Gorilla vs. Bear's Albums of 2018

Domino are honoured to introduce Devotion; the hugely anticipated debut album from one of London's most exciting underground talents, Tirzah. Arriving on the back of a lauded run of releases on Greco Roman, Devotion shines a brilliant new light on Tirzah's unique experimental pop, exquisitely soulful voice and potent contemporary lyricism.

It\'s not enough that rising Spanish star ROSALÍA ingeniously blends traditional flamenco with contemporary pop on her second album—she also gets a narrative based on medieval literature in there, too. Inspired by *Flamenca*, a 13th century book about a woman imprisoned by her jealous fiancé thought to be the first modern novel, each of the 11 songs on this collaboration with producer El Guincho (Pablo Díaz-Reixa) serves as a “chapter” of a running story about a doomed relationship. ROSALÍA went through the album track by track with Beats 1. **MALAMENTE (Cap. 1 Augurio)** “It’s a premonition—this moment when you know in the beginning of the story how it’s gonna end, but even then you go and do it. I was trying to compose a song everybody could understand, doing experimentation with electronic sound but also connected with my roots and flamenco. It’s combining these worlds.” **QUE NO SALGA LA LUNA (Cap. 2 Boda)** “This song is about commitment and that feeling you get when you get in a relationship with somebody. Sometimes you lose something of yourself in the process. It\'s the dark side of getting engaged—it\'s something beautiful but at the same time, there\'s another part, right?” **PIENSO EN TU MIRÁ (Cap. 3 Celos)** “It’s ‘Thinking About Your Gaze.’ This was a song that started from a sample of Bulgarian voices. I did the bassline on an island in Spain, El Hierro. I was so inspired in this place.” **DE AQUÍ NO SALES (Cap. 4. Disputa)** “It’s the most aggressive part of the record...and one of the most risky. I wanted to use the motorcycles in this song with this crazy rhythm that combines \[chapters\] three and four. Khalid told me he liked the song—I would love to do music with him.” **RENIEGO (Cap. 5. Lamento)** “It’s a traditional melody from flamenco. \[Spanish singer\] Camarón was singing with an orchestra; he created the arrangement. I think it sounds very magical.” **PRESO (Cap. 6 Clausura)** “You can hear Rossy de Palma’s voice—she’s an iconic actress from Spain. You can feel the experience in her voice. It’s heavy, you know?” **BAGDAD (Cap. 7 Liturgia)** “I was very inspired by an erotic club in Barcelona called Bagdad and by ‘Cry Me a River’ by Justin Timberlake. He heard the song and said, ‘Yes, you can use the melody’; I was so excited because he never approves anything.” **DI MI NOMBRE (Cap. 8 Éxtasis)** “It’s a very flamenco vibe, very traditional, \[but\] the structure is very pop. It’s about this connection between two people; the sexual moment. The lyrics—\'Say my name, say my name\'—I\'m such a big fan of Destiny\'s Child. \[It\'s\] paying tribute to all these artists I heard when I was a teenager. ” **NANA (Cap. 9 Concepción)** “This is a traditional flamenco melody used when you have a child you’re trying to make fall asleep. I was very inspired by what James Blake does—the space and the production he uses in his songs. I feel like in 50 years, people in universities will study him.” **MALDICIÓN (Cap. 10 Cordura)** “We’d been working with Pablo on the production and composition for a year and a half, and I didn’t like it enough. Then: This Arthur Russell sample—I think it’s perfect in this moment.” **A NINGÚN HOMBRE (Cap. 11 Poder)** “The last song of the record is the first I composed. Pablo was very excited by it and we saw that we sound good together, so I was like, ‘Let’s do the entire record together.’ It’s about the power of a woman.”

