Released on Juneteenth 2020, the third album by the enigmatic-slash-anonymous band Sault is an unapologetic dive into Black identity. Tapping into ’90s-style R&B (“Sorry Ain’t Enough”), West African funk (“Bow”), early ’70s soul (“Miracles”), churchy chants (“Out the Lies”), and slam-poetic interludes (“Us”), the flow here is more mixtape or DJ set than album, a compendium of the culture rather than a distillation of it. What’s remarkable is how effortless they make revolution sound.
Proceeds will be going to charitable funds
Of the many meanings behind *Dark Matter*—London jazz drummer Moses Boyd’s debut LP—the most vital comes from above. “It’s astronomy,” Boyd tells Apple Music, “this invisible fabric that brings us all together. *Dark Matter* isn’t meant to be a negative record; it\'s meant to unify, to make people think.” It’s also the rare political record that doesn’t lean entirely on lyrics. As both a producer and bandleader—contributors include Poppy Ajudha, Obongjayar, Joe Armon-Jones, and Nonku Phiri—Boyd wanted to capture the gravity of our current moment in both rhythm and atmosphere, by combining elements of Bjork’s *Vespertine* and Aphex Twin’s *Selected Ambient Works* with the funk of James Brown and Tony Allen. “I wanted nuance,” he says of the album\'s many textures. “That air and earth feeling. Floaty bits that are kind of beautiful, but thickness and weight, where it\'s like, if I put this on, it\'s going to hit me right in my stomach, and it\'s going to move me. I don\'t see myself as overtly political, but I guess I am. I\'m just responding to what\'s going on around, which maybe all art should do.” Here, he walks us through his debut, track by track. **Stranger Than Fiction** “I had just come back from holiday in Sri Lanka with my family to what was going on in the UK—so from palm trees and beaches to Brexit. At the moment, in the world, you can pick a country and look at what’s happening and just be like, ‘Is this actually real?’ I wanted to mirror what\'s going on around me musically. When you listen to it, it’s like, ‘What is real, what\'s not? Is that a real drum kit? Is that not a real drum kit?’ I wanted to really blur the lines and make people have to really listen carefully to decipher what\'s real and what\'s not. That was my musical metaphor for something stranger than fiction, which is also just referencing what\'s going on in politics, in nature, in life—full stop.” **Hard Food (Interlude)** “Amongst all of this craziness, you realize there\'s so much you have in common with the person next to you. Hard food is a Jamaican term—it\'s a type of dish that might consist of boiled dumplings, boiled plantains, a really hearty meal that brings people together. I’d reached out to \[jazz composer/bassist\] Gary Crosby, one of my mentors. That recording is our conversation. He\'s grown up with his own struggles and challenges in the UK. He used this analogy of ‘I’m from West Indian background and I defy anyone, from anywhere in the world, whether they know about my food or not: If they\'re hungry they\'re going to eat it, and they\'re going to enjoy it, and it will fill them up.’ He was trying to say, ‘Look, we\'re all similar. We all want the same things in life. We\'re not different to each other. There\'s far more that unites us than separates us.’” **BTB** “‘BTB’ is one of only two tracks that are complete live takes. BTB stands for ‘blacker than black,’ another play on dark matter. Just being me, and my experience being a young black person in England—it’s a celebration of culture. I\'m from the West Indies, and I really wanted to have my sort of take on those sounds and those rhythms. So it\'s very sort of soca, calypso-driven. Also quite dark—you couldn\'t play that at carnival, but it makes sense to me, as somebody that\'s grown up in that culture, but not necessarily born in it and from it. It might be like being born in New York, but your family is from Puerto Rico. You have a very different reference in the way you visualize and present your culture.“ **Y.O.Y.O** “‘Y.O.Y.O’ stands for ‘you\'re on your own,’ and ‘yo-yo’ in the sense of just like a yo-yo goes up and down and round and round, and if you listen to the drum beat, it\'s like a cycle of a loop. But when I was making this music, I was thinking like, \'Man, all of this is going on. You really are on your own in this world.\' And I don\'t necessarily think that\'s a bad thing. When it sort of hit me, it was like, ‘That at first is very sad, but it\'s also very liberating.’ You are in control. You go as far, or as close, as you want to go. You can\'t rely on anyone but your own brain and yourself, and in that there is power. It was influenced by sad things I was seeing around me, but out of that came positivity.\" **Shades of You** “I had the bassline and the drum beat, but I felt I’d given as much as I could to the song and it wasn\'t done yet. I was thinking about vocalists, and I\'m quite good at kind of hearing somebody\'s voice on it. That was it—I heard Poppy’s voice. I just knew she\'d understand it musically. And as I sort of explained it to her, she went away and came back without any direction from me. I’ve known her for a long time, I’m a big fan of what she does, and I wanted to try and push to see if she could try something different to maybe what you\'ve heard from her, because I\'ve seen her do loads of interesting things that aren\'t recorded or aren\'t on YouTube, and I just wanted to kind of get somebody that would get it, and I think she did.” **Dancing in the Dark** “What\'s the word when someone can read your mind? Telepathic. I had this loop, and even before I exhausted my part on it, I just heard Steven Obongjayar. He’s got this kind of raspy tone that could just cut through and make it kind of feel almost like Afrobeat and punk rock. We got in a studio together, and I played it to him, and then after two seconds he was like, ‘Man, can I have this for my album?’ After about an hour arguing: ‘No, you can\'t have it.’ What was crazy was that I had not explained anything to do with *Dark Matter*, or the subjects. He just got it. I was like, ‘Man, look at that. There\'s something going on. There\'s something in the air.’” **Only You** “I was talking to Theon Cross, who\'s a tuba player, and I remember playing him some sketches. He’s like, ‘Moses, man, why do you never feature on your music?’ And I think because I write it, because I produce it, because I help mix it, because I\'m putting it together, to me, it just feels a bit weird to then have solo stuff. And also, I don\'t want it to sound like a drummer\'s record. I don\'t want it to sound like you can tell who I am on the record. But he managed to convince me. I was in the club and I had an idea: I love listening to techno and garage, but why do I never hear a drum? I know it sounds weird, a drum solo through a sound system. But I didn\'t want it to be like a typical feature—here’s the song and it\'s framed just for me. I wanted it to kind of exist in its own sort of texture, to take you on this journey. Like you could close your eyes and sort of vibe to in a club. Maybe I got it, maybe I didn\'t. But that was the vibe.” **2 Far Gone** “There\'s an album by Herbie Hancock called *Inventions & Dimensions*, and Herbie doesn\'t need help, but it just showcases him so well. It\'s got these incredible grooves, and he\'s just going at it on the piano. I was like, ‘How do I do that with my thing?’ I remember going around to \[composer/producer\] Joe \[Armon-Jones’\] house and he had recently got a little upright piano in his front room. Typically, if you go to a studio and you record piano, they\'ll have really good stereo mics, and it\'s really pristine, and everything\'s got to be good. What was great about this one was he just had this one microphone and it wasn\'t the best microphone. He just put it somewhere and did one take at this upright. People were walking around the house—it was so rough and ready. But it worked so perfectly. Even when I was trying to mix it, the rawness of it sounded so great.” **Nommos Descent** “A lot of this stuff started as me really experimenting with loops. That one wanted a vocal. On a trip to South Africa last year, I was working with a friend of mine, Nonku Phiri. She\'s from Cape Town, but she lives in Jo’burg, and her father was a musician on *Graceland*, back with Paul Simon, so she knows everybody. While I was hanging out with her, a lot of the music she was showing me, people like Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a lot of folk music, vocal music, really fit the sound I was going for when I was experimenting. So when I got back to England, I sent her the track. Even if I took all the music away—I might do that one day—and just release her vocals, it would be so beautiful. It’s referencing the Nommos people, really talking on the element, the metaphor. \'Dark matter\' is a reference for the plight of the diaspora, black people, and sort of how we\'ve come from greatness and whether you choose to do with that what you will. What was cool: We\'re never actually in the same room. I sent the music to her and she did her thing, and it just worked.” **What Now?** “It\'s easy to feel helpless, but I\'m not really like that—I’m very solution-based. There\'s no point in sort of posing the statement without thinking about a solution. \[\'What Now\'\] was a nice summary for me, because I wanted it to be very meditative. It’s that real strong mix of trying to have the acoustic and the electronic worlds coexist without battling each other. You’ve got this 808 sort of vibe going, as well as horns that sound like they\'re almost suffocated. I was messing a lot with modular synths, and I think I sampled a note on a piano and sort of held it and saturated it a bit. I remember just listening to it in my home setup, and it just put me in this real trance. I think music has that power to cleanse and make you recollect, think, hope—all that stuff. Across the whole album, I could\'ve just recorded things in a very normal, clean fashion, but it was more about how do I get that vibration? How do I get that texture, that tone? And I wanted to end the record on that sort of note: ‘Well, where are we going from here?’”
Green-House is the project of Los Angeles based artist Olive Ardizoni. Approaching the project with an intentional naivety, they craft songs that find freedom through simplicity. As a non-binary artist, they hope to create a space with fewer barriers as both a performer and a listener. Their first release as Green-House, “Six songs for Invisible Gardens” (out Jan 15, 2020) was written with the intention of transforming the listening environment and augmenting domestic space. The music is designed as a communication with both plant life and the people who care for them.
Makaya McCraven is a student of Chicago’s jazz scene, but his rise as one of the genre’s most innovative drummers has brought him into collaboration with players from around the world. He’s involved with Kamasi Washington and the West Coast Get Down in California, the underground New York City scene, and even the psychedelic jazz revolution occurring in London and the UK. McCraven’s vision of jazz is slightly inverted: He takes marathon sessions and chops them up, not unlike a hip-hop producer does. When XL Recordings tapped him to reimagine Gil Scott-Heron’s seminal 2010 album *I’m New Here*, he used his unique aesthetics to reframe the album as *We’re New Again*, a staggering world built from the soil of Scott-Heron’s unique vision. “Gil is an exemplary vision of the poignant black artist,” McCraven explains to Apple Music. “I recognized that impact from a young age, later connecting things that I didn\'t know belonged to him, like ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.’” Instead of hiding behind the gargantuan shadow of Scott-Heron, though, McCraven embraces the challenge. It’s a stellar tribute, but decidedly crafted from Makaya’s perspective, and less of a cover album than a conversation between two powerful black artists. “I just feel very happy to be given the responsibility of work with this material,” he says. “I\'m honored.” Here McCraven talks through a few of his favorite tracks from the project. **Special Tribute (Broken Home, Pt. 1)** “The ‘Broken Home’ pieces across the entire record are something that particularly stuck out for me. I used samples from when Gil is talking about the women who raised him, and you get a sense of his whole life in a way, too. He goes through some different things about his mother, his grandmother, and just his story. So I felt like that had framed a lot of the record well. The record opens up with a special tribute, which is basically the music or some element of *I\'m New Here*, but backwards.” **I’m New Here** “This is a special track. Even the original, which Gil is covering, is quite sparse—there’s this empty feeling in a way. I really wanted to do something different with it. Even as I dug into it, Gil\'s version is very similar to the original version. So I took a slightly different approach, and I felt like it really brought another light or two to the lyrics, because there are a lot of different emotions there.” **Running** “‘Running’ was an interesting one to record, at least in terms of sound. The bells are recorded with Ben LaMar Gay, and they’re a kind of church bells—you wear white gloves to play them—and we were doing a session to create some different timbres around the material. From there I chopped up the instruments around the lyrics and the poem. I’ve always really, really loved the poem. I was working a lot with just the stems of Gil\'s voice, so that was really interesting, too, because I had a wide-open palette to start to try to interpret some of the pieces. Gil called himself a \'bluesologist\' in some interviews—there\'s so much blues in what he does in his legacy of music. And when I was recording with Ben LaMar Gay, we really tried to hone in on those blues elements.” **Lily Scott (Broken Home, Pt. 3)** “This is actually sampled from one of my father\'s records—he\'s playing a kalimba and there\'s some percussion. My mom is playing a Hungarian recorder or flute. This is the piece that Gil is speaking about his grandmother, Lily Scott, who helped raise him, in a kind of an homage to the women in his life. This was a nice way for me to personally touch this project. It was an honor for me to inject some of my family’s identity into Gil’s song about his family identity. I like having my own imprint on it.” **I’ll Take Care of You** “There were several versions I was working on to try to get this one to come together. The very last touch of this album was just finishing that song. I like to imagine the album playing as a full record. In stints it plays like a narrative more than as a bunch of singles or tracks. But ‘I\'ll Take Care of You’ is one of the songs I\'d describe as more of a stand-alone track. The piano in \'I\'ll Take Care of You\' comes from some outtakes of Gil in the studio playing piano and singing some different songs. I wanted to take his touch on the piano and isolate a bunch of the pieces and spread them out on various pads, kind of like a MPC, and create some progressions with Gil\'s touch on the piano. That\'s where the piano and the progressions came from on that track. I also did some more corrective vocal chopping around that one, utilizing pads and the MPC.” **Me and the Devil** “This begins with a sample from a track called ‘Allah,’ so that was apropos. This one comes from a Robert Johnson song and also features a blues form. I shifted the form a bit to make the chords reflect themselves in the verses. This one features Jeff Parker on guitar; when this project came up, I immediately thought of Jeff and Ben LaMar Gay. ‘I\'ll Take Care of You’ has Brandee Younger on harp. ‘Me and the Devil’ came together pretty early on in the process. It was just a really fun one to work on, because I was playing with the band, whipping it up on guitar and using a bassline and a saxophone to carry the song. A lot of the stuff I work on is approached from a variety of angles. It starts from a place of pure creativity, and then I carve away at it after the fact until I can get it to a place that I’m proud of.”
