuel macabre nightmares. Balancing unsettling lyricism and uncomplicated instrumentation, their thrumming basslines and crusty drum hits form the backdrop for ruminations on licking strangers and euthanizing friends. Much like being a teenager, it’s strange and weird and sometimes scary.
Across 10 tracks, band members Sami Cola, Nico Castleman, and Ruby Parrish rotate through guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. Though their lyrics are hard to swallow, their compositions are solemn, rudimentary chord progressions that pile each instrument on top of the others. The ominous bass and breathy sighs of “Dogs” recall the seductive rock of LA’s Cherry Glazerr. Sometimes the band’s eerie, crawling guitars resemble a lo-fi version of the xx’s haunted minimalism. “Fruity Void” drops the standard rock band arrangement in favor of a surreal synth wormhole. This is music for rousing the darkest corners of the psyche and embracing abjection.
Like the films of Harmony Korine, Family Party goes out of its way to indulge its creators’ peculiar desires and demented fantasies. The earliest tracks explore infatuation turned to poisonous obsession: “Cut up photos of you and glue it in my eyelids,” goes the first verse of “Dreamland.” “Silly Pony,” the best-conceived track, pairs a single plucked guitar string against Parrish’s exhausted vocals. “You fucked my dogma,” she sings, the syllables barely escaping her throat. “I’ll collect your used Band-Aids/Until my infatuation fades.” During the chorus, her voice sounds like it’s traveling through a playground talk tube. There’s no affection, just a deranged search for validation.
Family Party is dotted with mentions of sickness, reminders of the human body’s frailty and mortality. Parrish uses morbidity to manipulate: “If I told you I was croaking, would you love me back?” she ponders on “Silly Pony.” On “The Dentist,” Castleman recalls the pleasures of a day spent hallucinating on nitrous. “God, I love this auto-immune disease,” they sing flatly. They’re hyper-aware of their body, but the lyrics spiral into abstraction; the mind on nitrous is hard to access. “Lobe” takes a darker turn, commanding listeners to “euthanize your friends” so Castleman can “snip off their lips.” “Feed me probiotics/I don’t wanna be sick,” they continue—perhaps a genuine moment of health anxiety, perhaps a sarcastic aside.
It’s the disconnection that’s most upsetting about Knife Wife’s music: They don’t react as you’d expect to discussions of animal strangulation or ass-licking, because they mostly don’t react at all. But throughout Family Party, the band seek contact with others—at least by proxy. Whether screaming about lobotomies on “Lobe” or dreaming of becoming someone else on “Fruity Void,” their obsession with bodies, illness, and the grotesque is really about escaping oneself. Underneath their apathy lies personal distress and confusion; Knife Wife just find darkness more palatable when it’s veiled in obscenity.

Buy: Rough Trade
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