With every record, Damon McMahon aka Amen Dunes has transformed, and Freedom is the project’s boldest leap yet. The first LP,  D.I.A., was a gnarled underground classic, recorded and played completely by McMahon in a trailer in upstate New York over the course of a month and left as is. The fourth and most recent LP Love, a record that enlisted Godspeed! You Black Emperor as both producers and backing band (along with an additional motley crew including  Elias Bender  Rønnenfelt of Iceage and Colin Stetson), featured songs confidently far removed from the damaged drug pop of Amen Dunes’ trailer-park origins.  Love  took two years to make. Freedom took three. The first iteration of the album was recorded in 2016 following a year of writing in Lisbon and NYC, but it was scrapped completely. Uncertain how to move forward, McMahon brought in a powerful set of collaborators and old friends, and began anew. Along with his core band members, including  Parker Kindred  (Antony & The Johnsons, Jeff Buckley) on drums, came  Chris Coady  (Beach House) as producer and  Delicate Steve  on guitars. This is the first Amen Dunes record that looks back to the electronic influences of McMahon’s youth with the aid of revered underground musician Panoram from Rome. McMahon discovered Panoram’s music in a shop in London and became enamored. Following this the two became friends and here Panoram finds his place as a significant, if subtle, contributor to the record. The bulk of the songs were recorded at the famed  Electric Lady Studios  in NYC (home of Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, D’Angelo), and finished at the similarly legendary  Sunset Sound in L.A., where McMahon,  Nick Zinner, and session bass player extraordinaire  Gus Seyffert  (Beck, Bedouine) fleshed out the recordings. On the surface, Freedom  is a reflection on growing up, childhood friends who ended up in prison or worse, male identity, McMahon’s father, and his mother, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the beginning of recording. The characters that populate the musical world of  Freedom  are a colourful mix of reality and fantasy: father and mother, Amen Dunes, teenage glue addicts and Parisian drug dealers, ghosts above the plains, fallen surf heroes, vampires, thugs from Naples and thugs from Houston, the emperor of Rome, Jews, Jesus, Tashtego, Perseus, even McMahon himself. Each character portrait is a representation of McMahon, of masculinity, and of his past. Yet, if anything, these 11 songs are a relinquishing of all of them through exposition; a gradual reorientation of being away from the acquired definitions of self we all cling to and towards something closer to what's stated in the  Agnes Martin quote that opens the record, “I don’t have any ideas myself; I have a vacant mind” and in the swirling, pitched down utterances of “That's all not me” that close it. The themes are darker than on previous Amen Dunes albums, but it’s a darkness sublimated through grooves. The music, as a response or even a solution to the darkness, is tough and joyous, rhythmic and danceable. The combination of a powerhouse rhythm section, Delicate Steve’s guitar prowess filtered through Amen Dunes heft, and Panoram’s electronic production background, makes for a special and unique NYC street record. It’s a sound never heard before on an Amen Dunes record, but one that was always asking to emerge. Eleven songs span a range of emotions, from contraction to release and back again. ‘Blue Rose’ and ‘Calling Paul the Suffering’ are pure, ecstatic dance songs. ‘Skipping School’ and ‘Miki Dora’ are incantations of a mythical heroic maleness and its illusions. ‘Freedom’ and ‘Believe’ offer a street tough’s future-gospel exhalation, and the funk-grime grit of ‘L.A.’ closes the album, projecting a musical hint of things to come.

If Robyn has found peace or happiness, you wouldn’t necessarily know it by listening to her first album in eight years. Opener “Missing U” sets the mood, with wistful lines about stopped clocks and empty spaces left behind. Yet it’s somehow one of *Honey*’s more upbeat tracks, with an insistent rhythm and glittery arpeggios that recall the brightest moments of 2010’s *Body Talk*. At its best, Robyn’s music has always straddled the line between club-ready dance and melancholy pop, and her strongest singles to date, “Dancing On My Own” and “Be Mine!,” strike this balance perfectly. But never before have we heard the kind of emotional intensity that possesses *Honey*; in the years leading up to it, Robyn suffered through the 2014 death of longtime collaborator Christian Falk and a breakup with her partner Max Vitali (though they’ve since reunited). A few one-off projects aside, she mostly withdrew from music and public life, so *Honey* is a comeback in more ways than one. Produced with a handful of collaborators, like Kindness’ Adam Bainbridge and Metronomy’s Joseph Mount, the album mostly abandons the disco of \"Missing U,\" opting to pair Robyn’s darker lyrics with more understated, house-influenced textures. She gives in to nostalgia on “Because It’s in the Music” (“They wrote a song about us...Even though it kills me, I still play it anyway”) and gets existential on “Human Being” (“Don’t shut me out, you know we’re the same kind, a dying race”). But for all the urgent and relatable rawness, *Honey* is not all doom and gloom: By the time closer “Ever Again” rolls around, she’s on the upswing, and there’s a glimmer of a possible happy ending. “I swear I’m never gonna be brokenhearted ever again,” she sings, as if to convince herself. “I’m only gonna sing about love ever again.”

