NBHAP's Highlights of 2022

Alvvays never intended to take five years to finish their third album, the nervy joyride that is the compulsively lovable Blue Rev. In fact, the band began writing and cutting its first bits soon after releasing 2017’s Antisocialites, that stunning sophomore record that confirmed the Toronto quintet’s status atop a new generation of winning and whip-smart indie rock. Global lockdowns notwithstanding, circumstances both ordinary and entirely unpredictable stunted those sessions. Alvvays toured more than expected, a surefire interruption for a band that doesn’t write on the road. A watchful thief then broke into singer Molly Rankin’s apartment and swiped a recorder full of demos, one day before a basement flood nearly ruined all the band’s gear. They subsequently lost a rhythm section and, due to border closures, couldn’t rehearse for months with their masterful new one, drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell. At least the five-year wait was worthwhile: Blue Rev doesn’t simply reassert what’s always been great about Alvvays but instead reimagines it. They have, in part and sum, never been better. There are 14 songs on Blue Rev, making it not only the longest Alvvays album but also the most harmonically rich and lyrically provocative. There are newly aggressive moments here—the gleeful and snarling guitar solo at the heart of opener “Pharmacist,” or the explosive cacophony near the middle of “Many Mirrors.” And there are some purely beautiful spans, too—the church- organ fantasia of “Fourth Figure,” or the blue-skies bridge of “Belinda Says.” But the power and magic of Blue Rev stems from Alvvays’ ability to bridge ostensible binaries, to fuse elements that seem antithetical in single songs—cynicism and empathy, anger and play, clatter and melody, the soft and the steely. The luminous poser kiss-off of “Velveteen,” the lovelorn confusion of “Tile by Tile,” the panicked but somehow reassuring rush of “After the Earthquake”. The songs of Blue Rev thrive on immediacy and intricacy, so good on first listen that the subsequent spins where you hear all the details are an inevitability. This perfectly dovetailed sound stems from an unorthodox—and, for Alvvays, wholly surprising—recording process, unlike anything they’ve ever done. Alvvays are fans of fastidious demos, making maps of new tunes so complete they might as well have topographical contour lines. But in October 2021, when they arrived at a Los Angeles studio with fellow Canadian Shawn Everett, he urged them to forget the careful planning they’d done and just play the stuff, straight to tape. On the second day, they ripped through Blue Rev front-to-back twice, pausing only 15 seconds between songs and only 30 minutes between full album takes. And then, as Everett has done on recent albums by The War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves, he spent an obsessive amount of time alongside Alvvays filling in the cracks, roughing up the surfaces, and mixing the results. This hybridized approach allowed the band to harness each song’s absolute core, then grace it with texture and depth. Notice the way, for instance, that “Tom Verlaine” bursts into a jittery jangle; then marvel at the drums and drum machines ricocheting off one another, the harmonies that crisscross, and the stacks of guitar that rise between riff and hiss, subtle but essential layers that reveal themselves in time. Every element of Alvvays leveled up in the long interim between albums: Riley is a classic dynamo of a drummer, with the power of a rock deity and the finesse of a jazz pedigree. Their roommate, in-demand bassist Blackwell, finds the center of a song and entrenches it. Keyboardist Kerri MacLellan joined Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley to write more this time, reinforcing the band’s collective quest to break patterns heard on their first two albums. The results are beyond question: Blue Rev has more twists and surprises than Alvvays’ cumulative past, and the band seems to revel in these taken chances. This record is fun and often funny, from the hilarious reply-guy bash of “Very Online Guy” to the parodic grind of “Pomeranian Spinster.” Alvvays’ self-titled debut, released when much of the band was still in its early 20s, offered speculation about a distant future—marriage, professionalism, interplanetary citizenship. Antisocialites wrestled with the woes of the now, especially the anxieties of inching toward adulthood. Named for the sugary alcoholic beverage Rankin and MacLellan used to drink as teens on rural Cape Breton, Blue Rev looks both back at that country past and forward at an uncertain world, reckoning with what we lose whenever we make a choice about what we want to become. The spinster with her Pomeranians or Belinda with her babies? The kid fleeing Bristol by train or the loyalist stunned to see old friends return? “How do I gauge whether this is stasis or change?” Rankin sings during the first verse of the plangent and infectious “Easy on Your Own?” In that moment, she pulls the ties tight between past, present, and future to ask hard questions about who we’re going to become, and how. Sure, it arrives a few years later than expected, but the answer for Alvvays is actually simple: They’ve changed gradually, growing on Blue Rev into one of their generation’s most complete and riveting rock bands.

