The retro-futuristic duo (Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin) hails from LA by way of the uncanny Valley, churning out trippy DIY videos made from random VHS footage and mailing weird brochures to fans like a secretive cult. But on debut full-length *Mercurial World*, their polished synth-pop demands to be taken seriously, though their playful spirit abides—emulating the effects of a VOCALOID with their mouths, kicking off the album with a track called “The End.” Tenenbaum and Lewin blend the nostalgic with the contemporary, combining Y2K-era bubblegum, the disco grooves of mid-aughts indie-dance crossovers, and the space-age sheen of hyperpop for a 45-minute sugar rush; don’t miss “Chaeri,” 2021’s best pop song about being a bad friend.
www.mercurialworld.com
Written after the birth of her first child (and just before the arrival of her second), *Colourgrade* finds London’s Tirzah Mastin taking a more experimental approach, wrapping moments of unadorned beauty in sheets of distortion, noise, woozy synthesizers, and listing guitars. It’s decidedly lo-fi—not the sort of album that actively invites you in. And yet, like its predecessor—her acclaimed 2018 debut LP, *Devotion*—this is naturally intimate music, alt-R&B that offers brief meditations on the coming together of both bodies (“Tectonic”) and collaborators (“Hive Mind,” which, in addition to seal-like background effects, features vocals from touring bandmate and South London artist Coby Sey). Working again alongside longtime friend and collaborator Mica Levi, Mastin sounds free here, at ease even as she obfuscates. On “Beating,” as she sings to her partner over a skittering drum machine and a layer of gaseous hiss, she stops for a moment to clear her throat, as if in quiet conversation late at night. “You got me/I got you,” she sings. “We made life/It’s beating.”
Back in the early aughts, when most Melbourne bands were making party-rock anthems, HTRK (that’s “hate rock”) were the cool kids in the corner, with icy post-punk jams that might soundtrack an evening at the *Twin Peaks* Roadhouse. The band’s seen its share of loss in the years since, including the death of founding member Sean Stewart in 2010. But the duo wears its sorrows elegantly on *Rhinestones*, an album that refracts its gothic country inspirations through a blurred prism. “Kiss Kiss and Rhinestones” is Western folk at its most windswept and dreamy, whispered poetry over reverb-drowned acoustic guitar, like a fever dream set in the Wild West.
Listening to Liz Harris’ music as Grouper, the word that comes to mind is “psychedelic.” Not in the cartoonish sense—if anything, the Astoria, Oregon-based artist feels like a monastic antidote to spectacle of almost any kind—but in the subtle way it distorts space and time. She can sound like a whisper whose words you can’t quite make out (“Pale Interior”) and like a primal call from a distant hillside (“Followed the ocean”). And even when you can understand what she’s saying, it doesn’t sound like she meant to be heard (“The way her hair falls”). The paradox is one of closeness and remove, of the intimacy of singer-songwriters and the neutral, almost oracular quality of great ambient music. That the tracks on *Shade*, her 12th LP, were culled from a 15-year period is fitting not just because it evokes Harris’ machine consistency (she found her creative truth and she’s sticking to it), but because of how the staticky, white-noise quality of her recordings makes you aware of the hum of the fridge and the hiss of the breeze: With Grouper, it’s always right now.
There’s a liquid, surreal feeling that runs through *Pray for Haiti*, a sense of touching solid ground only to leave it just as fast. Between the bars of Newark rapper Mach-Hommy\'s dusty, fragmented beats (many courtesy of the production regulars of Griselda Records), he glimpses thousand-dollar brunches (“Au Revoir”), bloodshed (“Folie Á Deux”), and the ghosts of his ancestors (“Kriminel”) with spectral detachment—not uncaring so much as stoic, the oracle at the outskirts who moves silently through a crowd. He likes it grimy (“Magnum Band,” “Makrel Jaxon”) and isn’t above materialism or punchlines (“Watch out, I ain’t pulling no punches/So real I make Meghan Markle hop out and get the Dutches”), but is, above all, a spiritualist, driven by history (like a lot of his albums, this one is peppered with Haitian Creole), feel, and a quiet ability to turn street rap into meditation. “It’s crazy what y’all can do with some old Polo and Ebonics,” he raps on “The 26th Letter”—a joke because he knows it’s not that simple, and a flex because, for him, it is.