Earl Sweatshirt’s second album, 2015’s *I Don’t Like S\*\*t, I Don’t Go Outside*, is a masterwork of efficiency. At just 10 songs over 30 minutes, not a word is wasted nor a note held a second too long. Brevity, specifically, is a concept Sweatshirt cites in interviews as a guiding principle in his art, one he leans into even further on *I Don’t Like S\*\*t*’s follow-up, *Some Rap Songs*. At an even brisker 15 tracks in 25 minutes, the project is mineral-rich, Sweatshirt losing himself in a relentless pursuit of clever and complex bars. His rhymes are marvels of non sequitur, rarely tracking a theme or singular direction for more than a few lines, all delivered over subdued and unrelenting soul loops. The former Odd Future standout handles the bulk of production as well, though *Some Rap Songs* also includes contributions from frequent collaborators Denmark Vessey and Gio Escobar (of NYC art-jazz duo Standing on the Corner), among others. Vocal guests include two of Sweatshirt’s oldest inspirations—his mother, UCLA professor Cheryl Harris, and late father, South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile.

It’s no coincidence that the cover photo for Ariana Grande’s fourth album is her first not in black and white. She told Beats 1 host Ebro Darden that *Sweetener* is different because, “It’s the first time I feel more present than ever, and I see colors more.” Her new outlook comes just over a year since the devastating attack at her 2017 Manchester concert that killed 22 people and injured over 500, leaving Grande “permanently affected.” She responded with *Sweetener*, a gorgeous, pastel album about love, happiness, strength, and womanhood. She’s deeply in love, evidenced on the tropical “blazed,” and “R.E.M,” with harmonies described as “rainbow clouds” by Pharrell, who produced over half the album. She exits a toxic relationship in “better off”; “God is a woman” is a feminine, sex-positive anthem that she told Darden is her “favourite thing I’ll probably ever do”. The album closer “get well soon” is a self-care message she wrote immediately following a panic attack. “It\'s about being there for each other and helping each other through scary times and anxiety,” she told Darden. “I wanted to give people a hug, musically.” Sonically, *Sweetener* brings some surprises—sparse rhythms and what she calls “dreamier” harmonies replace many of the huge beats and choruses she’s famous for. She said the album is “more like me as a person. And what I’ve been craving to do.”

