FACT's 50 Best Albums of 2016

The avant garde Norwegian throws open a ghostly sonic sketchbook on this complex sixth album. Taking vampirism, gore, and femininity as her stated themes, Hval uses everything from percussive panting (the compellingly sinister “In The Red”) to distant, discordant horns (“Untamed Region”) to conjure challenging, dark dreamscapes. Thankfully, she never forgets the tunes. “The Great Undressing” is a propulsive art-pop jewel, and “Secret Touch” pits Hval’s brittle falsetto against hissing, addictive trip hop.

Jenny Hval’s conceptual takes on collective and individual gender identities and sociopolitical constructs landed Apocalypse, girl on dozens of year end lists and compelled writers everywhere to grapple with the age-old, yet previously unspoken, question: What is Soft Dick Rock? After touring for a year and earning her second Nordic Prize nomination, as any perfectionist would, Hval immediately went back into the studio to continue her work with acumen noise producer Lasse Marhaug, with whom she co-produces here on Blood Bitch. Her new effort is in many respects a complete 180° from her last in subject matter, execution and production. It is her most focused, but the lens is filtered through a gaze which the viewer least expects.

The infamous. Now on Bandcamp. Bird Sound Power features productions from Gavsborg & Time Cow dating between 2009-2016. Number 2 in both RA and FACT albums of the year 2016 Featured in Rolling Stone's top 20 Electronic albums of 2016

More trauma and travails with the magnetic Detroit MC. Like *XXX* and *Old* before it, *Atrocity Exhibition* plays like a nightmare with punchlines, the diary of a hedonist who loves the night as much as he hates the morning after. “Upcoming heavy traffic/say ya need to slow down, ’cause you feel yourself crashing,” Brown raps on “Ain’t it Funny,” a feverish highlight. “Staring the devil in the face but ya can’t stop laughing.”

Puberty is a game of emotional pinball: hormones that surge, feelings that ricochet between exhilarating highs and gut-churning lows. That’s the dizzying, intoxicating experience Mitski evokes on her aptly titled fourth album, a rush of rebel music that touches on riot grrrl, skeletal indie rock, dreamy pop, and buoyant punk. Unexpected hooks pierce through the singer/songwriter’s razor-edged narratives—a lilting chorus elevates the slinky, druggy “Crack Baby,” while her sweet singsong melodies wrestle with hollow guitar to amplify the tension on “Your Best American Girl.”

Ask Mitski Miyawaki about happiness and she'll warn you: “Happiness fucks you.” It's a lesson that's been writ large into the New Yorker's gritty, outsider-indie for years, but never so powerfully as on her newest album, 'Puberty 2'. “Happiness is up, sadness is down, but one's almost more destructive than the other,” she says. “When you realise you can't have one without the other, it's possible to spend periods of happiness just waiting for that other wave.” On 'Puberty 2', that tension is palpable: a both beautiful and brutal romantic hinterland, in which one of America’s new voices hits a brave new stride. The follow-up to 2014's 'Bury Me At Makeout Creek', named after a Simpsons quote and hailed by Pitchfork as “a complex 10-song story [containing] some of the most nuanced, complex and articulate music that's come from the indiesphere in a while,” 'Puberty 2' picks up where its predecessor left off. “It's kind of a two parter,” explains Mitski. “It's similar in sound, but a direct growth [from] that record.” Musically, there are subtle evolutions: electronic drum machines pulse throughout beneath Pixies-ish guitars, while saxophone lights up its opening track. “I had a certain confidence this time. I knew what I wanted, knew what I was doing and wasn't afraid to do things that some people may not like.” In terms of message though, the 25-year-old cuts the same defiant, feminist figure on 'Puberty 2' that won her acclaim last time around (her hero is MIA, for her politics as much as her music). Born in Japan, Mitski grew up surrounded by her father's Smithsonian folk recordings and mother's 1970s Japanese pop CDs in a family that moved frequently: she spent stints in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, China and Turkey among other countries before coming to New York to study composition at SUNY Purchase. She reflects now on feeling “half Japanese, half American but not fully either” – a feeling she confronts on the clever 'Your Best American Girl' – a super-sized punk-rock hit she “hammed up the tropes” on to deconstruct and poke fun at that genre's surplus of white males. “I wanted to use those white-American-guy stereotypes as a Japanese girl who can't fit in, who can never be an American girl,” she explains. Elsewhere on the record there's 'Crack Baby', a song which doesn't pull on your heartstrings so much as swing from them like monkey bars, which Mitski wrote the skeleton of as a teenager. As you might have guessed from the album's title, that adolescent period is a time of her life she doesn't feel she's entirely left behind. “It came up as a joke and I became attached to it. 'Puberty 2'! It sounds like a blockbuster movie” – a nod to the horror-movie terror of adolescence. “I actually had a ridiculously long argument whether it should be the number 2, or a Roman numeral.” The album was put together with the help of long-term accomplice Patrick Hyland, with every instrument on record played between the two of them. “You know the Drake song 'No New Friends'? It's like that. The more I do this, the more I close-mindedly stick to the people I know,” she explains. “I think that focus made it my most mature record.” Sadness is awful and happiness is exhausting in the world of Mitski. The effect of 'Puberty 2', however, is a stark opposite: invigorating, inspiring and beautiful.