It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”
On the eponymously titled final song of her debut album Land of No Junction, Irish songwriter Aoife Nessa Frances (pronounced Ee-fa) sings “Take me to the land of no junction/Before it fades away/Where the roads can never cross/But go their own way.” It is this search that lies at the heart of the album, recalling journeys towards an ever shifting centre – a centre that cannot hold – where maps are constantly being rewritten. The songs traverse and inhabit this indeterminate landscape: the beginnings of love, moments of loss, discovery, fragility and strength, all intermingle and interact. Land of No Junction is shot through with a sense of mystery – an ambiguity and disorientation that illuminates with smokey luminescence. Navigated by the richness of Aoife’s voice, along with the layers gently built through her collaborators’ instruments (strings, drums, guitars, keys, percussion) gives a feeling of filling up space into every corner and crack. A remarkable coherent sonic world: buoyant and aqueous, with dark undercurrents. Where nostalgia and newness ebb and flow in equal measure.
Peel Dream Magazine is the musical vehicle for NYC's Joe Stevens, who launched the band in 2018 with the critically acclaimed album "Modern Meta Physic," a mysterious, liminal tribute to the hazy end of ‘90s dream-pop that found its place on numerous "Best of 2018" lists. Now Peel Dream are back with "Agitprop Alterna," an album that pays homage to sonic and spiritual influences ranging from early Stereolab and Broadcast through stateside groups like Lilys and Yo La Tengo.. "Agitprop Alterna" finds Stevens channeling the collaborative spirit of the band's live incarnation in the studio, deepening the connection between the existential and the interpretive first explored on "Modern Meta Physic." It is a rejection of manipulation in all its forms and a buzzsaw against complacency; it's a rare trick to agitate without being obvious, and perhaps that makes "Agitprop Alterna" the most Peel Dream Magazine-like statement yet.
There aren’t many bands who undergo drastic sonic transformations *before* they’ve released their debut album. But Working Men’s Club’s music reflects the restless, push-it-forward energy of their leader Sydney Minsky-Sargeant. Originally a trio dealing in jerky New Wave, the band’s direction was diverted when Minsky-Sargeant took charge of the creative reins during the making of this self-titled debut. “I wanted to make a dance record, but I didn’t want to pigeonhole it as just being a dance record,” Minsky-Sargeant tells Apple Music. The frontman’s knack for snarling melodies remains, now beefed up with a sound that harks back to the dance floors of late-’80s Manchester, a heady mix of pulsing beats, acid house pianos, and bold synths. “I started off writing music on my own, then it became more collaborative, then back to being solo again,” says Minsky-Sargeant. “I’m grateful that I was given a chance to do it on my own, because that was always the route it was going.” Here, Minsky-Sargeant makes sense of the record, track by track. **Valleys** “The way that it starts very barren, selectively adding overt components and instrumentation, I thought it was a good buildup to the start of the record and a good opening track. It\'s about where I\'m from and how isolating it can feel to be in a small town in the North of England sometimes. It\'s quite a secluded, claustrophobic place sometimes. But I think everyone can relate to that in some way, wherever you live.” **A.A.A.A.** “It’s a funny tune. It blew me away how Ross Orton \[producer\] interpreted it and then how he made it. It was just a bass guitar and the same drumbeat, but with more brutal and normal-sounding drums. All the elements were there, but we chose to interpret it more electronically. Ross was using the synths to make drum sounds, and then we basically made that tune all on one synthesizer, which was really cool, and showed how minimal it could be.” **John Cooper Clarke** “I think John Cooper Clarke is a Northern icon. One of the last survivors of that era, going back into that period of time where he lived with Nico and lived in Hebden Bridge, which is down the road from me. He\'s just a proper punk, and one of the last remaining punks there is. Now Andrew Weatherall\'s dead, and people like that have fallen, he\'s still going. He just does it how he wants to do it, and I think that\'s quite admirable, as a creative.” **White Rooms and People** “It’s the poppiest, most indie-sounding tune on the record. It\'s hooky and captures that era of what we were doing when we started—but it\'s reinterpreted and much glossier. It feels like an older song to me. We did go back and reimagine it and put electronic drums on it, which I think really beefed it up and made it fit with the record.” **Outside** “This was an old demo of mine and we just made it sound better. It was the first tune that we did because we didn\'t know how to tackle it. We sped it up and just tried to really produce it, and it worked. It\'s quite a joyous tune, when the rest of the album is quite dark.” **Be My Guest** “I feel like there\'s two sides to this record and this is the first tune on the B-side. It’s the side of the record where it becomes more aggressive in stages. And this, I guess, is the most kind of nasty, brutal tune that there is on the record. It\'s all about the guitars for me, because I was really set on making sure that, especially that bit after the chorus where it goes into that big drop into those really high-pitched guitars, it just had to really carry.” **Tomorrow** “It\'s one of the last tunes I wrote before recording. It’s quite repetitive, maybe obnoxiously repetitive. I think when you\'re making that sort of repetitive music, it has to build throughout the backing. I guess it’s quite a polished, nice song in regard to the rest of the album. It’s more on the poppier side of things.” **Cook a Coffee** “We had to come back to this because the initial recording we did was really bare. I\'m pretty sure even the guitars might have been out of tune or something, so we went back and redid all the guitars, and put more synths on. We had to revisit it and beef it up. But we definitely got there in the end. Those synths at the end make it more anthemic and pulled it all together.” **Teeth** “When we put ‘Teeth’ out as a single, there was a lot of back-and-forth discussion over which mix would go out. Me and Ross had worked quite closely on this tune together, and for me and him, the wrong mix went out. So as soon as we got in the studio, it was like, ‘We\'ve got to change that mix for the record.’ And we did. It just drives it a lot more. It makes it a lot more cinematic than just guitars on top of synths. When we do stuff it\'s all so finely tuned, everything has its own place.” **Angel** “We play this second to last when we play it live, but in terms of the album, it had to be the last tune. I think it\'s just quite a pompous way to end it, isn\'t it? It\'s quite ridiculous. Whenever you read books about records and how they were done, it always seems that the last song\'s the last song that they recorded. And it felt like during the process of recording the album, we were putting it back–we knew it was maybe going to be a bit harder to capture. But it was actually fine. It was a nice way to end the recording process.”
The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.
In the months leading up to his first tour date supporting 2019’s *Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest*, Bill Callahan was struck by what he describes to Apple Music as “the perfect inspiration for the perfect goal”: Before he left home, he’d try to write and record another album. “I\'m the type of person that can only do one thing at a time,” he says. “I just knew that if I didn\'t finish it before the tour, then it would be a year before I could even think about working on these songs. And I knew that if I did finish it, I would feel like a million bucks.” So Callahan drew up some deadlines for himself and began finishing and fleshing out songs he had lying around, work he hadn’t been able to find a home for previously. *Gold Record* is the short story collection to his other LPs\' novels—a set of self-contained worlds and character studies every bit as detailed and disarming as anything the 54-year-old singer-songwriter has released to date. It also includes an update to 1999’s “Let’s Move to the Country,” a song (originally under his Smog pseudonym) that was calling out for some added perspective. “I have a natural inclination to try to make a narrative out of a whole record,” he says. “But this time, it’s really just a bunch of songs that stand on their own, not really connected to the others. That\'s why I called it *Gold Record*—it’s kind of like a greatest hits record, though singles record is maybe more accurate.” Here, he takes us inside every song on the album. **Pigeons** “I noticed when I got married that I finally understood this word ‘community.’ I was always hearing it, but it never really meant anything to me. But then when I got married—and especially when I had a kid—that word became my favorite word. It meant so much. This song is just about the feeling of marriage, how it connects you to life processes, to birth and death and your neighbors. I think if you have a partner, you can\'t be the selfish person you used to be, because there\'s actually someone listening to you when you\'re being that way, so it kind of steers you into being more considerate and a more generous person. Because when someone is hearing what you\'re saying, then you are hearing what you\'re saying for the first time. That leads to being married to the world, I think.” **Another Song** “I actually wrote that song for a producer who contacted me. They were making a covers record with Emmylou Harris, and so I wrote that for her. The record never happened, so I just used it for myself. I think that one has a different feel because I got \[guitarist\] Matt Kinsey to play bass on that one song, and he has a pretty distinct and melodic kind of up-front way of playing bass.” **35** “It\'s definitely an experience that I had, where I felt like I’d read all the great books and would just be disappointed or feel alienated from any new authors that I would try to read. In your late teens and early twenties is when you read great books and you kind of take them on as if they are books about you, or books that reflect your inner world perfectly. But whenever I try to go back to those, I\'m just not interested. I look at it as a good thing: You are kind of unformed in your twenties, and then hopefully, by the time you hit 30, you are somewhat formed. I think that it\'s like you\'re getting your wings to fly. When you\'re unformed, when you\'re a fledgling person, you can\'t really express a lot. I think it\'s a good thing to have that feeling of not connecting necessarily with art, because it prompts you to work on your own.” **Protest Song** “That song is probably the oldest new song on the record. I started it ten years ago, got the idea and just never finished it. But I considered putting it on *Shepherd*, just as I considered putting it on \[2013’s\] *Dream River*. It didn\'t seem to fit either of those. It was kind of a revenge song. At the time I used to watch a lot of late-night shows, just because I was curious about what kind of music gets on there. At least at the time, it was almost invariably the worst people out there, in my opinion. So it was just kind of like a revenge fantasy, on the musicians that are performing. That accent I use is just a film noir that lives inside me.” **The Mackenzies** “When I bought my first car 30 years ago, the couple who was selling it invited me into their house and made me a cocktail. I just kind of hung out with them for a while, which was just a very pleasant and unusual thing. It was a used Dodge minivan, and he was a Dodge mechanic. I figured it was probably the safest person to buy a car from, a mechanic. They were maternal and paternal, to a complete stranger, me just coming out to their house. They also had one of those very homey houses that some people have. Some people master the art of comfort—they have the best couches and chairs and shag carpet and stuff. That\'s what stuck with me—their warmth, their instant warmth. But maybe that\'s because I was giving them a check for five grand. The song is fairly new, but those people had been in my head for a long time. I guess I always believe that if it\'s something you always think about, then that means it\'s very important—it\'s a good way to find out about what you should be writing about, if you have recurring thoughts.” **Let’s Move to the Country** “I always like playing it live, but I kind of stopped and then resurrected it a couple of years ago on tour. It seemed like there was something missing, and because of developments in my personal life, it just seemed like I should write a new chapter to the song. The original is from the perspective of someone who can\'t even say the words ‘baby’ or ‘family.’ The updated version is someone that can. It\'s sort of a mystery, and deciding if you\'re going to have a second one or not is kind of almost as big a decision as having one kid, because it could be looked at as whether or not you\'re happy having kids. I\'m totally not saying that people that only have one kid aren\'t happy having kids, but by having this second kid, you\'re definitely making some kind of deeper commitment, I think. You\'re saying, ‘Okay, I\'m willing to get deeper into this.’” **Breakfast** “I think it just started from an image I had of a woman making breakfast for her man—doing that kind of affectionate thing, but not having affection for the person. What are the dynamics of that? What\'s going on in that type of relationship? Why is she still feeding him and feeding the relationship when she\'s not happy? I was trying to explore that kind of dynamic that relationships can get into sometimes. I also find it interesting with couples: who gets up first and the way that changes sometimes, depending on what\'s going on. Who\'s getting out of bed first, and who\'s laying in bed longer?” **Cowboy** “It’s kind of nostalgic for the way TV used to be. There would be a later movie, and then later there was a late, late movie. If you were staying up to watch that, it would usually be after *The Tonight Show*. That meant something. It meant you\'re up pretty late, for whatever reason. You might be being irresponsible, or you might just be indulging yourself. Now that TV is on demand, I don\'t think anyone really watches late-night shows at night anymore—they just watch the highlights the next day. So on one level, it\'s about that loss of sense of place that TV used to give you, because it was a much more fixed thing. And that kind of correlates to watching a Western, because that\'s about a time that is also gone. I was just thinking about that, the time of your life when you can just watch a movie at two in the morning.” **Ry Cooder** “He\'s someone that I\'ve been familiar with maybe since his \[1984\] *Paris, Texas* soundtrack, but I hadn\'t really explored his records very much. Maybe three or four years ago I started digging into all of them and was really being blown away by how great so many of his records are and how different each one is and how he really uplifts and kind of puts a spotlight on international musicians. Unlike \[1986’s\] *Graceland*—where people think that Paul Simon kind of was just using those people—Ry Cooder really seems to want people to know about all this other kind of music. If you watch or read an interview with him from now, he\'s totally stoked about music and not at all jaded or bored or anything. I just thought that he deserved a ballad, a tribute. Because I think he\'s great.” **As I Wander** “I tried to make it a song about everything that I possibly could. I was trying to sum up human existence and sum up the record, even though it wasn\'t written with that intent necessarily. All the perspectives on the record are very distinct, and limited to just that narrative. But with ‘As I Wander,’ I tried to hold all narratives at the same time. Just like a great big spaghetti junction where all the highways meet up and swirl around.”