Across a decade and a half of aliases and side-projects, Dean Blunt’s been known as an enigma. With a penchant for trolling and a disdain for genre boundaries, the Londoner is hard to pin down—from the masked post-punk of his Hype Williams duo to the weirdo noise-rap of Babyfather. But the sequel to 2014’s *BLACK METAL*, released under his own name, is mostly just…pretty. A pared-down collection of downcast avant-pop, *BLACK METAL 2* blurs acoustic strums, MIDI strings, and Blunt’s deadpan half-raps, telling fascinatingly unresolved stories—a gun on the beach, a mother without a son. These are lush, delicate songs that still feel profoundly unhappy: “Daddy’s broke/What a joke/Future’s bleak,” he sing-songs on folk downer “NIL BY MOUTH.” Even at its most accessible, Blunt’s work remains a bit of a mystery.
Seven years after her 2014 debut, the mysterious New York producer returns with a wink and a four-pack of bright, bubbly club bangers that go just as hard on headphones when alone in the bedroom. Like her peers in PC Music, there’s a good deal of nostalgia embedded in Doss’ futurism, and for scenes that haven’t always gotten their electronic-music-snob dues (such as the night-drive anthem “Puppy,” which nods to early-’00s progressive house like deadmau5 and Kaskade). From the introverted tech-house of “Look” to the wallowy shoegaze of “Strawberry,” there’s a sense of longing that ties it all together—an ache that only a solo dance-floor session can heal.
Since releasing her debut album, 2013’s *Pull My Hair Back*, Jessy Lanza has developed a singular style that draws on vintage freestyle, lo-fi synth-pop, and cutting-edge electronic music, rounded out by her breathy, alluring vocals. After three albums spent focusing her vision to a fine point, she zooms way out on her *DJ-Kicks* mix, placing her own songs—like the fluttering trap of “Seven 55,” featuring Loraine James—in a wider club-music context. There’s no missing Lanza’s fingerprints, in part because she occasionally picks up the mic to sing over the mix, even when the records aren’t hers. But the set casts a far wider stylistic net than her albums do, taking in shuddering acid house (DJ Spookie’s “Twilite”), sparkling Afropop (Jim C. Nedd’s “Maleka”), minimal techno (Secret Werewolf’s “Yage”), and more. The first half tends to ride a rolling, house-oriented groove; GRAIN’s “Untitled B2” (a 2002 cult classic from an alter ego of Magnetic Man member Artwork) tips things in a bassier direction, kicking off a stretch of UK funky, garage, electro, and footwork, all of it seamlessly mixed with both grace and character—no easy feat when corralling a range of styles this wide. She wraps things up with a stroke of pure genius: The Raining Heart’s “Raining Heart,” a 1986 slice of synthy slow-jam R&B—straight out of Germany, of all places—that sounds like she’s rescued it from the cassette deck of an ’80s Impala. It’s a reminder that when Lanza’s at the wheel, the vibe remains soulful, no matter what.