On their final album, Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Jarobi rekindle a chemistry that endeared them to hip-hop fans worldwide. Filled with exploratory instrumental beds, creative samples, supple rhyming, and serious knock, it passes the headphone and car stereo test. “Kids…” is like a rap nerd’s fever dream, Andre 3000 and Q-Tip slaying bars. Phife—who passed away in March 2016—is the album’s scion, his roughneck style and biting humor shining through on “Black Spasmodic” and “Whateva Will Be.” “We the People” and “The Killing Season” (featuring Kanye West) show ATCQ’s ability to move minds as well as butts. *We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service* is not a wake or a comeback—it’s an extended visit with a long-missed friend, and a mic-dropping reminder of Tribe’s importance and influence.

A confessional autobiography and meditation on being black in America, this album finds Solange searching for answers within a set of achingly lovely funk tunes. She finds intensity behind the patient grooves of “Weary,” expresses rage through restraint in “Mad,” and draws strength from the naked vulnerability of “Where Do We Go.” The spirit of Prince hovers throughout, especially over “Junie,” a glimmer of merriment in an exquisite portrait of sadness.

Jessy Lanza's second album 'Oh No' is inspired by Japanese 80s electro outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra’s philosophy of experimental pop. Playfully laced with cascading arpeggios, crispy drum machines and breezy songs, 'Oh No' has an infectious energy that has carried over from her live shows. Made in her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, with production partner Jeremy Greenspan from Junior Boys, the plaintive, reverb drizzled mood of the first album has all but given away to a more direct, confident and joyful album. As Jessy says ‘I want to make people feel good and I want to make myself feel good’.