In 2017, Kevin Morby moved home to Kansas. “I ended up sort of liking it, if for nothing more than having space and time to work on things,” he tells Apple Music. “But with that definitely came a bunch of uneasy feelings, having to interact with a bunch of ghosts from my past and just being back where I grew up. I really had to push through some initial emotions, but once I got past those, I was able to see the Midwest for the first time in a way that I never had before. That’s the seed of this record.” Having found inspiration in New York (2013’s *Harlem River*) and LA (2016’s *Singing Saw*), *Sundowner* finds Morby paying tribute to Midwestern twilight and Midwestern expanse with a set of panoramic folk that’s flush with fresh perspective. “When I was living on the coasts, so much of my life happened at night,” he says. “I wasn\'t really measuring the days in the way that I do now. In coming home, I just found that I\'m like looking at the sun going down and it\'s making me face myself.” Here, Morby walks us through the entire album track by track. **Valley** “Not only is it the first song on the record, but it\'s also the first song that I wrote for the record. Kansas doesn\'t really have any valleys, it\'s famous for being flat. But when I was living in Los Angeles, I was living in Mount Washington; my album *Singing Saw*, the cover was taken there. I would do this walk every day to the top of Mount Washington and this valley would be in my wake. That neighborhood just meant a lot to me, and it was really hard for me to have to leave it—I really didn\'t want to in a lot of ways, but I knew that I sort of had to. So that is kind of like my exit song to LA, the song that I feel like I was singing to myself as I left one part of my life and went into the next.” **Brother, Sister** “Coming back here and sort of looking at other people that I admire and what they were kind of doing around 30, it wasn\'t lost on me that a lot of my heroes and songwriting influences were doing similar things—like growing beards and moving to the country. One of those artists is Bruce Springsteen. I love his album *Nebraska*, and I\'ve always loved the story behind it. When I moved back to Kansas City, there was this killer on the loose—he had killed a few people, and then he got caught. And he explained to the press that he was doing it sort of as revenge for his brother who had been killed. I never learned too much about his brother, but my imagination just sort of ran with that, the idea of someone killing for someone sort of speaking to them beyond the grave.” **Sundowner** “It was a fear of the night coming on, just in the sense that I was living two lifestyles. One is my life of being a musician, out on the road and living in these exotic places and having this very social, active nightlife. And then my other life was coming back here and really being faced with myself once the sun went down, sort of left to my own devices and not really being able to run away from any sort of collection of thoughts that I may be thinking at the time. I just really have to sit with those, and I do a lot of processing and just getting to know myself really. The night represented that.” **Campfire** “I was watching a lot of Westerns, and I think of songs very cinematically. This is the first song that I recorded into my four-track where it felt like I had something really real. And I wanted it to feel like someone was walking, singing this song, and in the middle of this, they encountered someone, a stranger, who was sort of singing their own song, and they have some overlap at a fire. I was reading a book called *Lonesome Dove*, and there\'s this Latin phrase in that book that translates to ‘A grape ripens when it sees another grape.’ I\'m singing this song and I\'m going to come across another person, and they\'re singing a song, and then it changes the song that I\'m singing. That\'s what I\'m doing sonically, and the subject matter is paying homage to friends that have passed away and heroes that have passed away.” **Wander** “When I sent the demos to \[producer\] Brad Cook, I kind of put that one on there by mistake, or I didn\'t think there was too much to that song; I didn\'t know where to take it. And Brad seemed really excited about it in this way that got me excited about it. So it\'s a song meant to speed up and sort of get your blood pumping and then just abruptly stop. That central lyric—‘I wonder as I wander, why was I born in a wild wonder?’—is just something that\'s been in my brain for a long time. It\'s a sentiment that I’ve said to myself, kind of a fun tongue twister that sums up some outlook I have of the world.” **Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun** “The Midwest is largely looked over as flyover states, and most people who haven\'t been here think that it would be boring or just don\'t have much of an opinion on it. It was wanting to put the name front and center and have a song revolve around that and then have the sonic space to really represent or display what the openness of the Plains and the openness of the Midwest feels like. The lyrics are speaking to that, but also with this sort of depiction of a relationship in its earliest form when you kind of aren\'t clear what exactly is happening yet. You know you like it, but you\'re afraid that at any moment it could dissolve.” **A Night at the Little Los Angeles** “A friend of mine had commented, when I moved out to my house, that I was decorating it to look like Los Angeles and not like a typical house in Kansas. And I just liked the imagery of that a lot, of the idea of someone who is sort of longing for an exotic place like Los Angeles, but has to live in rural Kansas, and how they sort of decorate their place to mimic the other. My imagination just sort of ran with that idea and came up with this idea of a rural hotel that you could sort of step inside of, and there would be this sort of magical but kind of left-of-center idea of what Los Angeles is. I spent a lot of time in hotels around the world, and it\'s different things that I\'ve sort of encountered or heard coming through the walls. It’s really my take on fiction, for the record.” **Jamie** “Jamie was my best friend who passed away when I was 20. And at the time that I wrote the song, I had just turned 30. Jamie was a huge influence. He was kind of like an older brother to me, and we would spend every day together up until his passing. And he\'s been sort of my muse, but also this person that I felt that I worked really hard to sort of carry some sort of torch for. He’s made his way into a lot of my work over the years. But something about it being 10 years, I just felt I wanted to write a song to honor him that just sort of explicitly named him and put him front and center.” **Velvet Highway** “My girlfriend and I, when we first started dating, we went to Marfa, Texas, which is very close actually to where I ended up recording the album, outside of El Paso. To get to Marfa, we had to fly to El Paso and then drive three hours down this long, desolate highway. You really feel like you could just sort of disappear out there—it’s the open West Texas desert, and there\'s no one around. It was really late when we were driving, and there were jackrabbits all over the road, and they kept running in front of the car, and we kept hitting some, but we also just noticed there\'s a ton of these dead rabbits all over the road. When we got to Marfa, we asked someone about it and they said, ‘Oh, yeah, you came in on Delta Highway.’ And I just liked the idea of the imagery of this highway with a bunch of dead rabbit fur all over it. But I also like the idea of this magical kind of Yellow Brick Road, the imagery of a highway with a sort of velvet carpet. So I wrote that piece, and it just seemed like something that I would like to soundtrack that sort of drive.” **Provisions** “I was going through a lot of different things at the time. I left Los Angeles because of a breakup, and I was beginning something new romantically, and I was living back in my hometown. It just felt like my life was very much in flux. And ‘Provisions’ to me was a reminder of all these things changing. Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better, and sometimes it stays bad for a long time, and sometimes it stays good for a long time, but no matter what, you need to take care of yourself. You need to grab provisions, because you don\'t know when the next stop is going to be. You don\'t know when the next sign of relief or joy or respite is going to be, so you just need to be thinking ahead. It’s a song that really felt appropriate given where everyone\'s at right now, in quarantine and with the pandemic.”
There’s something immensely soothing about the tones and colors of *Daylight Savings*, the second album from Melbourne four-piece Surprise Chef. Founded in 2017 by housemates Lachlan Stuckey and Jethro Curtin, alongside Andrew Congues and Carl Lindeberg, the group began creating smooth, experimental, funky jazz in their Coburg share house ahead of their 2019 debut, *All News Is Good News*, and the method proved so successful, they simply kept going. What began as an homage to late jazz composer David Axelford has since led them down a unique path via instrumental jazz inspired by their leafy suburban surroundings and Australiana. That may not feel evident in the music itself, but the name—a nod to the early-2000s cooking show—and song titles like “Washing Day” and “Dinner Time” give away their affection for those simple, local moments. And though their music is instrumental, that tongue-in-cheek flair can be felt throughout. It feels as though each member of the group is wryly winking through the florid, ’80s-inspired percussion on \"Leave It, Don\'t Take It\" and the jaunty piano stabs on the title track. Somehow, it feels purposeful, nostalgic and comedic all at once, informed by the group’s noted devotion to crate-digging and experimentation. Their vinyl discoveries have inspired them to delve into funk (“Deadlines,” “New Ferrari\"), roots (“The Limp”), and Madlib-style beats tying it all together.
Daylight Savings is the second full-length album by Melbourne's cinematic soul journeymen Surprise Chef. Recorded over a weekend in Surprise Chef's DIY analogue studio (dubbed The College Of Knowledge), Daylight Savings expands on the dramatic 1970s cinematic soul sound established on their acclaimed first album, 2019's All News Is Good News. Created in Spring 2019, just as the jasmine bush in the backyard of the College Of Knowledge was coming to full bloom, Daylight Savings is filled with the optimism and hope that comes with the impending long, warm evenings after a dreary Melbourne winter.
Despite (perhaps) being the band’s most accessible & melodic work to date, New York quartet Sunwatchers‘ fourth album "Oh Yeah?" arrives in a flurry of notes with the buzzing hum of “Sunwatchers vs. Tooth Decay”; the title referencing a 1976 album featuring athlete and activist Muhammad Ali. A cheeky nod to be sure, but laced with the utmost reverence. This attitude sums up Sunwatchers’ aesthetic in a nutshell; the acknowledgement (typically via the band’s irreverent song titles or album art) that the things in life we should take seriously are better faced and understood when disarmed by a wink or nudge. The band may cloak their fiery activism in a jester’s outfit, but it does nothing to dull the force of their attack. The one-two punch of “Love Paste” & “Brown Ice” hits next, with the former’s tender opening melody punctuated by exuberant “WOO!”s while the latter launches into an urgent, stuttering march that utilizes an effective musical wind-up and release, ratcheting up a ferocious intensity across its near six minute runtime. “Thee Worm Store” closes out the first side, beginning with a lumbering synth growl, until it picks up speed and ends as a frantic noisy free-for-all. Side two strides forth with“The Conch”, an obvious ‘Lord of The Flies’ reference, and a delicious subversion of the idea of a “hero’s anthem” weighted down by the trappings of tribalism. The album’s showstopper however is “The Earthsized Thumb”, the near twenty-minute closing track. Guitarist Jim McHugh lays down a hypnotic Saharan guitar melody as the rest of the band ushers themselves in one by one over the tune’s distinct musical movements, a “Quick One” for all the heads perhaps? The album’s title “Oh Yeah?” is at once an homage to Mingus, Thee Oh Sees’ album “Help” (whose Brigid Dawson hand-sewed the tapestry adorning the album’s front cover) and (naturally) the rallying cry of KoolBrave himself - the Kool-Aid Man-as-Braveheart avatar the band adopted as their symbol. The three years since the band’s second album (and TiM debut) “II” was released, has seen the band grace stages across the USA and Europe, enlisting more comrades in their mission of solidarity (sonically speaking) with every show.