It’s with this genre-bending approach that Jessy Lanza presents her entry for the DJ-Kicks series – a sprawling, club-indebted odyssey that draws you in closer and closer with each listen. Recorded this summer, the mix is an incisive snapshot of her emotional landscape during the past 18 months. In 2020, with nothing but a van, a few personal belongings and her musical gear, Lanza and her partner relocated from New York City to the Bay Area to ride out the pandemic. A change of scenery, buoyed by the slower pace of their new home, gave her a fresh perspective during a worldwide screeching halt. Surrounded by Silicon Valley and the cult of wellness, Lanza drew inspiration from the synthetic grips of uncanny valley to create a striking cover that speaks to our curious times. “The artwork is inspired by seeing beauty product ads on the side of a bus. I thought it would be fun to play with the visual language of wellness. It’s funny to me how easily people accept the world of wellness products as a remedy or solution. The emphasis is on the temporal. I see this obsession with the temporal as an on- ramp to detach and disassociate from reality, from oneself and also from the people around us. It’s interesting to observe how this plays out in modern relationships as well.” Lanza has made a name for herself. “Making DJ-Kicks personal to me was important, like putting my vocals overtop and doing all the FX processing,” she says. “Getting my voice in there helped make the mix feel finished.” Jessy Lanza’s DJ-Kicks mix also arrives as a divine stroke of timing. As the world slowly starts to re-open, it’s a portal into the ecstatic energy of the dancefloor; an emblem of genuine healing – both personal and communal – that transports listeners to a state of pure euphoria. “I made this mix to connect the dots,” she beams. “The songs I included are ones that people respond to everywhere regardless of where in the world I’m DJing. I made this in pursuit of the bleary 4 AM feeling; the moment when you hear sweet soul-burner vocals with drum patterns that won’t let you go home. There always has to be melody – whether it’s vocal or rhythmic, there has to be something catchy, something joyful and ultimately something that will connect with the listener.”
“I like the simple stuff,” murmurs Loraine James on “Simple Stuff,” a standout track on the London producer’s second album for Hyperdub. Perhaps her idea of simplicity is different from others’, because *Reflection* (like its predecessor *For You and I*) is a virtuosic display of dazzlingly complex drum programming and deeply nuanced emotional expression. James’ music sits where club styles like drum ’n’ bass and UK funky meet more idiosyncratic strains of IDM; her beats snap and lurch, wrapping grime- and drill-inspired drums in ethereal synths and glitchy bursts of white noise. Recorded in 2020, while the club world was paused, *Reflection* captures much of the anxiety and melancholy of that strange, stressful year. “It feels like the walls are caving in,” she whispers on the contemplative title track, an unexpected ambient oasis amid a landscape of craggy, desiccated beats. Despite the frequently overcast mood, however, guest turns on songs like “Black Ting” show a belief in the possibility of change. “The seeds we sow bear beautiful fruit,” raps Iceboy Violet on the Black Lives Matter-influenced closing track, “We’re Building Something New.” Tender and abrasive in equal measure, *Reflection* is that rarest of things: a work of experimental music that really does make another world feel possible.
Madvillain superfans will no doubt recall the Four Tet 2005 remix EP stuffed with inventive versions of cuts from the now-certified classic rap album *Madvillainy*. Coming a decade and a half later, *Sound Ancestors* sees Kieran Hebden link once again with iconic hip-hop producer Madlib, this time for a set of all-new material, the product of a years-long and largely remote collaboration process. With source material arranged, edited, and recontextualized by the UK-born artist, the album represents a truly unique shared vision, exemplified by the reggae-tinged boom-bap of “Theme De Crabtree” and the neo-soul-infused clatter of “Dirtknock.” Such genre blends turn these 16 tracks into an excitingly twisty journey through both men’s seemingly boundless creativity, leading to the lithe jazz-hop of “Road of the Lonely Ones” and the rugged B-boy business of “Riddim Chant.”
There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*—particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne—but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and onetime nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. But across *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. In other words, a prototypical rapper. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion—and eventual victory—in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented *IGOR*. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST* with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)—boom-bap revival (“CORSO,” “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mold (“SIR BAUDELAIRE,” “HOT WIND BLOWS”), and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). And then there’s “RUNITUP,” which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD,” which has the energy of *Trap or Die*-era Jeezy. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, though, is a chance to see if they can recognize rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.
Named by her musician parents after Duke Ellington’s jazz standard “Mood Indigo,” Sydney’s Indigo Sparke was born to be a performer. There’s no trace of Ellington’s influence in her work, however, as Sparke’s debut album owes more to the spellbinding folk of Joni Mitchell and Laura Veirs. Although her roots are firmly Australian, there’s a palpable Americana influence that permeates *Echo*, from the languid opener, “Colourblind,” to the Bob Dylan-inspired strumming of “Golden Age.” Sparke has been releasing music since 2016, beginning with her *Nightbloom* EP, which led to a support slot on Big Thief’s Australian tour and, here, production work from Adrianne Lenker. *Echo* is a deeply personal record, with Sparke’s crystalline vocals occasionally barely above a whisper. She tells tales of road trips, love lost, and new experiences while reflecting on what it means to be a queer woman in the 21st century. The absence of percussion gives center stage to Sparke’s melodies and lyrics, particularly on the final track, “Everything Everything”, a rumination on life and death that brings universal sentiments to an intimate level.