On No One Deserves Happiness, The Body’s Chip King and Lee Buford set out to make “the grossest pop album of all time.” The album themes of despair and isolation are delivered by the unlikely pairing of the Body’s signature heaviness and 80s dance tracks. The Body can emote pain like no other band, and their ability to move between the often strict confines of the metal world and the electronic music sphere is on full display throughout No One Deserves Happiness, an album that eludes categorization. More then any of their genre-defying peers, The Body does it without softening their disparate influences towards a middle ground, but instead through a beautiful combining of extremes. No One Deserves Happiness is an album that defies definition and expectations, standing utterly alone. Buford and King are outliers at their core, observing the world as if apart
from it. They strive for music without a category. They embody many
contrasts. They are open and playful as well as thoughtful and disciplined. Live, they deliver punishing volume and scale with their spare duo set up, expanding their sound through a complex set of effects on both guitar and drums. For records, they approach things entirely differently and expand their group in the studio to include Seth Manchester and Keith Souza from Machines with Magnets (their long-time studio), as well as Chrissy Wolpert of The Assembly of Light Choir. The list of instruments used on No One Deserves Happiness is an unexpected collection that includes 808 drum machine, a cello and a trombone. The band employs instruments in their unprocessed state for the simple beauty of the sound, and then in equal measure push them to their most extreme (for example, the sounds at the end of “The Fall and the Guilt” are created by a guitar and a cello). Because they create an entirely singular sound, The Body is in high demand for collaborations with artists across the musical spectrum, from The Bug to Full of Hell to The Haxan Cloak and beyond. They build albums that are as lush and dense as a rainforest and as unforgiving. Building an album as layered as No One Deserves Happiness is a complex process. Striving for harshness, dynamics and detail all at once poses some technical challenges: It requires that tracks are built up, deconstructed, processed and re-built. Manchester explains that as an engineering team for The Body, Machines with Magnets must always consider the mix — they never go in and record the basics and then mix it. In order to get the immersive experience that is No One Deserves Happiness, they must experiment with and constantly re-evaluate every construct. While they do employ an 808 on this album, they use pre-fabricated samples very sparingly. To get the contrast they are looking for, they experiment with a huge variety of their own sound samples and varying levels of distortion. Reprocessing a few samples of a track can often result in a remix to retain the balance and dynamics they are looking for. Delicate, ethereal vocals, courtesy of Wolpert and Maralie Armstrong (who wrote and sings the lyrics for “Adamah” and contributes vocals at the end of “Shelter Is Illusory”) sharply juxtapose King’s distinctive, hellish cries. Album opener “Wanderings” is the perfect introduction to No One Deserves Happiness: Wolpert’s angelic calls to “go it alone” build until utter despair takes over, her voice drowned in guitar distortion, and as it is swallowed, we hear the desperate cries of Chip King. The Body then completely switches approaches, starting again with bare drums, but this time more processed and more industrial. The march is quickly augmented by electronics and King’s distant shrieks — this continues to build to the apex of Wolpert’s vocals rising from the oppressiveness and elevating it with her melodies. The contrasting composition and employment of textures on these two songs highlight the Body’s songwriting and arrangement skills. Each track is at once melodic and bleak, employing many of the same instruments but never in the same manner. The band’s musical tastes are broad, and that is reflected in the wide variety of inspirations they cite for the tracks on No One Deserves Happiness. “Two Snakes” started with a bass line that was inspired by Beyoncé and went through several mutations as the band remixed and reprocessed core elements, vocal melodies morphing into distorted keys, all carried by the foundational bass line. The core duo of The Body has clear ideas of what they want to achieve, but they are completely open to ideas on the execution. This collaborative, open approach allows for a lot of creative input into the building blocks or sounds of a composition that The Body then meticulously arranges. In the same manner as the music, the lyrics are inspired by a variety of literary reference points, from the spoken word piece on “Prescience,” written by Édouard Levé, to the Joan Didion quote inscribed in the album artwork. The Didion passage succinctly sums up an overriding theme of loss and isolation: “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” In the past two years alone, The Body has joined forces with the metal bands Thou, Sandworm, and Krieg, recorded with Wrekmeister Harmonies, and collaborated with electronic producer The Haxan Cloak. They are currently working on a collaboration with The Bug and grindcore band Full of Hell. They have toured with Neurosis (playing large venues) and toured with Sandworm (playing house shows). This unexpected list of collaborators and unpredictable touring approach further emphasizes the demand for the band’s distinctive sound and their open, explorative nature.