Released in August 2019, Modern Nature’s debut album - How to Live - crossed the urban and rural into each other. Plaintive cello strains melted into motorik beats. Pastoral field recordings drifted through looping guitar figures. Rising melodies shone with reflective saxophone accents, placing the record somewhere between the subtle mediations of Talk Talk, the stirring folk of Anne Briggs and the atmospheric waves of Harmonia. The album was met with universal acclaim and featured in a variety of publication's 'Best Of 2019' lists. As the group took the album out on the road, saxophonist Jeff Tobias' (Sunwatchers) role informed something even more expansive. “It feels like there's such scope and room to grow. I want the group to feel fluid and that whoever's playing with us can express themselves and interpret what they think this music is” says bandleader Jack Cooper. Their new mini album Annual, recorded in December 2019 at Gizzard Studio in London, is another step towards something more liberated and a world away from the sound of Jack Cooper's previous bands. Will Young sits this one out, concentrating on his work with Beak, but 'How To Live' collaborator Jeff Tobias takes a more central role, alongside percussionist Jim Wallis. Jack explains how 'Annual' came about: “Towards the end of 2018, I began filling a new diary with words, observations from walks, descriptions of events, thoughts...free associative streams of just.. stuff. Reading back, as the year progressed from winter to spring, the tone of the diary seemed to change as well... optimism crept in, brightness and then things began to dip as autumn approached... warmth, isolation again and into winter.” “I split the diary into four seasons and used them as the template for the four main songs. The shorter instrumental songs on the record are meant to signify specific events and transitions from one season to the next. I figured it wouldn't be a very long record, but to me it stands up next to 'How To Live' in every way.” Annual opens with Dawn which brings to mind the peace and space of Miles Davis' 'In A Silent Way'; it rises from nothing like shoots reaching for the light. "I wanted Dawn to feel like the moment you realise spring is coming, when you notice blossom on the trees or nights getting lighter." On lead track Flourish, it's clear Modern Nature have moved on from the first album; as muted percussion and double-bass stirs behind Cooper's Slint-like ambling guitar; the chorus soars into a collaged crescendo. “Flourish is my part of the world coming to life. I live on the edge of London between Leytonstone and Epping Forest, so the signs of spring are very apparent round here - flowers, light, people talking in their gardens.” “Mayday started as an outro to Flourish or 'Spring' as it was titled originally. The idea was a segueway into the summer section to represent the sort of collective excitement a city gets once it realises summer is here.” The summer of Jack's diary inspired 'Halo'. “The Wanstead Flats where I live, change a lot in the summer; a haze descends on them instead of the spring mist and the city's proximity is more apparent. Blue bags of empty cans and scorched grass from out of control barbeques.” Arnulf Lindner on double-bass recalls the playing of Danny Thompson's with Jeff Tobias' wonderfully lyrical saxophone referencing Pharoah Sanders. Cooper's vocals on this record barely rise above a whisper making Halo a perfect addition to the canon of bucolic North London songs of summer, alongside Donovan's Sunny Goodge Street or Nick Drake's Hazey Jane II. On Harvest Jack takes a backseat with Kayla Cohen of Itasca singing. “All these songs are in the same key but the melody was above my range. I'd been playing the new Itasca record most days and just reached out on a whim. Her phrasing and the economy with which she sings is perfect.” “The intention with the record was for it to feel like a circle, so Wynter reflects the opening. I guess having to get up and flip the record destroys the illusion so it's a rare circumstance where listening with the ability to just loop the album into another year is closer to our intention.” Annual then acts both like a companion piece to the band’s ‘How To Live’ debut but also a pointer to the paths ahead. Cooper has already started work on the next album, his speed of output an indication of the excitement and creativity that surrounds the project. Who will be involved and what the touchstones might be are yet to be firmly established but then who would have it any other way with this most fascinatingly free-flowing and mutable of groups?
Is that a goddamn bouzouki? you may ask. A pedal steel guitar? What kind of Stephen Malkmus album is this, anyway? It’s called folk music, and it’s taking the country by storm. Stephen Malkmus is only the latest popular artist to apply this old new approach to their rock and roll sounds. Take the name Traditional Techniques with as much salt as you’d like or dig the Adorno reference, Malkmus’s third solo LP without the Jicks (or Pavement) is as organic as they come. It’s packed with handmade arrangements, modern folklore, and 10 songs written and performed in Malkmus’s singular voice. An adventurous new album in an instantly familiar mode, Traditional Techniques creates a serendipitous trilogy with the loose fuzz of the Jicks’ Sparkle Hard (Matador, 2018) and the solo bedroom experiments of Groove Denied (Matador, 2019). Taken together, these three very different full-lengths in three years highlight an ever-curious songwriter committed to finding untouched territory. Perhaps some of these “folk” musicians could take a lesson or two. Created in the spontaneous west coast style adopted so infectiously by young American musicians in this time of global turmoil, Malkmus took on Traditional Techniques as a kind of self-dare. Conceived while recording Sparkle Hard with the Jicks at Portland’s Halfling Studio, Malkmus had observed the variety of acoustic instruments available for use. The idea escalated within a matter of weeks into a full set of songs and shortly thereafter into a realized and fully committed album. When he returned to Halfling, Malkmus drew from a whole new musical palette–including a variety of Afghani instruments–to support an ache both quizzical and contemporary. Stephen Malkmus isn’t one of those “hung up” musicians one reads about so frequently these days, sequestered in a jungle room of the heart. The jukebox in Malkmus’s private grotto remains fully updated. Not only is the artist present, but he’s on Twitter. Traditional Techniques is new phase folk music for new phase folks, with Malkmus as attuned as ever to the rhythms of the ever-evolving lingual slipstream. Instead of roses, briars, and long black veils, prepare for owns, cracked emojis, and shadowbans. Centered around the songwriter’s 12-string acoustic guitar, and informed by a half-century of folk-rock reference points, Traditional Techniques is the product of Malkmus and Halfling engineer/arranger-in-residence Chris Funk (The Decemberists). Playing guitar is friend-to-all-heads Matt Sweeney (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Chavez, and too many other to count), who’d previously crossed paths with Malkmus on the opposite end of the longhairs’ map of the world, most lately gnarling out together back east in the jam conglomerate Endless Boogie. But, buyer beware, no matter how these recordings might be tagged by your nearest algorithm, the expansive and thrilling folk-rock sounds of Traditional Techniques aren’t SM Unplugged. One might even question his commitment to acoustic instruments, but we’ll leave that for somebody else’s hot take. All we’re saying is watch your head. Because alongside all that gorgeous folk music (“The Greatest Own in Legal History,” “Cash Up”), there are also occasional bursts of flute-laced swagger (“Shadowbanned”), straight-up commune rock (“Xian Man”), and mind-bending fuzz in places you least expect it (“Brainwashed”). It’s hard to call Traditional Techniques “long awaited,” because Stephen Malkmus just put out an album last year, but it’s also exactly that. While he may have taken his sweet time in jumping on the folk music boom, surely there are those among us who have fantasized about how lovely it might sound if SM would just get with the times. And it sounds like all that and beyond. Set a day or two aside to transcribe the lyrics like the Dylanlogists of yore (though please keep your garbology to yourself) and vibe on the shape of folk to come with Stephen Malkmus. – Jesse Jarnow
"I feel like 'Home' is a second part of the same book, that the start was in 'Esja', a musical prelude to a real plot. I feel Home is a story with an ending, so the next book can tell a totally different one. I am constantly looking for new ways of expression. I am curious where 'Home' will lead me and my music". — Hania Rani Hania Rani is a pianist, composer and musician who, was born in Gdansk and splits her life between Warsaw, where she makes her home, and Berlin where she studied and often works. Her debut album 'Esja', a beguiling collection of solo piano pieces on Gondwana Records was released to international acclaim on April 5th 2019 including nominations in 5 categories in the Polish music industries very own Grammys, the Fryderyki, and winning the Discovery of the Year 2019 in the Empik chain's Bestseller Awards and the prestigious Sanki award for the most interesting new face of Polish music chosen by Polish journalists. Rani also composed the music for her first full length movie "I Never Cry" directed by Piotr Domalewski and for the play "Nora" directed by Michał Zdunik. Her song "Eden" was used as a soundtrack of a short movie by Małgorzata Szumowska for Miu Miu's movie cycle "Women's Tales" If the compositions on Esja were born out of a fascination with the piano as an instrument, then her follow-up, the expansive, cinematic, 'Home', finds Rani expanding her palate: adding vocals and subtle electronics to her music as well as being joined on some tracks by bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak. The album reunites her with recording engineers, Piotr Wieczorek and Ignacy Gruszecki (Monochrom Studio) and the tracks were again mixed again by Gijs van Klooster in his studio in Amsterdam and by Piotr Wieczorek in Warsaw ( Ombelico and Come Back Home). Home was mastered by Zino Mikorey in Berlin (known for his work on albums by artists such as Nils Frahm and Olafur Arnalds). For Rani, 'Home', is very much a continuation of the work she started on 'Esja', "the completion of the sentence" as she puts it. The album offers a metaphorical journey: the story of places that become our home sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice. It is the story of leaving a place that is familiar and the journey that follows it. Home opens with the fragment of the short story "Loneliness" by Bruno Schulz, which can be seen as a parable of a journey that does not necessarily mean going beyond the physical door but can signify going beyond the symbolic limits of our knowledge and imagination. "One can be lost but can find home in his inner part - which can mean many things - soul, imagination, mind, intuition, passion. I strongly believe that when being in uncertain times and living an unstable life we can still reach peace with ourselves and be able to find 'home' anywhere' This is what I would like to express with my music - one can travel the whole world but not see anything. It is not where we are going but how much we are able to see and hear things happening around us". — Hania Rani Home is also about the inevitability of change. We never find places exactly how we left them. Time flies and life with it. Just like art and music. Once you started the trip, you will never be back really to the place where you started with. It is a sentiment that is at the heart of Home, not just its themes, but at the heart of Rani's music too. Following the success of Esja it would have been easy for her to stick to the same solo piano formula, but while Rani expresses her surprise and gratitude for the success of Esja, "I wasn't sure how this album - based on Piano and silence - will be received by the audience. The reception was a big surprise to me" it has also given her the confidence to express more of herself as an artist. On Home Rani steps into more of a producer's role, adding strings, bass and drums where needed, exploring the sounds of synths and electronica, but also creating textured layered songs made from acoustic samples, mostly from piano recordings. "I try to explore new genres and discover new artists, I don't want to be stuck in things that I know, I want to learn about things that are still new to me". But perhaps most notable is her singing, Rani has a fragile, beautiful voice, both pure and expressive. Long a feature of her live shows she uses it as another instrument, adding extra layers of melody and emotion to her already deeply expressive music. "I consider voice as another instrument. Maybe if I wasn't so often alone on the stage, I would take another instrument to play the melody that I have in my mind. But while I am alone, singing allows me to have more possibilities at the same time. The human voice has a real magic, nothing carries emotions as easily and powerfully as the voice, and I think being able to bring this atmosphere on stage opens up new possibilities of expression for me". — Hania Rani Home also features Rani's new band, bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak who appear on some of the albums stand out tracks, the beguiling single 'Leaving', the title track 'Home', atmospheric 'Tennen' and the beautiful 'I'll Never Find Your Soul'. After working and touring alone Rani begin to feel stuck with her own ideas and thoughts, and sounds. It was a prolific period for her compositionally, writing the music on Home, but also a film score and music for the theatre, but she felt that someone else's vision might bring new ideas to things that she already knew. Shortly before she was about to record Home she attended a concert of the young Polish jazz trio, Immortal Onion, in Gdańsk, her hometown. She liked what she heard and sked the double bassist and a drummer if they wanted to meet and something clicked. They spent most of the next week improvising and jamming on her music. This gave a whole new insight for some of the songs and brought new ideas for arrangements. And having enjoyed working together on the album Rani is looking forward to touring with the boys. "Touring with band is a totally different thing, way more challenging technically, but it also brings a new energy and new sound possibilities. I am very curious how we will manage to bring the album to life. I would like to keep the show balanced - mixing the new textures of Home with the atmosphere of minimalistic songs from Esja." — Hania Rani For Rani, this sense of exploring is a key part of her art. But it isn't only the music, Rani is keenly interested in art and architecture (as anyone who follows her exquisitely curated Instagram feed will know) and how her music works in the wider world. "I try to keep my eyes and ears wide open. What I want to master in my art is how to build the right atmosphere on stage, in recordings. To do this you need to be aware of many aspects - not only music, but also the full range of gestures, acoustics, visual aspect. I want to learn how to bring particular atmosphere and bring people to a specific space. I observe how music works in different contexts, how the feeling of sound changes in different acoustics, space, light conditions. The same thing happens with artwork that I share. I feel like everything of what I am bringing to the the world and sharing with others has an impact of reception my music. If we are an inseparable part of the ecosystem, then the music should be considered similarly." — Hania Rani The album's distinctive cover artwork was designed by the architect Łukasz Pałczyński, who combined his sketches with the stills from the music video for the song Leaving shot by her regular collaborators Mateusz Miszczyński and Jakub Stoszek in Greece and together with Rani's music and vision it is this sense of collaboration that gives Home it's power as Rani starts to give full expression to her own unique vision and perhaps the most exciting thing is that it is just another step on her journey, one that we are all lucky to be a part of! All prices shown are “NET of VAT” (Value Added Tax). VAT will be calculated and added at the checkout. You will be charged the appropriate rate which will vary depending on the country. This release was uploaded at 24 bit / 96 kHz for maximum fidelity and is available in FLAC, WAV, AIFF or MP3.