In August 2019, New York singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins thought she had the rest of her year fully mapped out, starting with a tour of North America as a guitarist in David Berman’s newly launched project Purple Mountains. But when Berman took his own life that month, everything changed. “All of a sudden, I was just unmoored and in shock,” she tells Apple Music. “I really only spent four days with David. But those four days really knocked me off my feet.” For the next few months, she wrote as she reflected, obsessively collecting ideas and lyrics, as well as recordings of conversations with friends and strangers—cab drivers and art museum security guards among them. The result is her sophomore LP, a set of iridescent folk rock that came together almost entirely over the course of one week, with multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman in his Brooklyn studio. “I was trying to articulate this feeling of getting comfortable with chaos,” she says. “And learning how to be comfortable with the idea that things are going to fall apart and they\'re going to come back together. I had shed a lot of skin very quickly.” Here, Jenkins tells us the story of each song on the album. **Michelangelo** “I think sequencing the record was an interesting challenge because, to me, the songs feel really different from one another. ‘Michelangelo’ is the only one that I came in with that was written—I had a melody that I wanted to use and I thought, ‘Okay, Josh, let’s make this into a little rock song and take the guitar solo in the middle.’ That was the first song we recorded, so it was just our way of getting into the groove of recording, with what sounds like a familiar version of what I\'ve done in the past.” **New Bikini** “I was worried when I was writing it that it sounded too starry-eyed and a little bit naive, saying, ‘The water cures everything.’ I think it was this tension between that advice—from a lot of people with good intentions—and me being like, ‘Well, it\'s not going to bring this person back from the dead and it\'s not going to change my DNA and it\'s not going to make this person better.’” **Hard Drive** “I just love talking to people, to strangers. The heart of the song is people talking about the nature of things, but often, what they\'re doing is actually talking about themselves and expressing something about themselves. I think that every person that I meet has wisdom to give and it\'s just a matter of turning that key with people. Because when you turn it and you open that door, you can be given so much more than you ever expected. Really listening, being more of a journalist in my own just day-to-day life—rather than trying to influence my surroundings, just letting them hit me.” **Crosshairs** “You could look at this as a kind of role-playing song, which isn\'t explicitly sexual, but that\'s definitely one aspect of it. It’s the idea that when you\'re assuming a different role within yourself, it actually can open up chambers within you that are otherwise not seeing the light of day. I was looking at the parts of me that are more masculine, the parts of me that are explicitly feminine, and seeing where everything is in between, while also trying to do the same for someone else in my life.” **Ambiguous Norway** “The song is titled after one of David\'s cartoons, a drawing of a house with a little pinwheel on the top. It\'s about that moment where I was experiencing this grief of David passing away, where I was really saturated in it. I threw myself onto this island in Norway—Lyngør—thinking I could sort of leave that behind to a certain extent, and just realizing that it really didn\'t matter what corner of the planet I found myself on, I was still interacting with the impression of David\'s death and finding that there was all of these coincidences everywhere I went. I felt like I was in this wide-eyed part of the grieving process where it becomes almost psychedelic, like I was seeing meaning in everything and not able at all to just put it into words because it was too big and too expansive.” **Hailey** “It\'s challenging to write a platonic love song—it doesn\'t have all the ingredients of heartbreak or lust or drama that I think a lot of those songs have. It\'s much more simple than that. I just wanted to celebrate her and also celebrate someone who\'s alive now, who\'s making me feel motivated to keep going when things get tough, and to have confidence in myself, because that\'s a really beautiful thing and it\'s rare to behold. I think a lot of the record is mourning, and this was kind of the opposite.” **The Ramble** “I made these binaural recordings as I walked around and birdwatched in the morning, in April \[2020\], when it was pretty much empty. I was a stone\'s throw away from all the hospitals that were cropping up in Central Park, while simultaneously watching nature flourish in this incredible way. I recorded a guitar part and then I sent that to all of my friends around the country and said, ‘Just write something, send it back to me. Don\'t spend a lot of time on it.’ I wanted to capture the feeling that things change, but it’s nature\'s course to find its way through. Just to go out with my binoculars and be in nature and observe birds is my way of really dissolving and letting go of a lot of my fears and anxieties—and I wanted to give that to other people.”