After giving the world a decade of nonstop hits, the big question for Rihanna was “What’s next?” Well, she was going to wait a little longer than expected to reveal the answer. Four years separated *Unapologetic* and her eighth album. But she didn’t completely escape from the spotlight during the mini hiatus. Rather, she experimented in real time by dropping one-off singles like the acoustic folk “FourFiveSeconds” collaboration with Kanye West and Paul McCartney, the patriotic ballad “American Oxygen,” and the feisty “Bitch Better Have My Money.” The sonic direction she was going to land on for *ANTI* was still murky, but those songs were subtle hints nonetheless. When she officially unleashed *ANTI* to the world, it quickly became clear that this wasn’t the Rihanna we’d come to know from years past. In an unexpected twist, the singer tossed her own hit factory formula (which she polished to perfection since her 2005 debut) out the window. No, this was a freshly independent Rihanna who intentionally took time to dig deep. As the world was holding its breath awaiting the new album, she found a previously untapped part of her artistry. *ANTI* says it all in the title: The album is the complete antithesis of Pop Star Rihanna. From the abstract cover art (which features a poem written in braille) to newfound autonomy after leaving her longtime record label, Def Jam, to form her own, *ANTI* shattered all expectations of what a structured pop album should sound like—not only for her own standards, but also for fellow artists who wanted to demolish industry rules. And the risk worked in her favor: it became the singer’s second No. 1 LP. “I got to do things my own way, darling/Will you ever let me?/Will you ever respect me?” Rihanna mockingly asks on the opening track, “Consideration.” In response, the rest of the album dives headfirst into fearlessness where she doesn’t hesitate to get sensual, vulnerable, and just a little weird. *ANTI*’s overarching theme is centered on relationships. Echoing Janet Jackson’s *The Velvet Rope*, Rihanna details the intricacies of love from all stages. Lead single “Work” is yet another flirtatious reunion with frequent collaborator Drake as they tease each other atop a steamy dancehall bassline. She spits vitriolic acid on the Travis Scott-produced “Woo,” taunting an ex-flame who walked away from her: “I bet she could never make you cry/’Cause the scars on your heart are still mine.” What’s most notable throughout *ANTI* is Rihanna’s vocal expansion, from her whiskey-coated wails on the late-night voicemail that is “Higher” to breathing smoke on her rerecorded version of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” Yet the signature Rihanna DNA remained on the album. The singer proudly celebrated her Caribbean heritage on the aforementioned “Work,” presented women with yet another kiss-off anthem with “Needed Me,” and flaunted her erotic side on deluxe track “Sex With Me.” Ever the sonic explorer, she also continued to uncover new genres by going full ’50s doo-wop on “Love on the Brain” and channeling Prince for the velvety ’80s power-pop ballad “Kiss It Better.” *ANTI* is not only Rihanna’s brilliant magnum opus, but it’s also a sincere declaration of freedom as she embraces her fully realized womanhood.

Brutally honest stories of L.A. street life fill the Compton rapper\'s second album. Like his commanding debut, *Still Brazy* brings together point-blank rhymes and vintage West Coast production. But when YG looks beyond the life-and-death drama of his neighborhood—taking aim at right-wing politics, police brutality, and racial division—his street-level honesty is every bit as biting.

There’s one moment critical to understanding the emotional and cultural heft of *Lemonade*—Beyoncé’s genre-obliterating blockbuster sixth album—and it arrives at the end of “Freedom,” a storming empowerment anthem that samples a civil-rights-era prison song and features Kendrick Lamar. An elderly woman’s voice cuts in: \"I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” she says. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé’s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her blackness, her husband’s infidelity) and make for Beyoncé\'s most outwardly revealing work to date. The details, of course, are what make it so relatable, what make each song sting. Billed upon its release as a tribute to “every woman’s journey of self-knowledge and healing,” the project is furious, defiant, anguished, vulnerable, experimental, muscular, triumphant, humorous, and brave—a vivid personal statement from the most powerful woman in music, released without warning in a time of public scrutiny and private suffering. It is also astonishingly tough. Through tears, even Beyoncé has to summon her inner Beyoncé, roaring, “I’ma keep running ’cause a winner don’t quit on themselves.” This panoramic strength–lyrical, vocal, instrumental, and personal–nudged her public image from mere legend to something closer to real-life superhero. Every second of *Lemonade* deserves to be studied and celebrated (the self-punishment in “Sorry,” the politics in “Formation,” the creative enhancements from collaborators like James Blake, Robert Plant, and Karen O), but the song that aims the highest musically may be “Don’t Hurt Yourself”—a Zeppelin-sampling psych-rock duet with Jack White. “This is your final warning,” she says in a moment of unnerving calm. “If you try this shit again/You gon\' lose your wife.” In support, White offers a word to the wise: “Love God herself.”