It is impossible to talk about modern psychedelic music without mentioning Ripley Johnson. As bandleader of Wooden Shjips and one half of Moon Duo, Johnson has continually charted new cosmic paths that expand on the language of the genre. With Rose City Band, Johnson’s songwriting and beautiful guitar lines take center stage, the veil of psychedelia notably drawn back. While his vocal treatment would be recognizable to any Wooden Shjips fan, the sparseness of the instrumentation lays bare the beauty of his writing. Shimmering guitar lines are free to shine, buoyed by driving rhythms. New to the mix are arrangements and instruments drawn directly from classic country, resulting in songs with more than a hint of twang. The aptly named Summerlong, born of Johnson’s own fondness for the season, delivers an emotional lift—an expression akin to the joy of getting out there on a warm day, be it gathering for a BBQ, hopping onto a bike, leaping into a swimming hole, or simply reading in a park. Rose City Band started purely as a recording project, with Johnson's role mostly obscured for the self-titled debut album. Released with no promotion, in the style of private press records, it was a liberating act, a focus on music without any expectations. Explaining it with a chuckle, Johnson elaborates, “I always would threaten to my friends that I’m gonna start a country rock band so I can retire and just play down at the pub every Thursday night during happy hour. I love being able to tour and travel, but I also like the idea of having a local band … more of a social music experience.” Freedom from expectation and obligation gave Johnson the space to experiment with new instrumentation and arrangements. The introduction of lap steel, mandolin, and jaw harp enhance Johnson’s lean guitar work with radiant overtones, placing Summerlong more overtly within the country tradition than its predecessor. Work on the album began at Johnson’s home studio in Portland during the summer, but, interrupted by touring, it would not be finished until the winter season. The dark isolation of winter and the pining for summer’s easier days can be felt in the album’s few quieter moments. Summerlong was mixed by John McEntire (Stereolab, Broken Social Scene, Tortoise) at his newly minted Portland Soma Studios and mastered by Amy Dragon at Telegraph Mastering, also based in Portland. Buoyant and joyous, Summerlong is a captivating listen that leaves the listener yearning for more. The record is an ode to freedom, born of a musician stepping out of all routines and whose own liberation is communicated so completely in his music. Summerlong is a record that, taken in its entirety, is an emphatic statement on the songwriting power of Ripley Johnson. Johnson’s joy in every aspect of this album is delightfully infectious.
Berlin based composer and producer Ben Lukas Boysen returns with his most progressive and shape-shifting work to date, the long awaited Mirage, on 1 May 2020 with Erased Tapes. The third album to be penned under his own name proceeding his Hecq moniker, Mirage follows 2013’s Gravity and the acclaimed 2016 full length Spells, a record as much admired by his peers as it was loved by fans that not only yielded remixes from Max Cooper and Tim Hecker, but also opened Jon Hopkins’ Late Night Tales compilation. Since the release of Spells, Ben continued to be in demand for his scoring abilities, collaborating with cellist and composer Sebastian Plano on the music for David OReilly’s landmark innovative video game Everything. It was added to the long list for the Best Animated Short at the 90th Academy Awards, making it the first video game to qualify for an Oscar. In 2019 Ben contributed to the Brainwaves project alongside fellow Erased Tapes artists Michael Price and Högni Egilsson in collaboration with a team of scientists at Goldsmiths University, London — linking states of consciousness and music. He also scored the soundtrack to the DAFF award-winning German TV show Beat, the feature film The Collini Case, and co-composed the music for the short film Manifesto with Nils Frahm, starring Cate Blanchett. As with Gravity and Spells, Ben has an array of musical guests adorning Mirage, including long time collaborator, Berlin based cellist and composer Anne Müller as well as Australian saxophonist and composer Daniel Thorne — for whom Ben wrote parts specifically, having heard his 2019 solo debut Lines of Sight. Lead track Medela features both and takes the listener on a kaleidoscopic journey that slides with ease across sonic terrains. By the end it’s difficult to tell what exactly was heard; “I wanted to experiment with blending these recordings with 100% artificial elements, often to points where an instrument becomes an abstraction of what it was and the musicians’ presence in the song is much more of an important DNA string in the song rather than an obvious layer.” Mirage, like its title suggests, feels like a sonic optical illusion — each piece containing sounds and techniques bent and processed to make them seem overexposed; the overly felt-y piano on Clarion, Daniel Thorne’s saxophone on Medela, the single note voice of Lisa Morgenstern splitting into different chords on Empyrean. It is detectable but also easily missed, like the double piano on Kenotaph that could be perceived as one, but is actually two pianos in two different rooms, separate countries even — one is digital while the other is acoustic. While on Spells Ben made programmed pieces sound indistinguishable from human playing, with Mirage he set out to do the opposite and make the human touch unrecognisable, creating something of a mystery or a mirage. “A lot of the elements and instruments you hear on the album are either not what you think they are, or exactly what you think they are but behave differently or they’re elements you definitely know but they are hidden, processed, or morphed into something else. With Spells and Gravity I was trying to hide the machines. On Mirage, I’m trying to hide the human” — Ben Lukas Boysen
You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.
Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"
GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).
“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig” reasoned George Bernard Shaw. “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” True to form, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have left the wiser of us aware that they are no band to be messed with. In the seven years since this band’s inception, the powerful primal charge at their heart has been amplified far beyond the realms of their original imagination. What’s more, no one has been more taken aback by this transformation than the band themselves. This culminated recently at a sold-out show at London’s renowned former fleapit Scala “That was the first gig where we were properly smacked with a feeling that something had shifted” reflects vocalist Matt Baty. “Something big and bold and positive. I felt quite overwhelmed with emotion at one point during that show. I’m not sure anyone paid to see me cry onstage, but I was close.” This upward trajectory has done nothing to make the Newcastle-based quintet complacent however, as they’ve used the cumulative force behind them as fuel for their most ambitious and hard-hitting record yet. ‘Viscerals’, their third proper is an enormous leap forward in confidence, adventure and sheer intensity even from their 2018 breakthrough ‘King Of Cowards’. Incisive in its riff-driven attack, infectiously catchy in its songcraft and more intrepid than ever in its experimental approach, ‘Viscerals’ is the sound of a leaner, more vicious Pigs, and one with their controls set way beyond the pulverising one-riff workouts of their early days. Whilst the fearsome opener ‘Reducer’s battle cry “ego kills everything” brings a philosophical bent to its Sabbathian abjection, elsewhere ‘Rubbernecker’ may be the most melodious ditty this band has yet attempted, redolent of the debauched swagger of Jane’s Addiction. Meanwhile the sinister sound-collage of ‘Blood And Butter’ delves into jarring abstraction anew, ‘New Body’ countenances a bracing Melvins-and-Sonic-Youth demolition derby and - perhaps most memorably of all - the perverse banger ‘Crazy In Blood’ marries MBV-ish guitar curlicues in its verses to a raise-your-fists chorus worthy of Twisted Sister or Turbonegro. Yet Pigsx7 have effortlessly broadened their horizons and dealt with all these new avenues without sacrificing one iota of their trademark eccentricity, and the personality of this band has never been stronger. “We’re a peculiar bunch of people - a precarious balance of passion, intensity and the absurd” notes Baty. Indeed, locked into a tight deadline in the studio, the band were forced to rally forces and to throw everything they had into created as concise and powerful a statement as could be summoned forth. “We booked dates in Sam’s studio before we’d written 80% of the album” reveals guitarist Adam Ian Sykes “We definitely thrive under pressure. It’s stressful but that stress seems to manifest itself in a positive way”. Yet for all that this record is the most far-reaching yet, its ability to get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition is implicit from its title outwards. “Viscerals is reflection of many things I guess” says guitarist Sam Grant, whose Blank Studios was the venue in question for the band (whose rogues gallery is completed by bassist John-Michael Hedley and drummer Christopher Morley). “It’s the internal; it’s our health and physicality; it’s bodily and unseen; it’s essence that forgoes intellect; and it’s not a real word!” “At times it feels like we’re on a playground roundabout and there’s a fanatical group of people pushing it to turn faster” reckons Baty. “Then when it’s at peak speed they all jump on too and for just a few minutes we all feel liberated, together.” Such is the relentless momentum of this unique and ever-porcine outfit; hedonists of the grittiest and most life-affirming ride in the land, and still the hungriest animals at the rock trough. ---
Close your eyes during Melbourne combo Mildlife’s second album and you can almost see it: the swirl of stars unspooling in deep purple space, the shag carpet of Milky Way dust, the giant mirror ball of the moon. Connecting the dots between ’70s fusion, ’90s acid jazz, and modern salvage-seekers like Tame Impala and Daft Punk, *Automatic* is a fun, transportive record, playful enough to avoid feeling heavy (the robo-voiced mantras of “Vapour,” the scat-sung middle section of “Memory Palace”) but genuine enough in its commitment to kick when it wants to (the hard-swung groove of “Downstream,” the Floyd-like spaciness of “Citations”). They play to each other like jazz and to their audience like disco. And no matter how high they fly, the groove remains terra firma.
