Bandcamp Daily's Essential Releases of 2022

*Pink Dolphins*, the third outing of trumpeter jaimie branch’s electronic duo with drummer Jason Nazary, was released just two months before branch’s shocking and untimely passing at age 39. It is named for the Amazon river dolphin, a creature that branch liked to call “aquadelic” and something she saw as representing her mixed Colombian heritage. The lo-fi grooves and smeared sonic wanderings are pulled together by producer Jeff Parker, who augments the duo tracks with guitar, bass, and vintage synthesizer, plus an assist from Chad Taylor on mbira for “Delfin Rosado” (“pink dolphin”). Given the electronic aesthetic, it’s striking how much of branch’s trumpet playing here is straightforwardly open and clear, with little in the way of effects. Her horn sings out boldly, and she sings as well, on the track “Earthlings,” intoning the line “we are not the earthlings that you know” with an air of sensuous mystery. It’s a melodic hook that lingers much like the memory of branch herself.

The New Yorker has finally gotten his flowers as one of the finest MCs in the contemporary underground after a cool couple decades grinding it out with his label, Backwoodz Studioz; 2021’s *Haram*, from Woods’ Armand Hammer duo with E L U C I D, felt like a high watermark for a new NY scene. On *Aethiopes*, Woods’ first solo album since 2019, he recruits producer Preservation, a fellow NY scene veteran known for his work with Yasiin Bey and Ka; his haunted beats set an unsettling scene for Woods’ evocative stories, which span childhood bedrooms and Egyptian deserts. The guest list doubles as a who’s who of underground rap—EL-P, Boldy James, E L U C I D—but Woods holds his own at the center of it all. As he spits on the stunningly skeletal “Remorseless”: “Anything you want on this cursed earth/Probably better off getting it yourself, see what it’s worth.”

DIGITAL VERSION OF THE ALBUM DROPS ON APRIL 8, 2022. Aethiopes is billy woods’ first album since 2019’s double feature of Hiding Places and Terror Management. The project is fully produced by Preservation (Dr Yen Lo, Yasiin Bey), who delivered a suite of tracks on Terror Management, including the riveting single “Blood Thinner”. The two collaborated again on Preservation’s 2020’s LP Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, which featured a memorable billy woods appearance on the song “Lemon Rinds”, as well as the B-side “Snow Globe”.

Absolutely thrilled to present the debut release from the duo of RA Washington (from Mourning [A] BLKstar, Vernacular - our recent amazing Astral Spirits reissue of their only recorded album) and Jah Nada (from Bloody Show, Obnox, JZNZ and more). In Search For Our Father's Gardens is a sprawling double LP that features a large 14 piece ensemble cast, including members of Mourning [A] BLKstar, Oneida, and more. The album runs the gamut of sounds from the reverent sounds of Side A, the the soulful emissions of Side B, the meditative drones and rhythms of side C, through to the culmination of it all on Side D's "Bobbi Lynn" featuring guest drummer Kid Millions. Also of special note with the album (and digital download). One brilliantly unique feature Washington & Nada added to both the physical and digital versions of this record - sides B & C were recorded and designed to be played separately and/or together (if you have two record players set up). The bonus digital version is of course called "Side E" and is a great way to see the unconventional thinking and ideas behind the duo.

Heaven Come Crashing, the sophomore electronic full-length from Brooklyn-based composer and producer Rachika Nayar, finds the protean guitarist and producer pivoting from the ghostly netherworlds of her debut into vivid, fluorescent, cinematic maximalism. On Our Hands Against the Dusk, Nayar used her guitar as the primary source for sound design, mutating the instrument beyond recognition through layers of digital processing. Soon after, the album’s companion EP, fragments, demonstrated the types of raw guitar-playing that would be transfigured into those grander compositions—miniature genre sketches that touched upon everything from post-rock to Midwestern emo. With these two 2021 releases, Rachika resculpted the limits of both guitar and electronic music, placing her at the forefront of various contemporary music scenes in her current home of New York City and more broadly amongst the likes of Fennesz, Julianna Barwick, and Tim Hecker. Heaven Come Crashing retains Nayar’s mangled guitar stylings but expands the color palette by looking not so much to the fretboard, as to the dance floor and the silver screen. Influences enter into the frame ranging from ’90s trance, to early M83, to Yoko Kanno anime soundtracks. With its M1 piano stabs, supersaws, and glimpses of Amen breaks, the album charts a luminescent space between 5 a.m. warehouse raves and the urban freeways of its cover image—romantic, nocturnal, and reckless in its velocity and emotional abandon. On the topic, Nayar says: “I both love and feel so wary of melodrama, because its entire premise is to be uncritical. Taking your most massive emotions at face-value feels so fraught when they partly originate with structures you can’t control, with structures you maybe even feel at war with.” Within this conflicted relationship to its own theatrics, the album wages a battle between surrendering to desire and incinerating it. Heaven Come Crashing invites the listener to revel within fantasy, before helping light the match to burn it down—one final embrace in the dream world before it shatters to pieces ~~~ “Fantasy is scenario, but a scenario in bits and pieces—always very brief, just a glimmer of the narrative of desire. What’s glimpsed is very sharply contoured, very brightly lit, but all of a sudden it’s gone: a body I catch sight of in a car as it goes round a bend, before it plunges into the shadows“ — Barthes, How To Live Together