Tom ‘Konx-om-Pax’ Scholefield’s Caramel is quite a different record from the dark, mould-pocked ambience of his debut ‘Regional Surrealism’. Although it’s primarily a beatless album, it’s one with a big smile on it’s face.   Scholefield started making ‘Caramel’ after his last record in 2012, “My surroundings have a direct influence on the mood of what I make. I made Regional Surrealism when I was living in a big empty flat on my own in Glasgow town centre surrounded by concrete and junkies. Moving next to the park, closer to friends and getting to tour the world had a positive effect on the feel of the tracks.”   ‘Caramel’ has a lightness and energy, an unrepentant joyful cheesiness even - like the rave piano and spiralling arpeggios of ‘Cosmic Trigger’ or the big beatless build up of the title track. “A lot of the tracks are very simple, that’s quite an important theme.”  He adds “I remember the Human League talk about how you can play their songs using only a couple of fingers on the synth, or Boards Of Canada saying its important to be able to hum their melodies really easily.” There’s also a strong element of rave memory in this ambience. It’s influenced in some ways by touring the world with Lone doing visuals and DJing, but also from simply listening to old rave tapes and taking in the warmth and energy. As he says “Some of the tracks are like photocopies of photocopies of rave tracks, where the drums have dissolved and its just the melodies that have survived.” You can hear this distinctly on ‘Perc Rave’. Other tracks are more or less drones that build into melodies, like ‘Beatrice’s Visit’, as he says “I’m always trying to find the most ecstatic and basic loop and just let it run and do it’s thing. I heard a funny story about Basic Channel popping out to get a kebab and letting their machines run while they were out.” Other tracks approach the pastoral melodies of prime nineties IDM such as ‘At The Lake’ and ‘Rainbow Bounce’ which almost seem like a homage to Planet Mu’s Mike Paradinas at his most beatific. Dive in.

Thugga’s agility and anguish come together in a high-impact performance for the ages. He’s always been lithe, but witness the rapper’s snakelike vocals slide through “Wyclef Jean” and “Swizz Beats,” both built on the subliminal rumbles of dub and dancehall. While he digs into “Future Swag” with wolfish gusto, his fractured croon finds home in the sore-hearted hedonism of “Riri.”

In the space of three years, Peder Mannerfelt appears to have established himself as a thrilling and singular sonic artist. With a prolific catalogue and as one half of Roll The Dice, his artistic career in fact stretches back to the early days of Sweden's techno pioneers. After the boldly conceptual 'Swedish Congo Record' Controlling Body represents a return to experimental ground still fresh from 2014's debut LP 'Lines Describing Circles'. With this new release, which features vocals from Glasser, comes a focus on the communicative power of the human voice, even in its barest form....

The songwriter transfigures personal tragedy into growling, elemental elegies. On his latest collaboration with the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave pulls us through the gorgeous, groaning terrors of “Anthrocene” and “Jesus Alone” only to deliver us, scarred but safe, to “I Need You” and “Skeleton Tree,” a pair of tender, mournful folk ballads.

"simultaneously hypnotizing and grounding"- MTV news "like a CVS that turns into a dance club after lockup" - Bandcamp Daily "'Don't Worry Bout The Fuck I'm Doing' is sonically consistent with her futuristic take on electronic pop. Her voice rides the hypnotic beat, but her charged lyrics take front stage" - The FADER "When French lets loose emotionally, as on ‘You Never Knew’ or last year’s stunning ‘Forget Your Future’, it’s crushing. The shitheads here though only warrant the calm instruction of the title and with it French shows off another facet to her increasingly exciting work." - FACT "one of our favorite tracks from the record, an emphatic middle finger to the disgusting catcallers she encounters on a daily basis in NYC .. ethereal electronic pop anthem." - Gorilla vs Bear "A gorgeous, space-y spin on NG's signature, forward-thinking electropop, it's definitely a headbobber." - PAPER Mag "You Never Knew' is an addictive piece of electronic pop that will make you reach for that play button time and time again." - The 405 "Negative Gemini, makes a genre-spanning blend of ’90s techno and heady modern electronica: a little Chicago, a little Detroit, and a whole lot of Brooklyn. But unlike many of her contemporaries, French conveys her personality and experiences through vocals and lyrics, not just tight production" - NYLON "As if Kylie Minogue was commissioned to soundtrack a movie that falls somewhere between ’90s teen romance and a grindhouse movie, the track is capable of establishing Lindsey as the internet’s next big pop star." - Pigeons and Planes "Your summer anthem is here, courtesy of Negative Gemini. One of our favorite up-and-coming singer/producers ... this synthy indie track induces long summer joyride yearning alongside unforgiving bad bitch vibes." - Nasty Gal "Body Work peers out with a new delight in manic exploration" - Tiny Mix Tapes