No Fool Like An Old Fool is the sophomore LP from Austin via Alabama musician, Caroline Sallee, aka Caroline Says. Moving beyond the surf-folk foundations of her debut, on No Fool... Sallee loosens her earthly tether, allowing her songs to float to ever higher altitudes on clouds of loops, immaculate melodies, and hypnotic harmonies, as she sings about aging, the daily grind, and hometown stymie. Moving to Austin in 2013 gave her a new perspective on her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, which informed the overall vibe of the album. “I think leaving my fairly small hometown and then going back to visit it inspired the feeling I went for on this album. I observed that so many people I knew were content doing basically nothing. Or that they were scared to try to do anything or leave town, like they felt stuck there.” The first few notes of the Daniel Rossen-esque opener “First Song” dutifully establish the surreal and slightly tragic tone of longing maintained throughout the album. The curiously upturning melodies ride out on a rich ambient texture before “Sweet Home Alabama” cuts the fog with a crackling 60's soul loop that's charming and catchy enough to induce a cathartic laugh from the listener. The brightness fades with the frosty and propulsive “A Good Thief Steals Clean,” which features lyrics inspired by the 1971 film Panic in Needle Park, and the idea of being in love with a heroin addict. “I tend to write from the perspectives of characters in dark situations, even though my songs may sound bright,” Sallee notes of her alluring juxtaposition of sunny production and grim lyrics. She employs this dynamic again on “Rip Off,” a frenetically percussive song with lyrics inspired by an NPR story about a young Iraqi man who was killed in an ISIS bombing just before moving to NYC to become a professional dancer. Inspired by Terrence Malick's Badlands and Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska," the song “Black Hole" features multi-voice harmonies sung from the perspective of 50's spree killer Charles Starkweather. Finding time to record while working three jobs was no easy task, and her living situation didn't make it any easier. Sallee explains "I lived in a disgusting mildewed basement apartment that was like living in a gross cave. My landlords were a crazy old couple that lived above me, and it was like living inside of a drum. I could hear their footsteps, and their dog’s footsteps, and a lot of the time it just sounded like they were throwing things on their floor. It was so hard to find a perfectly quiet time to record. I recorded all my loud stuff (amped guitar, drums) during the day, and had to do quieter stuff like vocals late at night." The hurdles she navigated to record naturally led to ad hoc recording techniques, and endless sonic experimentation, often leading to her use of the computer as an instrument. She remarks “I did a lot of recording in a state of exhaustion from working so much. I was so worn down that these songs were able to just come through.” No Fool Like An Old Fool is a fine soundtrack for this kind of liminal state, honest in its weariness, glad to be done with the day, carrying itself into tomorrow with a bleary-eyed sense of wonder and hope for the future. A tireless worker, and a wellspring of creativity, whatever Caroline Says, we will be listening.

Aviary is an epic journey through what Julia Holter describes as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world.” Out on October 26th via Domino, it’s the Los Angeles composer’s most breathtakingly expansive album yet, full of startling turns and dazzling instrumental arrangements. The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2015 record, Have You in My Wilderness, it takes as its starting point a line from a 2009 short story by writer Etel Adnan: "I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds." It’s a scenario that sounds straight out of a horror movie, but it’s also a pretty good metaphor for life in 2018, with its endless onslaught of political scandals, freakish natural disasters, and voices shouting their desires and resentments into the void Aviary, executive produced by Cole MGN and produced by Holter and Kenny Gilmore, combines Holter's slyly theatrical vocals and Blade Runner-inspired synth work with an enveloping palette of strings and percussion that reveals itself, and the boundless scope of her vision, over the course of fifteen songs. Holter was joined by Corey Fogel (percussion), Devin Hoff (bass), Dina Maccabee (violin, viola, vocals), Sarah Belle Reid (trumpet), Andrew Tholl (violin), and Tashi Wada (synth, bagpipes).

Cindy Lee is the brainchild of singer / guitarist Patrick Flegel. While some may know Flegel from their time spent in Canadian experimental indie band Women, Cindy Lee has spent the past four years crafting songs that push and pull in opposing directions – from tales of tragedy laced with haywire distortion to moments of breathtaking beauty. Model Express continues this haunting interplay with devastating effect.

There had always been a burning sense of resistance baked into SOPHIE’s experimental soundscapes, which simultaneously honored and rejected the tropes and rules of mainstream pop. But the Scottish producer’s visionary debut album is an exhilarating escalation—a work that not only exploded expectations around song structure and form but conventional notions of gender, identity, and self, as well. *Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides* is sweeping and defiant, pinballing from glitchy rave cuts (“Ponyboy”) to ethereal pop elegies (“It’s Okay to Cry”) to ambient passages that feel practically spiritual (“Pretending”). Each left turn is an invitation to slip further into SOPHIE’S neon universe. In the hands of any other artist, such dizzying digital distortions would appear to warp reality. Here, though, they clarify it. Every synthetic vocal, slithering synth, zigzagging beat, and gleefully warped sample brings us closer to SOPHIE\'S truth. Some of the project’s headiest questions—those about body, being, and soul—seem to rest on a distant horizon the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to yet. “Immaterial,” a fizzing, maximalist hat-tip to Madonna, moves the goalposts even further, proposing a version of consciousness in which the material world is, in fact, only the beginning.