The Staples Jr. Singers were part of a vanguard of soul gospel artists in the 1970s that broke from tradition to testify with the groove. When they wrote these songs — all of them stone cold soul — they had one question on their minds: When Do We Get Paid? “We were so strange and we were so young,” said Edward Brown, a singer in the Staples Jr. Singers, “and a lot of people didn’t understand that.” Like many gospel groups at the time, the Staples Jr. Singers were a family band: Annie, A.R.C., and Edward Brown from Aberdeen, Mississippi. They were just teenagers when they started, in 1969—they named themselves after their idols (the Staple Singers, if we need to spell it out for you)—and they built a reputation by playing school talent shows and front yards near their hometown on the banks of the Tombigbee River, until they eventually began touring with regional acts on the gospel circuit. Every weekend, they would pile into their family van and travel across the Bible Belt, performing sometimes as many as three shows in a single day. Back then, the South was desegregated on paper but not always in practice, and the Staples Jr. Singers weren’t always sure what kind of welcome they would receive—whether a new audience would embrace them, whether local restaurants would serve them. The Browns got their big break in 1975, when a traveling gospel singer Joe Orr introduced them to a man who ran a now long gone recording studio in Tupelo—like a figure from a parable, he only went by the name of Big John. They were just teenagers at the time, and they drew inspiration straight from their lives. “It was kind of like some of the things that my parents were going through,” said Annie. “They didn’t have much, but the little they had, they tried to take care of the family. My daddy used to work, come home and make sure that we had food, clothes on our back, and a place over our head. So, those songs had the meaning of some of the things that we were going through.” They sold the records themselves, sometimes after their shows, other times right out of their childhood home. “People used to come by—and people liked our style that we had back then,” said Edward, “we had our own style of music right there.” Forty years, three generations, and countless performances later, the original members of the Staples Jr. Singers are still on the circuit, performing almost every weekend with their families. Although they don’t go by the Staples Jr. Singers anymore—they changed their name to the Brown Singers in the late 70s, then marriage made two bands out of one: Annie Brown Caldwell formed a gospel dynasty of her own, the Caldwell Singers, with her husband and daughters. While the Browns and Caldwells have written an entire catalog of gospel music since the era of 1975’s When Do We Get Paid, for the Staples Jr. Singers, the incantatory funk of this music still holds the power to help make a way out of dark and troubled times. “I can be a witness,” Annie said. “Back then you could feel it. You were basing it on yourself. These are the songs that are really going to take us over.”

Brittney Parks’ *Athena* was one of the more interesting albums of 2019. *Natural Brown Prom Queen* is better. Not only does Parks—aka the LA-based singer, songwriter, and violinist Sudan Archives—sound more idiosyncratic, but she’s able to wield her idiosyncrasies with more power and purpose. It’s catchy but not exactly pop (“Home Maker”), embodied but not exactly R&B (“Ciara”), weird without ever being confrontational (“It’s Already Done”), and it rides the line between live sound and electronic manipulation like it didn’t exist. She wants to practice self-care (“Selfish Soul”), but she also just wants to “have my titties out” (“NBPQ \[Topless\]”), and over the course of 55 minutes, she makes you wonder if those aren’t at least sometimes the same thing. And the album’s sheer variety isn’t so much an expression of what Parks wants to try as the multitudes she already contains.