Bristol, England-based sound artist and producer Sophia Loizou presents Singulacra, the follow-up to her 2014 debut, Chrysalis, which is itself a staggering exploration of the conflict between nature and technology and the space between natural and synthetic sounds. With Singulacra, Loizou builds on the framework of Chrysalis for her most ambitious offering to date. Ghostly remnants of hardcore and early jungle percolate throughout while fragments of radio transmissions seep in and out through tape-based processes and spectral processing, leaving the listener in a hauntingly beautiful landscape filled with both solidity and disintegration. Bringing back the times of pirate radio, almost like lost transmissions from beyond the grave, this work provides a sense of intimacy and familiarity during the contemporary full-speed acceleration toward unknown futures. Exploring its audiences' anxieties surrounding technological utopias while retaining an emphasis on nurturing human value when facing inhuman forces, Singulacra engages with the potential loss of human essence amid technological progress toward artificial intelligence.

Natural patterns of organic life make the most efficient use of space and surface area and in permaculture design one observes natural patterns in a landscape and plans details accordingly. Taking a self-occurring pattern like the veins of a leaf, contour lines, or the spirals of water and letting that guide interactions with the surface of the earth. The ethos is to work with natural flow and processes rather than to impose. Mirroring this idea From Patterns to Details draws from the sense of a deeper underlying order. It sees continuity between environment and individual, continuity between external bodies and the internal emotional landscapes that music can communicate beyond the affordances of language. The album embraces technology as something that is not in conflict with the organic processes of nature. Technology is treated as life in a different state. Human beings are gardens in a different state; all temporary forms of the same thing. From Patterns to Details imagines states of alignment with all, and harmonious design, a complete integration between personal and external systems whether organic or technological. Fis composes physical, spirited, exploratory electronic music inspired in part by his work as a permaculture designer. Initially developing his craft on the sound systems of his birth country New Zealand, he went on to a string of critically acclaimed releases on Tri Angle Records and Loopy in recent years.

A chaotic but fascinating collision of experimental electronica and punk spirit. It’s fitting that Mark E Smith is sampled on the invigorating clatter of ‘Junk’ because he’s the sort of belligerent maverick you suspect inspired Powell on a debut full of abrasiveness and sharp left-turns. As with Smith’s best music, you’ll often find a cracking tune or hypnotic rhythm underneath the songs’ thorny surfaces, with \"Jonny\"’s alloy of acid-house synths, punk riffs and icy vocals impossible to resist.

After the lonesome folk and skeletal roadhouse soul of her debut album, 2012’s *Half Way Home*, Angel Olsen turned up the intensity on *Burn Your Fire for No Witness*, and she does it again on *MY WOMAN*. The title’s in all caps for a reason: The St. Louis, Missouri, native’s third album is bigger in both the acrobatic feats of her always-agile voice and the widescreen, hi-fi sound that Olsen and co-producer Justin Raisen bring to the table. With the very first song, “Intern,” it’s clear that Olsen has taken us somewhere new. A slow dance in a dive bar at last call, it might be familiar turf were it not for the synthesizers that cast an eerie glow across the song’s red-velvet backdrop. “Never Be Mine” harnesses the anguish of ’60s girl groups in jangling guitar and crisp backbeats; “Shut Up Kiss Me” couches desire in terms so heated the mic practically melts beneath Olsen’s yelp. Mindful of its ancestry but never expressly retro, the album is a triumph of rock ’n’ roll pathos, an exquisite dissertation on the poetry of twang and tremolo. And even if “There is nothing new/Under the sun,” as Olsen sings on the fateful “Heart Shaped Face,” she is forever finding ways to file down everyday truths to a finer point, drawing blood with every new prick. As she sighs over watery piano and fathomless reverb on the heartbreaking closer, “Pops,” “It hurts to start dreaming/Dreaming again.” But that pain is precisely what makes *MY WOMAN* so unforgettable, and so true.