That motherhood is transformative is an understatement. For those who have the experience, it can change who they are and how they perceive the world, with fresh eyes, an open heart, and a devotion so deep it feels like being unmade. Thus, it\'s fitting that Cleo Sol’s *Mother* begins with a monument to maternal love—its abundant patience and grace for which she has a new understanding. “The train never stopped, never had time to unpack your trauma,” the British singer-songwriter croons gently on the opening track, “Don’t Let Me Fall.” “Keep fighting the world, that’s how you get love, mama.” Likewise, “Heart Full of Love” is an ode to her own child (who adorns the cover) that strives to portray both the power of that singular feeling and the gratitude that’s leveled her in its presence: “Thank you for sending me an angel straight from heaven, when my hope was gone, you made me strong...Thank you for being amazing, teaching me to hold on.” The rest of *Mother* unfurls like a letter addressed to a little one who, once removed from the safety of the womb, may come to know cruelty more often than mercy. On the piano-laden centerpiece “We Need You,” she pours into whoever may hear it a reminder of their worth, while a choir summons the divine. “We need your heart, we need your soul,” they sing, “we need your strength through this cold world, we need your voice, speak your truth.” Similar affirmations pepper the album, as Cleo imbues the lyrics with a tenderness that lands like a hug; her voice itself is so elegant and serene these songs, despite the lushness of the instrumentation, nearly resemble lullabies. It’s easy to be given to pessimism, but what she offers here is a balm, brimming with the kind of compassionate optimism that only new life can bring.
When Low started out in the early ’90s, you could’ve mistaken their slowness for lethargy, when in reality it was a mark of almost supernatural intensity. Like 2018’s *Double Negative*, *Hey What* explores new extremes in their sound, mixing Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker\'s naked harmonies with blocks of noise and distortion that hover in drumless space—tracks such as “Days Like These” and “More” sound more like 18th-century choral music than 21st-century indie rock. Their faith—they’ve been practicing Mormons most of their lives—has never been so evident, not in content so much as purity of conviction: Nearly 30 years after forming, they continue to chase the horizon with a fearlessness that could make anyone a believer.
Where Lana Del Rey’s previous 2021 album *Chemtrails Over the Country Club* made no reference to the global pandemic in which it was partly created, *Blue Banisters* is steeped in it. From bringing up Black Lives Matter protests in “Text Book” to facing the loneliness of isolation during quarantine in “Black Bathing Suit,” there’s no shortage of references to the year that kept us all inside. “And if this is the end, I want a boyfriend/Someone to eat ice cream with and watch television,” she sings. When not singing about girls in summer dresses dancing with their masks off, Lana ruminates on her family. She mentions her sister Chuck in the title track and regales with tales about her parents in “Wildflower Wildfire.”
The Pakistani musician began writing her second album, and then her younger brother died. And so, instead of the dark, edgy dance record she’d intended on making, Aftab turned to the Urdu ghazals she grew up with—an ancient form of lyric poetry centered around loss and longing. On *Vulture Prince*, Aftab makes the art form her own, trading the traditional percussion-heavy instrumentation for heavenly string arrangements (harp, violin, upright bass); she even ventures into reggae territory on “Last Night,” a slinky rendition of a Rumi poem. She translates another poem, this time by Mirza Ghalib, on “Diya Hai,” the last song she performed for her brother Maher, and a haunting expression of all-encompassing grief.