“If I ever win a Grammy, I’m gonna thank him,” Queens-born vocalist, producer, and multi-disciplinary artist Yaya Bey tells Apple Music about one of the many songs on *Remember Your North Star* inspired by an unnamed ex-lover. He was a music industry player and that relationship, which lasted some three years, revealed many things to Bey—not just about the industry itself, but about who she is and what she values. “It was like, ‘Well, where am I going? Where am I headed and what should I remember?’ And I guess in trying to move towards love—love for self, love romantically, platonically—I’m remembering that that’s where I’m going. That’s my North Star.” While that relationship opened her eyes to some of the industry’s—and men at large’s—more sordid practices, Bey managed to keep her joy intact, delivering a robust collection of music that spans Billie Holiday-inspired jazz crooning, lovers rock reggae, and the bubbling form of South African house, amapiano. Within these spoonfuls of sugar, Bey supplies medicine aplenty, lambasting the intrinsically toxic systems that would, at one time, have her questioning her own self-worth. “To be a woman in this male-dominated industry means you get judged and valued by things that really don’t matter,” she says. “But I can’t have apprehension about what I do with my music because it’s the only place I have a voice. Being a Black woman, an up-and-coming artist, and especially in my thirties, the only place I have a voice is in my music. I can’t be silent there. I’ll just disappear.” Below, Bey takes us through some of the key tracks on *Remember Your North Star*, a project that casts her more visible than ever. **“Intro”** “So, \[talk show host\] Wendy Williams had said some shit about \[vegan lifestyle influencer\] Tabitha Brown on her show. And then Tabitha Brown retaliated in this way that insinuated Wendy Williams doesn’t know love or doesn’t have anyone to love her. And then someone on Black Twitter tweeted that even though Tabitha Brown didn’t say very much, we all knew it was an insult because we all kind of know Black women have a wound around not being loved and not knowing love. And that got me to thinking about how Black women respond to that. There’s the ‘city girl’ approach, which is like, ‘Fuck love, just provide for me financially’—and all of it is defense mechanisms—because a lot of times we’re afraid to ask for the things that we want, or we assume that we can’t get the things that we want, emotionally. I’m saying, ‘N\*\*\*\*s going to n\*\*\*a, so you might as well get paid.’ That’s just my take on not feeling secure that men will show up in a way that is supportive of my emotional needs.” **“big daddy ya”** “I was having this realization that most all of my problems can somehow be tied to either racism, patriarchy, or capitalism—literally everything in my life that’s going wrong. And as it pertains to patriarchy, misogyny, and all that shit, it’s always just fucking men at the root of my problems. Even when it’s a woman, it’s still some woman enacting patriarchy, enacting misogyny. What I learned about the male ego is just to laugh at it because it’s utterly ridiculous. It isn’t built on supporting the collective, uplifting the collective. It’s built on scarcity and that’s why it’s so fragile. And so, ‘big daddy ya’ is just me mocking men.” **“nobody knows”** “I had just signed to Ninja Tune, and they sent me to D.C. to start the album. It was one of the first songs that I wrote. I had been going back and forth with this guy for three years, and we weren’t in contact at the time. And he was bouncing back and forth between me and this other woman. I was really fucked up because I had lost my job. Like, the song starts off, ‘I ain’t paid my rent in three months’—that was very true for me. And this guy, the last time I saw him, he was rubbing it in my face that \[his other woman\] is a doctor and I’m unemployed. I have to work so hard under the system of capitalism to be worthy. I can’t just wake up in the morning and be worthy. I have to have all of these things to be worthy of love, to be worthy of a roof over my head. Me just being me is not enough for this world—I think it’s a song that means the most to me on the album because I was at my lowest point, but I was still fighting for myself.” **“alright”** “I was listening to a lot of Frankie Beverly & Maze, and what I like about Frankie Beverly & Maze is that they make music to uplift the spirit. I knew I needed live musicians because a lot of the album was made on a 404 or from sliced samples. It’s all digital. \[My friend\] Temi introduced me to \[co-producer\] Aja Grant, and it was easy. It was a jam session sort of thing. I just hummed out the melody lines and they picked it up, and then added to it and extended it.” **“meet me in brooklyn”** “My family is from Barbados. I always say that I’m an African American of Western Indian descent. I grew up deeply in both cultures. So, I felt like I needed to put some of that on the album because it’s part of who I am. And the album, overall, is about me dealing with and navigating misogyny externally and internally, and even internalized misogyny through my romantic dealings. And some of romance is about fun, like when you first meet someone at a party—like, the first time I ever danced with a boy was at a reggae party. So, it’s in my DNA, and culturally and socially growing up in New York, and I wanted to include that sound.” **“pour up” (feat. DJ Nativesun)** “My friend Chris is an amazing DJ, and he plays a lot of house and dance, and I was working on a song with another artist at a session in D.C. at this big house that had all these little studio rooms. Chris comes into the session, and he has a track. At first, I was afraid because it’s amapiano. But