Anyone reckless enough to have typecast Angel Olsen according to 2013’s ‘Burn Your Fire For No Witness’ is in for a sizable surprise with her third album, ‘MY WOMAN’. The crunchier, blown-out production of the former is gone, but that fire is now burning wilder. Her disarming, timeless voice is even more front-and-centre than before, and the overall production is lighter. Yet the strange, raw power and slowly unspooling incantations of her previous efforts remain, so anyone who might attempt to pigeonhole Olsen as either an elliptical outsider or a pop personality is going to be wrong whichever way they choose - Olsen continues to reign over the land between the two with a haunting obliqueness and sophisticated grace. Given its title, and track names like ‘Sister’ and ‘Woman’, it would be easy to read a gender-specific message into ‘MY WOMAN’, but Olsen has never played her lyrical content straight. She explains: “I’m definitely using scenes that I’ve replayed in my head, in the same way that I might write a script and manipulate a memory to get it to fit. But I think it’s important that people can interpret things the way that they want to.” That said, Olsen concedes that if she could locate any theme, whether in the funny, synth-laden ‘Intern’ or the sadder songs which are collected on the record’s latter half, “then it’s maybe the complicated mess of being a woman and wanting to stand up for yourself, while also knowing that there are things you are expected to ignore, almost, for the sake of loving a man. I’m not trying to make a feminist statement with every single record, just because I’m a woman. But I do feel like there are some themes that relate to that, without it being the complete picture.” Over her two previous albums, she’s given us reverb-shrouded poetic swoons, shadowy folk, grunge-pop band workouts and haunting, finger-picked epics. ‘MY WOMAN’ is an exhilarating complement to her past work, and one for which Olsen recalibrated her writing/recording approach and methods to enter a new music-making phase. She wrote some songs on the piano she’d bought at the end of the previous album tour, but she later switched it out for synth and/or Mellotron on a few of them, such as the aforementioned ‘Intern’. ‘MY WOMAN’ is lovingly put together as a proper A-side and a B-side, featuring the punchier, more pop/rock-oriented songs up front, and the longer, more reflective tracks towards the end. The rollicking ‘Shut Up Kiss Me’, for example, appears early on - its nervy grunge quality belying a subtle desperation, as befits any song about the exhaustion point of an impassioned argument. Another crowning moment comes in the form of the melancholic and Velvets-esque ‘Heart-shaped Face’, while the compelling ‘Sister’ and ‘Woman’ are the only songs not sung live. They also both run well over the seven-minute mark: the first being a triumph of reverb-splashed, ’70s country rock, cast along Fleetwood Mac lines with a Neil Young caged-tiger guitar solo to cap it off. The latter is a wonderful essay in vintage electronic pop and languid, psychedelic soul. Because her new songs demanded a plurality of voices, Olsen sings in a much broader range of styles on the album, and she brought in guest guitarist Seth Kauffman to augment her regular band of bass player Emily Elhaj, drummer Joshua Jaeger and guitarist Stewart Bronaugh. As for a producer, Olsen took to Justin Raisen, who’s known for his work with Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira and Santigold, as well as opting to record live to tape at LA’s historic Vox Studios. As the record evolves, you get the sense that the “My Woman” of the title is Olsen herself - absolutely in command, but also willing to bend with the influence of collaborators and circumstances. If ever there was any pressure in the recording process, it’s totally undetectable in the result. An intuitively smart, warmly communicative and fearlessly generous record, ‘MY WOMAN’ speaks to everyone. That it might confound expectation is just another of its strengths.

Rapper/singer Anderson .Paak’s third album—and first since his star turn on Dr. Dre’s *Compton*—is a warm, wide-angle look at the sweep of his life. A former church drummer trained in gospel music, Paak is as expressive a singer as he is a rapper, sliding effortlessly between the reportorial grit of hip-hop (“Come Down”) and the emotional catharsis of soul and R&B (“The Season/Carry Me”), live-instrument grooves and studio production—a blend that puts him in league with other roots-conscious artists like Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar.