Even before Playboi Carti’s breakout single, “Magnolia,” early fans were expressing an insatiable demand for new music from the rapper. *Die Lit* comes a year after the self-titled album that brought us that hit, with 19 tracks to make up for the wait. Having joked openly about being called a “mumble rapper,” Carti aggressively leans into the distinction here, thickening his Atlanta accent and even pitching up his delivery on songs like the spacey “Fell in Luv” and “FlatBed Freestyle,” where his couplets devolve into rhythmic yet indecipherable vocals. On the whole, *Die Lit* is a collection of earworms built on minimal and bass-heavy production from Pi\'erre Bourne, assisted occasionally by contributors like Lil Uzi Vert, Skepta, and Nicki Minaj.

Almost 2 years after the success of the album THE TONY ALLEN EXPERIMENTS and a few months after the release of the 7inch AMORE, Nu Guinea return to the scene with a new LP published by their newborn label NG RECORDS. After touring the world looking for sounds suitable for their vibrations, NU GUINEA decided to go back to square one, Napoli, where Massimo Di Lena and Lucio Aquilina were born and raised. They watched their city from a distance reconstructing its energy from their studio in Berlin, calibrating the synths on the meridian of Vesuvius, the volcano that has always protected and threatened Napoli. NUOVA NAPOLI is the result of a long musical research that has become a historical investigation on the sound that shaped Napoli during the ‘70s and ‘80s, starting from the contamination of genres (disco, jazz-funk, African rhythms) which ended up in Nu Guinea’s DNA. In this album the synthesizers fill the spaces between the past and the future, tightening in a single body acoustic instruments, electronics and voices in Neapolitan dialect. It is the first time that the duo has worked with such a large group of musicians, some of whom are exponents of the contemporary Neapolitan scene. WARNING: We recommend listening to Nuova Napoli while walking in the alleys of Napoli’s historic center, around wet clothes hanging and street vendors on tiny three-wheelers.

Swapping producer Chris Coady for Spaceman 3\'s Pete \"Sonic Boom\" Kember, Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand fully embrace their bliss on *7*, their haziest, dreamiest album yet. They move seamlessly from meditative to trippy, adopting swelling, stately, Spector-swilling-martinis-with-Eno arrangements on \"Last Ride\" and entering a reverb-drenched citadel of synths on \"L\'Inconnue.” Seeming more unabashedly themselves than ever, this is the sound of Beach House doubling down on the aqueous dream-pop perfection that made them indie heroes in the first place.