when I think about the music that’s coming out of Africa, that’s dancehall, that’s soca, it’s house music—and I think, once we get past the whole diaspora wars thing, all of us fighting for the scraps, we’re all Africans at the very bottom of this capitalist, imperialist food chain. Because you can’t talk about Fela without talking about James Brown without talking about \[Wizkid’s\] *Made in Lagos*—that was an Afrobeats album because it was made by an African from Nigeria, but if we take that away, that was a dancehall record. At first, I was afraid that I would experience some backlash, but when I thought about it, I’m like amapiano is house music, and I’m allowed to be a part of the conversation.” **“reprise”** “Sometimes relationships that you go through are a catalyst for you to get to know yourself more, or for you to really see where you’re playing yourself, where you’re doubting yourself, where you are not showing up for yourself. It’s really about how I had a lack of self-worth, and I was afraid to see myself as capable. And I had this other song where I was, like, tearing his ass a new one. But it was coming from a place that was more about bashing him than it was about uplifting me. And it isn’t really my desire to bash anyone. So, I didn’t put the song out and, instead, I wrote ‘reprise,’ which is more reflecting on how I got to where I am, and the things that I’ve seen. It gave me a space to even have compassion for him because he’s somebody with his own trauma and insecurities that are informing the way he’s moving through the world.” **“rolling stoner”** “I probably smoke the heaviest when I’m going through shit. Two months before the pandemic started, I was working 13-hour shifts in a homeless shelter, seeing crazy shit. I’m riddled with guilt because I’m working there, and I feel like I’m a part of the problem. Even though I’m just an art teacher there, it’s still like I shouldn’t be here because this is hella problematic. I come home, I smoke my life away, I make music, I go to sleep for two hours. I do it again. I mean, I had smoked before then, but that was my introduction to, ‘Now I’m a pothead.’” **“i’m certain she’s there”** “So, my parents were teenage parents. My mom, she didn’t raise me. She came from different circumstances. Her family was not as supportive. Her mom died. Her dad was just really disappointed that she had a baby so young. And my dad, on the other hand, he just had more support, more help raising me. Either people don’t ever talk about my mom at all, like she’s this thing that never happened, or they have terrible things to say about her. Which, as a child, it fucked with my own self-image, to have this mom that is a pariah, I guess. So, as I got older, I realized that some of that is misogyny. And I just wanted to address that.” **“street fighter blues“** “‘Street fighter blues’ was the starting point of the album. I had someone else that I was supposed to work with, and the session was a nightmare. I ended up snatching my equipment out the wall and leaving. But then, I called my friend Nate Jarvis, who is a longtime collaborator, and once I got in the right environment, it was easy. I was listening to a lot of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, which is what informed the vocals. And then, I went on the 404 and sampled my voice, busted out a drum pattern, and it was over with.” **“mama loves her son”** “A long, long time ago, I had this conversation with my friend, and she was like her mother—always kind of taught her not to trust women. And we’re taught not to trust women and not to trust ourselves because we see other women as competition for male validation. It’s not even just romantic male validation, it’s just love from men, acknowledgement from men—in the workplace, in friendships, in social settings, on social media, in relationships, in every power dynamic in marginalized groups. I needed a way to address the way that women act out misogyny.” **“blessings”** “I wrote ‘blessings’ when I was in D.C. It’s one of the first songs I wrote. At the time, I was not talking to the same person I’ve been talking about. We were not on speaking terms. I guess I was going through breakup blues. I felt like I wasn’t enough for that person, and I was figuring out how to be enough for myself. But at the same time, I was in D.C. A label had paid for me to go out there and make an album. I was too sad to get out of bed, but if I could just get out of this funk and realize there’s blessings around me, I could find a way to be present for them. And wherever you are, a person needs that. And life goes on, with time, you know?”

For the Singapore-born singer and producer, virtual reality *is* reality. Her yeule persona, named for a *Final Fantasy* character, is something of a high-concept art-pop cyborg, a Tumblr kid-turned-Twitch streamer whose aesthetics draw from art-house anime, digital RPGs, and niche online subcultures like seapunk and witch house. Her second album, *Glitch Princess*, takes her sound even further down the post-Grimes cyber-pop rabbit hole; industrial screeches, 8-bit bleeps, and humanoid spoken-word interludes abound. (Five tracks feature co-production from Danny L Harle, a master at divining emotion from digital artifice.) “I like making up my own world/And the people who live inside me,” yeule murmurs like a shy Vocaloid in the opener, “My Name Is Nat Ćmiel.” But there’s a rawness pulsing through the project, a decidedly human heartbeat—most strikingly on “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty,” a poignant indie-rock ballad hiding in the midst of the digital decay.

Mastered by Heba Kadry Mixed by Geoff Swan Purchase of the entire album includes a .pdf with a download for The Things They Did for Me Out of Love