Deepak Verbera, the third LP by Austin’s Spencer Stephenson aka BOTANY, bends the beat-driven path carved by the composer’s first two records into meterless cosmic territory, juxtaposing free jazz arrhythmia with cathedral-filling harmony, ringing off the temple walls with soaring grandeur. The billowing textures that loomed behind his previous output break unabashedly into the foreground, shedding the beats that once stenciled them in. What arises in the absence of discernible rhythm is a psych-inflected scrapbook of atmospheres with tremendous sonic and emotional breadth. Deepak is a Hindi word meaning “lamp” or “source of light”, and Verbera is a Latin word meaning “lash” or “scourge”. This pairing of words articulates the exact dynamic at play here, as brightness intensifies only to dim into darkness, the album vacillates from heavenly luminosity to earthly severity, soothing and searing in patient turns. In essence Deepak Verbera is a soundscape record created through methods usually found in hip-hop; vinyl samples, looped vocal phrases, pulsing bass, and warm synths all shimmer with kosmische-indebted splendor, like Popol Vuh with MPCs and a stack of secondhand records. “Whose Ghost” opens the album in absolute upheaval, challenging the listener to endure an Albert Ayler-style clamor of argumentative drums and brass. Those who weather the storm are soon consoled by the library-music-inspired “Has Appeared” which cleanses the palate for the ascendant, “Ory (Joyous Toil)”. Its incense laden sister song “Burning From the Edges Inward” plays like a mini-album unto itself, seamlessly shifting moods with each passage as rolling waves of acoustic piano diffuse into smoked-out guitar drones and witch-like choirs. Side A ends with “Outer Verberum,” a guitar-heavy track which can only be described as “free-psych”. Tracks like “Gleaning Gleaming” are built out of micro-snippets of soul records that cascade over themselves to become something wholly incomparable to their source. The album’s back cover explains that this music is an attempt to recreate the lost audio recordings of a little-known mystic traveler, Horris E. Campos. During the 1970's and 80's, Campos claimed to have contacted entities made of light that transmitted information to him through vibratory tones, which he then emulated on tape using various overdubbed musical instruments. Whatever the details of Campos’ story, Deepak transcends this esoteric source to become an allegory of Stephenson's own ability to speak to the ether and bring the message back to us. Growing up outside Fort Worth, Texas (the birthplace of Ornette Coleman), Stephenson spun Botany out of a youth full of music handed down from a drum-n-bass-producing older brother and a guitarist father-- borrowing effects pedals and drum machines from both, before his first experiments with recording software at age fifteen. A drummer foremost, Stephenson went on to study Jazz drumming, piano, and guitar in college before dropping out, primarily focusing on sample-based music all the while. He concedes, “I spent most of my time there opening the top of the piano to pluck the strings with my fingers, or scraping vibraphone bells with a cello bow, really anything I could find to create interesting sounds that were kind of atypical to me at the time.” After a brief stint playing drums for an experimental act in Denton, Texas he released his debut EP on Western Vinyl in 2011. Stephenson spent the next three years constructing his tour de force full-length debut Lava Diviner (Truestory), which was followed by the digital single “Laughtrack,” a collaboration with Father John Misty. Struggling to find foothold in the Dallas/Fort Worth/Denton area, he moved to a city with a long legacy of heady music, Austin, home of the 13th Floor Elevators and ambient kings Stars of the Lid, both of which spiritually precede Stephenson’s music. Quickly becoming a vital member of Austin’s bubbling electronic scene, in 2015 he released his hallucinatory love letter to hip hop, Dimming Awe, the Light is Raw , an album that Pitchfork called "...alternatingly danceable and meditative psychedelia," and Gorilla vs. Bear called a "glorious synthesis of dusty hip-hop vibes and cosmic free jazz spirit." Reading these descriptions, it’s no surprise that his latest full-length Deepak Vebera is even more unhinged from any single format than any of his previous albums. Moving beyond the limited expectations of any single genre, Deepak Verbera presents a closed-eye cinema quilted together from sounds both found and created, with a masterfully blurred sense of which-is-which. We can only assume its creator delights in keeping you guessing.

When Lil Uzi Vert dropped *Lil Uzi Vert Vs. The World* in 2016, he was already one of rap’s most promising young talents. After he amassed a cult following of early adopters from a combination of early SoundCloud releases and his breakout 2015 tape *Luv Is Rage*, all eyes were on him when he dropped the follow-up six months later. At just nine tracks long, *Lil Uzi Vert Vs. The World* widened the breadth of his artistic whims to the point that it would catapult him leagues ahead of the SoundCloud-famous MCs he was initially grouped with. Here, he can be found singing over warped EDM sirens on “Hi Roller,” thumbing his nose at ex-girlfriends on “You Was Right,” and, maybe most strikingly, rapping over an accordion sample on “Ps and Qs.” It was around the time of *Lil Uzi Vert Vs. The World* that Uzi became the poster boy for that dismissive designation “mumble rap,” but you can hear just about everything he says on *Lil Uzi Vert vs The World*, the same way you can on all of the increasingly popular Uzi releases that follow it.