When Mildlife’s debut album, Phase, was released in 2018 it didn’t so much explode on to the scene as ooze. Their mellifluous mix of jazz, krautrock and, perhaps more pertinently, demon grooves, was the word of mouth sensation of that year among open-minded DJs and diggers searching for the perfect beat. Their emergence was backed up by European tours that demonstrated a riotously loose-limbed approach to performance that was every bit as thrilling as Phase’s tantalising promise. What was more impressive was how lightly they wore influences that took in Can, Patrick Adams and Jan Hammer Group, while primarily sounding precisely like Mildlife. By the end of 2018 they’d been nominees for Best Album at the Worldwide FM Awards (Worldwide’s Gilles Peterson was a notable champion) and won Best Electronic Act at The Age Music Victoria Awards back home in Melbourne. Their progress post-Phase was cemented with a UK deal with Jeff Barrett’s Heavenly, who released How Long Does It Take? replete with Cosmic doyen Baldelli and Dionigi remixes, while last year they were officially anointed by DJ Harvey when he included The Magnificent Moon on his Pikes compilation Mercury Rising Vol II. With Automatic, the band have made a step-change from their debut. It’s more disciplined, directional and arguably more danceable. As on Phase, they are unafraid to let a track luxuriate in length without ever succumbing to self-indulgence. The arrangements, tightly structured thanks to Tom Shanahan (bass) and Jim Rindfleish’s fatback drumming, permit space for the others to add spice to the stew, topped off with Kevin McDowell’s ethereal vocals as Mildlife effortlessly glide between live performance and studio songwriting. “The recorded songs kind of become the new reference point for playing the songs live,’ says Kevin. “They both have different outcomes and we make our decisions for each based on that, but they’re symbiotic and they both influence each other. It’s usually a fairly natural flow from live to recorded back to live.” The centrepiece of Automatic is the title track where the band sound like Kraftwerk and Herbie Hancock on quarantined lockdown in Bob Moog’s Trumansburg workshop. It’s both a departure and quintessentially Mildlife. This is music you can dance to rather than ‘dance music’ and it’s all the better for it.
Since they burst out of Toronto during the mid-2000s in a tangle of pawn-shop keyboards and effects pedals, Holy Fuck has inspired all manner of colorful descriptors—they’re a psychedelic synth-funk machine, an avant-improv dance-tent attraction, and a Krautrock party band all in one. What they haven’t been is a tune generator for other featured artists. “We never wanted to make that electronic record where every song had a different singer on it,” band co-founder Brian Borcherdt tells Apple Music. \"A lot of those records always felt too disjointed and too much of a gimmick.” However, over time, Borcherdt has come to see the practical benefits of outsourcing vocal duties. Where past Holy Fuck albums treated Borcherdt and Graham Walsh’s voices as textural elements that get emulsified in the band’s noisy swirl, their fifth album, *Deleter*, sees them recruit guest singers like Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, Liars’ Angus Andrew, and Pond’s Nick Allbrook. “The cameo-core thing seems to make more sense in the streaming era,” Borcherdt says. \"You can release tidbits and different one-offs, and there\'s a connectivity that draws in fans of different bands. There\'s a different way of absorbing music now, so we feel differently about some of these things than we would’ve 10 years ago.” He tells us more about what inspired that change of heart as he breaks down each of the album’s songs. **Luxe (feat. Alexis Taylor)** “I had a vocal melody that I wrote and recorded over this whole song, and Graham\'s reply was, \'We should get Alexis to sing on it!\' We wanted the vocal to sound like a found sample, or something from an old record. And so Alexis was like, ‘Well, if that\'s the case, then why don’t I go to Nashville and sing it through the Voice-o-Graph \[a vintage recording booth at Jack White’s Third Man studio\], and it\'ll literally be an old record, and I\'ll send you the sound files.\' We actually cleaned up his vocal, because he basically gave us a digital version of a scratchy record, and we thought, ‘If this is going to go on to a track that has all these different rhythms and textures going on, we\'re actually going to have to take out some of these pops and clicks and scratches.’” **Deleters (feat. Angus Andrew)** “We\'ve played lots of shows with Liars, and we actually reached out to Angus to sing on a different track, but didn\'t end up keeping that vocal. With \'Deleters,’ I originally imagined a woman singing the hook. And we reached out to a lot of friends, but nobody really could commit. Katie \[Monks\] from Dilly Dally actually tried singing it, but in the end, she wasn\'t happy with it. So we were just kicking it around and Angus was already going to sing some other bit for us, and he\'s got his cool falsetto that\'s kind of iconic to the way he sings, so it just made sense for him to do it. My original vocal harmonies are layered in there, so having Angus is just like the icing on the cake that just makes it that much cooler.” **Endless** “That’s Graham singing. He brought in all the different parts, but everything within this band is a conversation, it\'s never one-sided. So Graham had some ideas, but then we parse through those ideas and connect them with the band that we are. We had just toured with Explosions in the Sky, so we were like, ‘We want it to be like that, but not *too* much like that!\'” **Free Gloss (feat. Nicholas Allbrook)** “As much as we wanted to keep things organic and reach out to our friends, our management was a little more savvy. But still, it wouldn’t seem right to us if we didn\'t have a personal connection with the person. So we actually did go see Pond when they came to town and met them all and hung out, and had a really good time. And Nick was actually supposed to sing vocals with us the next morning, but he was too hung over from the night before! Still, at least it felt like, ‘Okay, this is grounded in something. This feels like someone we could hang out with.\' In the end, he made a true cameo: He comes in for that vocal on the bridge, much like a rapper would have in a late-\'90s R&B song.” **Moment** \"In a way, this is almost like the most Holy Fuck of the songs—to my ear, it sounds kind of like where we\'ve gone in the past. But it does have a bit more Moroder and Italo-disco in there. In a lot of ways, we did our best to write our own language for the first 10 years of being a band. We tried to do things in a very idiosyncratic way. But after so many years of doing that, and flying all over the world, playing on these festivals, all those old keyboards just broke. They just don\'t last! So where we\'re going now is applying that old language to more conventional means, like programmable drum machines and MIDI. And with that kind of dynamic, it\'s suddenly going to sound more Italo-disco, because we have those tools now.” **Near Mint** “This started with the bassline—Punchy \[aka Matt McQuaid\] had his chorus pedal on, and we thought it sounded like an early Cure song off of *Faith*. And then at some point, it just turned into Krautrock, because everything we do eventually becomes Krautrock. But it feels like it picks up on some of the more obvious Krautrock influences—like the first three Can records or the first Neu! record—and then in the next phase, it turns into something more synthy and dreamy, like Harmonia and Cluster. It starts in one place and then ends up somewhere else unexpected. There\'s something very relaxing about that song.” **No Error** “That vocal is part of a live performance, but I sang it into my Casio SK-8, so I grabbed that sample and dropped it in. I was like, \'It\'d be cool if this song had a sample for a vocal,\' and I was like, ‘Well, I guess I can do that right here, right now.\' That\'s why it sounds kind of messed up: I\'m singing over top of the sample, so it sort of flanges a little bit between a live vocal repeating the same thing as the sample. It ends up being really minimal, because there\'s no click track or drum machine beat. On most of our songs, there\'s usually something keeping a rhythm or a pulse, and that one was a little bit more off the cuff, which was fun for us, because we weren\'t locked into some metronome.” **San Sebastian** “Almost every one of these songs started somewhere on the road—like ‘Luxe’ started in Luxembourg, from an encore where we just made something up, and this one started at a sound check in San Sebastian. That\'s just a vocal mic running through the mixer, live. But it\'s the same mixer that I\'m playing the guitar through, so what you\'re hearing on that signal is the guitar and vocal fusing together. And then you have Graham playing those weird pulses and eerie drones.” **Ruby** “This one almost didn’t make it—the \[phone-recorded\] demo just sounded way too shitty. I would hear the song and be like, ‘This sounds amazing,\' but every time I tried to play it for the guys, they\'d be like, ‘I can\'t hear what\'s going on! It’s too murky.’ So we tried to reverse engineer it, and the first attempt was just lame. We were like, \'This sounds like Tom Cochrane—what happened? It sounds like some *Graceland*-meets-Bruce Springsteen tune.’ It totally went off the rails in the wrong direction, because it was hard to really hear that initial seed that made the demo exciting. So we had to go back and really listen to it for the 10th time and then we realized, ‘No, this is a weird, droney, scary song.’ And the moment we did get it, we were like, ‘It\'s also going to be the last song\'—we just knew it would pull everything together.”
For his band’s fifth LP, Protomartyr guitarist Greg Ahee took inspiration from working with DJ/producer (and fellow Michigan native) Matthew Dear. “He comes from a completely different world and has a completely different way of making songs,” Ahee tells Apple Music of Dear, with whom he collaborated on the latter’s 2018 album *Bunny*. “I thought that it\'d be cool to bring other people into Protomartyr to try to get some new perspectives. I wanted to approach things like a jazz record, but one where there\'s no real lead instrument. Everything blends together and flows in a way I haven\'t heard very much in rock music—nothing stands above anything else.” Featuring contributions from Nandi Plunkett (vocals), Jemeel Moondoc (alto saxophone), Izaak Mills (bass clarinet, saxophone, flute), and Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), *Ultimate Success Today* finds the Detroit post-punk outfit adding new textures and tones to some of Ahee and frontman Joe Casey’s most urgent and upsetting work to date. “I was sick, and I don\'t know if that\'s just because I\'m getting old and you get sick when you get old, but you start feeling every ache and pain that you\'ve been putting off,” Casey says. “And if there was anything that I was putting off writing, anything that I was like, ‘Oh, someday I would like to do that,’ I was definitely going to try to push it and make sure it was on this record.” Here, Ahee and Casey take us inside every song. **Day Without End** Greg Ahee: “We wanted to try something a little bit different and open with this thing that\'s just a repetitive build. We\'ve always, in my mind, been pretty good at building tension and building it to where it almost releases, but you never really get that satisfaction. The whole idea of this song is building tension and then just stopping it—I feel like that sums up what we like to do as a band.” Joe Casey: “Lyrically, it was just an easy way for me set the tone for the album. When people are describing us, ‘dark and gloomy’ is kind of a go-to, which I think is wrong. And the idea of having a summer album—or an album about light that still had some dark themes to it—was kind of my goal. This song is about a day when the sun never goes down—quite disturbing. I’ve suffered from not being able to go to sleep, and there\'s nothing more sickening than lying in a bed, being there all night trying to fall asleep, and the sun starts coming up and you hear birds chirping. The world has reset and you have not.” **Processed by the Boys** JC: “People have—for good reason—been focusing on that line ‘A foreign disease washed up on the beach.’ And I feel kind of bad to then go, ‘Yeah, but the song says all these things that you think are going to be the end of the world—a foreign disease or someone stabbing you—are not really what brings down society.’ What brings down society is corrupt governments or a police force having too much power—the boys running amok. You don\'t want the annoying guy that you knew in high school to be in charge, but as you get older, you realize that the idiots that you knew in high school are the people that are now in charge, and it becomes a very frightening, frightening thing. ‘Processed’ is also one of those words that institutions use that can mean so many different things. Processed meat. When you get any sort of paperwork, when you\'re trying to apply for unemployment or you\'re trying to apply for health insurance, you have to wait till your documents get processed. I don\'t like how dehumanizing that is.” **I Am You Now** JC: “The main thing about ‘I Am You Now’ is just how corporations will—or anybody—will take people that are marginalized or suffering, and then draw them into this world and make them feel like they\'re important by selling things to them. And how the person that is suffering will immediately be turned into a symbol for the status quo: ‘Oh, as long as somebody\'s selling something to me, I must be included.’ It’s probably one of the more raucous songs on the album. I like songs I have to fight against. Like, ‘Okay, Greg\'s guitar is fighting for space—I need to fight for my space.’ We\'re kind of doing a back-and-forth like that. Those are all some of my favorite songs.” GA: “When I write a riff, I’m always conscious that it\'s going to either be a thing where Joe needs to find a way to sing over it or we\'re going to have that back-and-forth. And pretty early on with this one, it was clear that it was going to be a back-and-forth. We were playing around with this idea of all of us fighting against each other, but also trying to make a really tight piece of music.” **The Aphorist** JC: “I don\'t think the band, on our first record \[2012’s *No Passion All Technique*\], would have thought to even consider doing something like this. Now, I feel confident enough, after five albums, that, like, ‘Okay, I\'m going to try as best I can to sing it.’ And I\'m glad for the opportunity, especially after something like ‘I Am You Now.’ This is definitely one of those songs about writing songs. To me, shouting slogans is stupid. The first verse is a poem my brother wrote that I adjusted a little bit. I always liked my brother Jim; I always like to go to him for writing advice or if I\'m stuck on something. That was a song that we were working on for a while where the slight tempo changes would completely alter it, so it was hard to find the tone that would work for it. I was trying lots of different things and Jim was like, ‘Oh, I got this poem,’ and it fit the vibe of the record and what I was going for—the impermanence of things. That helped lock it in.” GA: “That was a really hard one for us to get tight with as a band, because of the time signature, and if we would have played that song even a couple BPMs too fast, I couldn\'t play that riff. It took a while to just play that song over and over again before we really got it.” **June 21** JC: “June 21 is the beginning of summer. It was actually kind of written around that time, too. You know it\'s summer \[in Detroit\] when you just hear the cars starting to drive fucking insane on the expressways. Everybody usually thinks that summer is a great time of year, but if you\'re physically and mentally diminished, summer is rough as any other season.” **Michigan Hammers** JC: “The song’s about workers, and the line about Veracruz is about mules. Because in the Mexican-American War, the army used lots of them. And off the coast of Veracruz, they couldn\'t get close enough to shore, so they just threw all the mules off the side of the boat. The ones that could swim to the shore, they used—but over half of them drowned. America won that war, and afterward, Ulysses S. Grant was celebrating the victory, so he went on a camping trip outside of Mexico City and he had a bunch of mules carrying stuff, one of which fell down the side of the mountain. They were like, ‘Well, that mule’s dead,’ and they continued to the top of the mountain. Then, two days later, the mule just showed up. It had climbed back up to the top of the mountain. It shows the reliance of these animals. Musically, it was another kind of rocking song and I wanted to write a rallying song about something fictional so it wouldn\'t be weighed down with any sort of meaning. I wanted it to be free of specificity.” GA: “A lot of times, Joe will take lyrics and just talk about it and joke about it with us. In the studio’s kitchen, they had magnet fridge poetry, and somebody put together, like, ‘champagne bath, half empty.’ Joe was like, ‘Oh, that\'s like the saddest four-word short story that I\'ve ever read.’ And then a variation of that ended up in the song.” **Tranquilizer** GA: “We knew we wanted some fucking freaky jazz saxophone on that one, and we wanted to get someone that really comes from that world, and Jemeel does. That song has almost no guitar. It was kind of supposed to be based around ‘If There\'s a Hell Below We\'re All Going to Go,’ by Curtis Mayfield, where it\'s just like a distorted, driving bassline that never changes and then all these things kind of float on top of it and then it kicks off in this kind of dramatic way. It was originally combined with ‘Modern Business Hymns’ and we ended up splitting those into separate songs—partially because we thought they were both solid enough on their own, and partially because the moods of them are very different. But I wanted to still have a connection between them, so the bassline that plays throughout ‘Tranquilizer’ is the same as the outro of ‘Modern Business Hymns.’ But in ‘Modern Business Hymns,’ you almost can\'t tell because it\'s kind of pretty. ‘Tranquilizer’ is menacing.” JC: “That was definitely one where I had to kind of go back to the idea of not overthinking lyrics. Because I really wanted to try to capture the feeling of when you\'re in pain. Writing about pain is impossible to do, because it is such an unthinking feeling. You’re not thinking about it. You\'re not having heady thoughts when you\'re in pain. You\'re immediately kind of reduced to very animalistic thoughts and fears, and I wanted to keep it that way. It\'s less about the words and more about the feeling of saying them almost. Once Greg explained the connection between this and the next song, it was easy to take the idea that you\'re dealing with pain until you take something to dull it or kill it. Because then on the next song, the first line is ‘Once the tranqs had hit.’ So it\'s like once you have gotten rid of the pain, then your mind can kind of formulate more thoughts about it.” **Modern Business Hymns** JC: “I always wanted to write a science fiction song, or a song about the future, but it\'s easier said than done. You don\'t want to make it too cheesy. So I wanted to kind of tie it into dreams, where when you\'re thinking about your future, if things are going well, you can imagine it as very bright. But when things are going very bad, the future can be just as dire as what you\'re going through. In the past, I\'ve sometimes maybe wanted to double my vocals during the chorus, and this was definitely one that I\'m like, this song will work if there\'s a female vocalist in the song, and I wanted it to be more of a duet. It ended up being maybe less of that, but I\'m glad. I think Nandi makes the song. Her voice has a purity to it that I don\'t think people would expect to be in a Protomartyr song. For some reason, I feel like it elevates it in a way that I would have never imagined before I heard it.” **Bridge & Crown** JC: “I have a friend who is studying to be a dentist, and she is always trying to throw in different dental ideas. And the thing that she gave me for this song that really sealed it for me was the four different kinds of patients. That\'s something that you\'ll learn, I guess, if you study to be a doctor or a dentist or anything, is the different attitudes patients will have. It was a perfect way to get into talking about dealing with mortality, specifically your own mortality. The thing that will survive long after you\'re gone is your dental work. Out of all the songs, that was the one where the lyrics came the easiest for me.” GA: “I had written it start to finish, just on my phone. I think I was on an airplane and just messing around with how to structure it and trying different things. And it sounded insane. I made some really crazy drumbeats on it where I had just layered three different drum machines on top of each other. I brought it to the band and \[drummer\] Alex \[Leonard\] somehow learned how to play it, which he\'s actually really good at—when we just drum something that seems impossible, he can oftentimes figure out a way to make it work. It ended up being one of the craziest songs, because it wasn\'t really meant to be played.” **Worm in Heaven** GA: “When I was writing those chords, I was kind of just trying to write a country song. But it\'s also one of those things where immediately in writing it, I was like, \'This is the last song on the album.\' But unlike that first song, you actually get the tension released by the end. It still cuts off as drastically as the first song does, but not before actually reaching a point where you feel like this tension that\'s been building the entire album finally has some sort of resolution and the song is able to actually explode.” JC: “It has a certain stillness to it, a confidence to it. The guitar takes a while to really announce itself, which isn’t something we would have necessarily felt comfortable doing before. I didn\'t have the lyrics until right before we recorded it. I really wanted to have the last thing be very of-the-moment, and I think, with that one, I wrote half of it up in my room at the studio ten minutes before it was time to record the vocals, and finished the second half of the lyrics in the booth as we were recording it. It’s happened a couple times on different albums where I just feel like the music is so beautiful that the lyrics have to kind of rise to the occasion for it. I don\'t want to get too corny about it, but it was like, ‘All right, no matter what happens to this record, this is kind of the point that we\'ve been building, this moment.’ And it worked for me.”
“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”
1. Noup Head (feat. Kathryn Joseph, Kevin Cormack, John Burnside & Alex Kozobolis) 2. Rousay 3. Peedie Breaks (feat. Benge) 4. Skreevar (feat. Marta Salogni) 5. Long Hope (feat. Kathryn Joseph, John Burnside, Hiroshi Ebina & Hinako Omori) 6. Linga Holm 7. Hidaland 8. Hether Blether (feat. Astra Forward, Hinako Omori) 9. Hamnavoe 10. Where I Am Is Here
$hit & $hine – Malibu Liquor Store So, what have you been doing in 2020? Tensions have mounted, turmoil has reigned and work emails have forever rung out with boilerplate platitudes as the world has ushered in a new decade in more uncomfortable and disquieting fashion than anyone could have imagined in January. Nonetheless, amidst such mental tumult Craig Clouse - the Austin-based sage of the aurally unclean also known as Shit & Shine – has been busily channelling the interface between the surroundings and his own wayward muse into ‘Malibu Liquor Store’ – a lockdown-birthed psychic landscape mapped out in the first half of this turbulent year. The only expectation any relatively well-adjusted person should have of Shit & Shine remains the unexpected at this stage, with Clouse having released well over thirty records on multiple labels in a storied, questing and uniformly invigorating catalogue – just as comfortable with both bloody-minded electronic assaults and noiserock-driven dirge, as adept at kraut-hammered rhythmic mantras as dancefloor-friendly abstraction. ‘Malibu Liquor Store’ is none of these things exactly yet simultaneously flirts cheerily and irreverently with all of them. Always shot through with gleeful humour, this is a sonic world that recognises neither boundaries nor common sense. Craig Clouse cares not for your definitions of psych or dance music, and he’s never more comfortable than when transcending and annihilating both generic headspaces with casual ease and cheerful panache. Instead, these heat-damaged jams mark a spectral collision course between infectious glitch-heavy groove and an appropriately Texan acid-flashback aesthetic - a world in the last fifty years of culture are reflected and refracted back ad absurdum. Co-ordinates and reliable audial landmarks are rendered meaningless as the title cut comes on like a ‘60s Morricone chase sequence reassembled in new electronic shapes like lysergically-assisted Meccano. ‘Rat Snake’ sees the humid grooves of Can’s ‘Soon Over Babaluma’ bludgeoned into delirious submission. ‘Devil’s Backbone’ witnesses Buttholes-esque transgressions of the ‘80s beamed forward Terminator-style to a cyborg-ridden dystopia, and the glorious skeletal groove of album centrepiece ‘Hillbilly Moonshine’ meanwhile is nothing less than workout music for the damned – a relentless and pulsating soundtrack for a generation of ghouls mounting a legion of rowing machines along a metaphysical river Styx. The creation of ‘Malibu Liquor Store’ may just have helped Craig Clouse keep his sanity in 2020, even if it appears custom designed to help us lose our own. ---
The songs comprising Keeley Forsyth’s debut are, she states simply, “like blocks of metal that drop from the sky.” With its minimal arrangements placing her recollections and dissections of sometimes harrowing experiences front and centre, Debris showcases her elemental voice and an outpouring of candid, haunting lyrics detailing the seismic ruptures which take place behind closed doors. “There was a lot going on in my life that was heavy and hard,” she adds. “Songs were made under that moment.” Born and raised in Oldham, Forsyth first made her name as an actor, and while the creation of music has been a constant feature in her life, she’s taken the long road to its release. A deeply intuitive and singular musician, she began writing several years ago, accompanying herself on harmonium and accordion. “I came up with lots of songs in a very short space of time,” Forsyth recalls. “Most songs were written in the time it took to sing them. But I held them close, and often thought I needed to do something with them. It never felt right to go out and look for it. I felt like I needed to wait and move when I felt inspired.” That inspiration struck one evening while listening to the radio, where she first encountered pianist and composer Matthew Bourne’s work. “I heard his music and suddenly I could hear them both together,” she says of her songs and his compositions. “I felt compelled to write to him. He got straight back and said he loved what I was doing.” What followed were quick and instinctive collaborations with Bourne and producer and musician Sam Hobbs, with the initial burst of momentum Forsyth felt when writing carried through into the studio, preserving the intricacies and accidents that make an album human.