7 is our 7th full-length record. At its release, we will have been a band for over 13 years. We have now written and released a total of 77 songs together. Last year, we released an album of b-sides and rarities. It felt like a good step for us. It helped us clean the creative closet, put the past to bed, and start anew. Throughout the process of recording 7, our goal was rebirth and rejuvenation. We wanted to rethink old methods and shed some self-imposed limitations. In the past, we often limited our writing to parts that we could perform live. On 7, we decided to follow whatever came naturally. As a result, there are some songs with no guitar, and some without keyboard. There are songs with layers and production that we could never recreate live, and that is exciting to us. Basically, we let our creative moods, instead of instrumentation, dictate the album’s feel. In the past, the economics of recording have dictated that we write for a year, go to the studio, and record the entire record as quickly as possible. We have always hated this because by the time the recording happens, a certain excitement about older songs has often been lost. This time, we built a "home" studio, and began all of the songs there. Whenever we had a group of 3-4 songs that we were excited about, we would go to a “proper” recording studio and finish recording them there. This way, the amount of time between the original idea and the finished song was pretty short (of the album’s 11 songs, 8 were finished at Carriage House in Stamford, CT and 2 at Palmetto Studio in Los Angeles). 7 didn’t have a producer in the traditional sense. We much preferred this, as it felt like the ideas drove the creativity, not any one person’s process. James Barone, who became our live drummer in 2016, played on the entire record. His tastes and the trust we have in him really helped us keep rhythm at the center of a lot of these songs. We also worked with Sonic Boom (Peter Kember). Peter became a great force on this record, in the shedding of conventions and in helping to keep the songs alive, fresh and protected from the destructive forces of recording studio over-production/over-perfection. The societal insanity of 2016-17 was also deeply influential, as it must be for most artists these days. Looking back, there is quite a bit of chaos happening in these songs, and a pervasive dark field that we had little control over. The discussions surrounding women’s issues were a constant source of inspiration and questioning. The energy, lyrics and moods of much of this record grew from ruminations on the roles, pressures and conditions that our society places on women, past and present. The twisted double edge of glamour, with its perils and perfect moments, was an endless source (see “L’Inconnue,” “Drunk in LA,” “Woo,” “Girl Of The Year,” “Last Ride”). In a more general sense, we are interested by the human mind's (and nature’s) tendency to create forces equal and opposite to those present. Thematically, this record often deals with the beauty that arises in dealing with darkness; the empathy and love that grows from collective trauma; the place one reaches when they accept rather than deny (see “Dark Spring,” “Pay No Mind,” “Lemon Glow,” “Dive,” “Black Car,” “Lose Your Smile”). The title, 7, itself is simply a number that represents our seventh record. We hoped its simplicity would encourage people to look inside. No title using words that we could find felt like an appropriate summation of the album. The number 7 does represent some interesting connections in numerology. 1 and 7 have always shared a common look, so 7 feels like the perfect step in the sequence to act as a restart or “semi-first.” Most early religions also had a fascination with 7 as being the highest level of spirituality, as in "Seventh Heaven.” At our best creative moments, we felt we were channeling some kind of heavy truth, and we sincerely hope the listeners will feel that. Much Love, Beach House

'Portrait With Firewood' is Felix’s most personal body of work to date, the product of an emotionally turbulent 2017, capturing the range of feelings and emotions he went through in vivid sonic beauty. By putting aside his previous sampleadelic approach he returned to his childhood instrument of the piano as a core starting point. "It's a confessional record… I realise that's a word mostly used to describe singer/songwriter rather than (largely) instrumental music, but I think it's apt. There's a sort of emotional candour.” Felix is classically trained in the jazz tradition and influenced by the likes of Keith Jarrett and Alice Coltrane. Previously he was shy at the prospect of fans hearing his piano playing, but determined to overcome this fear he has brought forward a new honesty to his work. "Finding the confidence to work with my own piano improvisations was a big part of that. Once I had figured out how I was going to make the music, it actually fell in to place rather quickly.” Felix's goal was to create something "overwhelmingly beautiful", but also to capture the "inherent melancholy in beauty in all it's impermanance and fragility". He took inspiration and solace from performance artist Marina Abramovic. "She has an incredibly deep understanding of the human condition, and expresses it in such a poetic way. Many of the themes of her work had particular resonance for me over the course of 2017 as I worked on the album. I was moved to tears on several occasions watching her videos or reading about her work.” Felix collaborated with cellist Zosia Jagodzinska and vocalist Lola Empire. Jagodzinska recorded several takes of improvisations over the track 'Creature' which Felix would chop, pitch and layer into new melodic lines and seed throughout the album.  Felix's new approach expanded to experimentation with field recording, contact micing his beloved piano and purchasing his first hardware synth, all in service of enriching the personal, humane quality of the record. "Music helps me to communicate the sorts of things that I find almost impossible to put in to words. I think the process for this album has helped me create a more rich and emotionally complex body of work than I have managed before.”

( open.spotify.com/artist/45GkpefZW8F5td5gkU8f29 + everywhere else! ) Get a tape @ Gnar Tapes and/or Plastic Response ! links below ~~~ gnartapes.com/shop/pynkie-neoteny/ plasticresponserecords.bandcamp.com/album/neoteny <3 First album YaY ! "'Neoteny' is 'remaining young'....Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature." (Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker) <3333333333