“It is a reflection of the highs and lows of my own journey of self-discovery, rehabilitation, and reflection across the past two years,” Zach Choy, drummer, vocalist, and de facto spokesperson for Crack Cloud, tells Apple Music about the Canadian collective’s debut full-length. “I can hear where I was when it started, and I can hear where I was when we ended it.” Crack Cloud has been described as its members’ “recovery program” from their own personal battles, and Choy assesses *Pain Olympics*’ blend of post-punk, hip-hop, electronica, and industrial sounds as being a concept album of sorts, fundamentally about “finding your way through the world with a lot of baggage and trauma in tow. The medium is the message. Each individual song operates as an organ upon which the others rely.” Allow him, then, to act as your guide through the labyrinthine world of *Pain Olympics*. **Post Truth (Birth of a Nation)** “We wanted to create a world for the album, and to set the tone in a really grandiose, melodramatic way. This is that world’s ‘big bang’—it was a very visual concept. A frame of reference was the original Willy Wonka movie—going down that tunnel that Willy Wonka guides the children down, with its psychedelic nightmare sequence and range of emotions. The joy of working with a collective of people is that everyone specializes in and is geared towards different things. Here, a lot of the string arrangements were facilitated by one of our members who’s a connoisseur of that sort of thing—similarly, the industrial section. You hear these different elements and you hear the different people in our collective. This track is one of the best representations of the stitching-together that takes place within the collective and how things are pooled together based on one fundamental idea.” **Bastard Basket** “‘Bastard Basket’ felt like the natural antithesis to ‘Post Truth.’ It’s pensive and brooding where ‘Post Truth’ is big and bombastic. We wanted to strip away the magnificence and extravagance and sober the listener down. The general concept for reference for all of us while constructing the album was the idea of the rise and fall of a society, all of the discovery and contention and plateaus that you’ll read about in history. We wanted to represent those plateaus and draw parallels with personal life. I think anyone can relate to retaining an ambition and aspiration, and then waking up the next day and feeling the complete opposite. COVID even is a very tangible manifestation of that. One day you have your trajectory for 2020—and the next it’s out the window.” **Somethings Gotta Give** “This retains a despondency, but with a chorus that delivers more aggression and frustration. Musically, every song reveals the microscopic influence of what we were listening to along that two-year timeline. This was our attempt at an homage to the pop music we were listening to at the time, everything from The Tea Party to The Cure to blink-182. *Pain Olympics* as a whole concept took direct influence from Pink Floyd’s *The Wall*, The Beatles’ *Sgt. Pepper’s*, and Kendrick Lamar’s *To Pimp a Butterfly*. Those albums were lifesavers for me. They showed me how far you can take music and how visual it can actually be, and how emotionally engaging it can become when there’s a story that lasts not three minutes, but 45. As an artist, I want to tell stories that are informed by my personal experiences and hopefully resonate with people who have gone through similar things.” **The Next Fix** “This is a particularly personal song for me, and I think it came out onto the page in only 20 minutes. Daniel \[Robertson, multi-instrumentalist\] came with a riff and a rhythm, and the lyrics just poured out of me. I generally find lyrical inspiration to be very sporadic. This album was my first attempt at being more personal and more vulnerable as a songwriter; in the past I’ve written in a more abstract and broader manner. That was perhaps more to fit the niche of the genre we were operating within—a lot of punk music is steered by broader politics, whereas we approached this album without any sort of stylistic limitations. I’ve found it exciting to learn how to translate thoughts and emotions without hiding behind abstraction.” **Favour Your Fortune** “‘The Next Fix’ and ‘Favour Your Fortune’ are companion pieces—the two songs directly feed off one another, in terms of their conflicting energy, and I very much thrive off exploring those dichotomies. They’re two sides of the same coin, and I find it hard to manifest one side but not the other. I think there was a bit of a subliminal link in the songs’ creation, a certain residual headspace that carried into ‘The Next Fix’ from writing ‘Favour Your Fortune’ first. They were flipped in their positioning on the record to meet the album’s flow of high-low-high-low. Presenting the alternation in that way is a projection of my own personality and navigation of the world. I think I’m a pretty motivated person, but I supress a lot of anxieties and doubts. There’s a lot of highs and a lot of lows—and it’s not consistent, either.” **Ouster Stew** “I wanted this song to be really funny—and I thought it would be really funny to have a drum solo in the middle. That one’s an anthem. Musically it’s a ‘high’ moment, but it’s balanced by lyrics that are pretty sardonic, pretty cynical. If there’s any song on the album that has an equilibrium, it’s ‘Ouster Stew.’ It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing—it’s manufactured as the ‘radio song’ but deals with conflict, morality, the world’s dog-eat-dog nature. I think it’s direct projection of the contention within our culture when it comes to all politics, and I thought it’d be opportunistic to cloak that within a pop song.” **Tunnel Vision** “For all intents and purposes, ‘Tunnel Vision’ is a classic climax: It has a meandering jam in the middle, and its lyricism and use of dual vocalists with back-and-forth lines is there to fully realize the contention and duality that is such a major theme on the album. It was the most straightforward track, and one of the earliest we wrote for the album. I felt like I didn’t want to end the album with a rock song, though, which is ultimately why it wasn’t positioned to close the album.” **Angel Dust (Eternal Peace)** “We end with a pseudo resolution to an otherwise chaotic story, to bring the cyclical nature of *Pain Olympics* across. This isn’t the end, it’s merely the beginning. *The Wall* and *To Pimp a Butterfly* were heavily influential on the narrative device of closing an album and yet trying to leave it open-ended. We want to leave the listener in a state of mind where they are compelled to consider what they have just heard. Art can be such a profound experience when you abandon any societal or cultural hindrances that would otherwise prevent you from being able to experience a record or a painting in a pure, instinctual way. It’s about open-mindedness, and letting the music drive you on a spiritual level, as opposed to letting your own analysis drive your interpretation.”
Written and recorded between July 2017 and December 2019 Produced by Crack Cloud Engineer Jonathan Paul Stewart Mastering Christian Wright Logo by Wei Huang Cover by Marc Gabbana
Alongside Londoners such as saxophonist Nubya Garcia, tuba player Theon Cross, and keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, Shabaka Hutchings is at the forefront of club jazz’s resurgence in the UK. The British-Barbadian artist’s various projects all work in Afro-political idioms, with each occupying a different philosophical realm: Sons of Kemet focuses on black displacement in royal Britain, The Comet Is Coming is influenced by Afrofuturism and progressive rock, and Shabaka and the Ancestors explores the African diaspora from the standpoint of Western culture’s erasure of black identity and communities. On *We Are Sent Here By History*, Hutchings and his South Africa-based band use history as a reflection point, but one that deeply informs the future. Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, and Yusef Lateef are just a few of the musical-political touchstones that also influence the record, and you hear these icons in the powerful chants and spoken words of Siyabonga Mthembu, the phrasing of the woodwinds—chaotic, playful, spiritual—and the general status-quo-challenging vibe of the arrangement. Like his predecessors, Hutchings makes protest songs that make you feel alive, even when they are indictments of colonialism and toxic masculinity. But he also uses music as a corrective: Like its title suggests, “We Will Work (On Redefining Manhood)”—all looping chanted vocals around a multitude of percussive instruments—looks beyond a dark past towards brighter days.
Over the last 15 years, British musician Stephen Wilkinson\'s Bibio project has encompassed hazy hip-hop beats, synths, and swaths of ambient fog. His 11th studio album—and eighth for the legendary electronic label Warp—dives headlong into the guitars of British folk music, with loops of fancy fretwork and fuzzy electronic programming occasionally accompanied by Wilkinson\'s honeyed vocals. Along with its predecessor *Ribbons* from 2019, *Sleep on the Wing* finds Wilkinson returning to the pastoral textures of his early work in the late 2000s, as he unfurls hypnotizing melodies—subtly burrowing themselves into your brain and leaving a lasting impression despite their brevity.
Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten was with bandmates Tom Coll and Conor Curley in a pub somewhere in the US when the words “Happy is living in a closed eye” came to him. It was possibly in Chicago, he thinks, and certainly during their 2019 tour. “We were playing pool and drinking some shit Guinness,” he tells Apple Music. “I was drinking an awful lot and there was a sense of running away on that tour—because we were so overworked. The gigs were really good and full of energy, but it almost felt like a synthetic, anxious energy. We were all burning the candle at both ends. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me when I wrote that line that I was not really facing reality properly. Ever since I\'ve read Oscar Wilde, I\'ve always been fascinated by questioning the validity of living soberly or healthily.” The line eventually made its way into “Sunny” a track from the band’s second album *A Hero’s Death*. Like much of the record, that unsteady waltz is an absorbing departure from the rock ’n’ roll punch of their Mercury-nominated debut, *Dogrel*. Released in April 2019, *Dogrel* quickly established the Irish five-piece as one of the most exciting guitar bands on their side of the Atlantic, throwing them into an exacting tour and promo schedule. When the physical and mental strains of life on the road bore down—on many nights, Chatten would have to visit dark memories to reengage with the thoughts and feelings behind some songs—the five-piece sought relief and refuge in other people’s music. “We found ourselves enjoying mostly gentler music that took us out of ourselves and calmed us down, took us away from the fast-paced lifestyle,” says Chatten. “I think we began to associate a particular sound and kind of music, one band in particular would have been The Beach Boys, that helped us feel safe and calm and took us away from the chaos.” That, says Chatten, helps account for the immersive and expansive sound of *A Hero’s Death*. With their world being refracted through the heat haze of interstate highways and the disconcerting fog of days without much sleep, there’s a dreaminess and longing in the music. It’s in the percussive roll of “Love Is the Main Thing” and the harmonies swirling around the title track’s rigorous riffs. It drifts through the uneasy reflection of “Sunny.” “‘Sunny’ is hard for me to sing,” says Chatten, “just because there are so many long fucking notes. And I have up until recently been smoking pretty hard. But I enjoy the character that I feel when I sing it. I really like the embittered persona and the gin-soaked atmosphere.” While *Dogrel*’s lyrics carried poetic renderings of life in modern Dublin, *A Hero’s Death* burrows inward. “Dublin is still in the language that I use, the colloquialisms and the way that I express things,” says Chatten. “But I consider this to be much more a portrait of an inner landscape. More a commentary on a temporal reality. It\'s a lot more about the streets within my own mind.” Throughout, Chatten can be found examining a sense of self. He does it with bracing defiance on “I Don’t Belong” and “I Was Not Born,” and with aching resignation on “Oh Such a Spring”—a lament for people who go to work “just to die.” ”I worked a lot of jobs that gave me no satisfaction and forced me to shelve temporarily who I was,” says Chatten. “I felt very strongly about people I love being in the service industry and having to become somebody else and suppress their own feelings and their own views, their own politics, to make a living. How it feels after a shift like that, that there is blood on your hands almost. You’re perpetuating this lie, because it’s a survival mechanism for yourself.” Ambitious and honest, *A Hero’s Death* is the sound of a band protecting their ideals when the demands of being rock’s next big thing begin to exert themselves. ”One of the things we agreed upon when we started the band was that we wouldn\'t write a song unless there was a purpose for its existence,” says Chatten. “There would be no cases of churning anything out. It got to a point, maybe four or five tunes into writing the album, where we realized that we were on the right track of making art that was necessary for us, as opposed to necessary for our careers. We realized that the heart, the core of the album is truthful.”
Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"
Daniel Avery returns with his third full-length album, Love + Light, a surprise release out now via Phantasy worldwide and Phantasy/Mute in the United States and Canada on all digital platforms, with ethereal artwork taken from an image by Avery’s tour photographer Keffer. Love + Light arrives unexpectedly, following Avery’s recent collaborations with Alessandro Cortini on the critically acclaimed Illusion of Time LP (“a record that suggests Godspeed You! Black Emperor in drone mode, reimagining Music For Airports as if the runways were covered in gravel and air traffic control was on strike,” said Loud & Quiet, while Q hailed it “lush mood music to get lost in”) and alongside Roman Flügel under the alias of Noun. Avery’s previous solo album Song For Alpha was released in 2018 to similar acclaim. Avery shares, “This record has been a real positive force of energy in my life, to the point where it almost formed itself in front of me. In that same spirit, I wanted to share it with you now, as soon as it was finished. As I started to collect the pieces together, it was apparent that the album would be split into two distinct halves but halves that were inexorably tied together. One could not have existed without the other. Music has always been a source of personal strength for me yet I remain fascinated by the power it can possess of its own volition. Releasing the record in this way, just a couple of weeks after the final note had fallen, felt like a decision made by an outside force yet one I agreed with entirely. Stay safe, friends and I’ll see you on the other side soon. DA xxx”
The Orielles release their brand new album 'Disco Volador' via Heavenly Recordings on February 28th, 2020. The first pressing is translucent orange vinyl edition with a groovy green splodge is now available & standard CD. All vinyl comes with a download card and code. We also have a limited number of signed editions of this first pressing as well as CDs available. 'Disco Volador' sees the 4-piece push their sonic horizon to its outer limits as astral travellers, hitching a ride on the melodic skyway to evade the space-time continuum through a sharp collection of progressive strato-pop symphonies. Voyaging through cinematic samba, 70s disco, deep funk boogies, danceable grooves and even tripping on 90s acid house, Disco Volador is set to propel The Orielles spinning into a higher zero-gravity orbit. Written and recorded in just 12 months, it captures the warp-speed momentum of their post-Silver Dollar Moment debut album success; an unforgettable summer touring, playing festivals like Green Man and bluedot, Disco Volador’s library catalogue vibes stem from a band lapping up and widening their pool of musical discovery whether nodding to Italian film score maestros Sandro Brugnolini and Piero Umiliani, or the Middle Eastern tones of Khruangbin and Altin Gün. The album features the bands new single ‘Come Down On Jupiter’ and follows the critically acclaimed debut ‘Silver Dollar Moment.’