Wie entscheidet man eigentlich, im Laufe einer Karriere ein Album mit dem eigenen Bandnamen zu betiteln? Und warum ist dieses fünfte (offizielle) Studioalbum von DIE NERVEN dann auch noch ihr erklärt schwarzes Album? Weil es wie ein Monolith dastehen wird, in der Tradition der schwarzen Alben von Metallica, Jay-Z und Prince? Das wird die Zeit zeigen. Titel und Farbe markieren jedoch ganz unmissverständlich: "DIE NERVEN" von DIE NERVEN ist für Kevin Kuhn (Schlagzeug), Julian Knoth (Bass und Gesang) und Max Rieger (Gitarre und Gesang), die 2010 mit einer Explosion in die Stuttgarter Noise-Szene sprengten und sich in den letzten zwölf Jahren zu einer der profiliertesten Rockbands des Landes entwickelt haben, ihr bisher wichtigstes Album. Ein schwarzes Album also, selbstbetitelt. Kein Wolf ziert das Cover, nein: ein schwarzer Schäferhund vor schwarzem Grund. "DIE NERVEN" ist auch ein Stimmungsbild. Und in der konsequenten Wortschatzverkleinerung ihrer Texte, die vage genug bleiben, um in der chaotischen Komplexität der Gegenwart Impulse zu setzen, ist die Musik auch Sprachrohr für ein Unbehagen geworden, mit dem man sich in jedem ihrer Stücke identifizieren kann: Das Album "DIE NERVEN", das sind zehn in Form und Inhalt vollendete Gegenwartsbetrachtungen mit Schaum vor dem Mund, die schließlich als vereinfachte Erzählungen mit Edding auf ein weißes T-Shirt geschrieben werden, so dass die Farbe durchdrückt und sich auf der zwischen Wut und Angst aufgebracht pumpenden Brust verewigt: "EUROPA" – wie alle Texte 2018/19 entstanden und somit irritierend visionär – offenbart DIE NERVEN als Teil einer behüteten Generation, die zu ahnen beginnt, dass ihr noch ganz andere Zeiten bevorstehen, und dass das erlebte Leid der Anderen untrennbar mit den eigenen Privilegien zusammenhängt. Der lang erspielte Kontrastreichtum der Band hat auf "DIE NERVEN" zu einer Form gefunden, die sich nicht mehr länger aus einem Spannungsverhältnis nährt. Hier manifestiert sich vielmehr das Resultat einer der fruchtbarsten Symbiosen der jüngeren Rockgeschichte. "DIE NERVEN" ist eine zehn Songs dauernde, schweißtreibende Feier der kreativen Kraft von Rieger, Knoth und Kuhn. Sie haben zu einem neuen Dialog gefunden. Wirkten im bisherigen Songwriting äußerst ausgeprägte Egos manchmal auch gegeneinander, forderten Rieger, Knoth und Kuhn nun geradezu vom jeweils anderen ein, sich in seiner extremen Eigenart einzubringen. Es herrscht keine Konkurrenz mehr. Aus drei Egos ist ein gemeinsames Ego geworden. Es heißt: "DIE NERVEN". So steht das Ungeschliffene, das in seiner gewaltigen Brachialität noch immer von Punk getrieben wird, dem Pop nicht entgegen, sondern verbindet sich mit ihm: Die gegensätzlichen Pole bei DIE NERVEN haben zu einer eigenen Form der Verschmelzung gefunden. Sie spielen auf einem neuen Niveau zusammen, dienen nur noch dem Song. Bisweilen muss man sogar genau hinhören, wer da nun gerade singt. "DIE NERVEN" von DIE NERVEN sind zehn Stücke, in den Berliner Candy Bomber-Studios irgendwo zwischen den zwinkernden Referenzpunkten Rammstein, Godspeed You! Black Emperor und, ja: (Max Rieger:) “Wagner!“ live eingespielt. Ohne Klick, gemeinsam, gleichzeitig: DIE NERVEN, Gefühl und Organismus. Die Gesangsaufnahmen besorgte Moses Schneider, und Max Rieger, mittlerweile einer der gefragtesten Produzenten des Landes, mischte sich vier Monate die Finger wund, weil er meanwhile einen Anspruch an dieses Monster entwickelt hatte, den er niemand anders mehr zumuten konnte.

Yannis Philippakis doesn’t think that Foals will make another album like *Life Is Yours*. After the sprawling rock explorations of 2019’s two-part *Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost*, their seventh album is a product of the environment in which it was made: a series of grueling lockdowns, dreaming of lost nights and nocturnal roaming, yearning to be back out on the road. It was a period in which everyone was desperate to get out of the house, but only Foals could’ve turned it into the most buoyant and danceable record of their career. “I can’t see us making a record that’s as dancy and up and energized and simple as this again,” singer and guitarist Philippakis tells Apple Music. It’s not like the London-based trio ever seems inclined to repeat a trick anyway. “Everyone always says, ‘How come the sound changes so much from album to album?’” says guitarist and keyboardist Jimmy Smith. “Well, you go through three years, musically and emotionally, and you’re not the same person.” What marks Foals out as one of the most important guitar bands of their generation is how they always sound like themselves, wherever they take their sound: whether it’s the mix of melancholy and defiance in Philippakis’ voice; the wiry, sleek guitar lines; the swarming synths; or drummer Jack Bevan’s rhythmic propulsion. The anthemic grooves of *Life Is Yours* were made for dancing to, but delve deeper and you’ll find Philippakis in a contemplative mood. “It’s a positive and fun record made for communal moments, but the title is quite solemn advice,” he says. “It’s meant as an antidote to depression. On every record, there’s been a balancing act that goes on between the levels of melancholy.” Here, they get the blend just right. In many ways, *Life Is Yours* feels like a compilation of Foals’ best bits. Philippakis and Smith take us through it, track by track. **“Life Is Yours”** Yannis Philippakis: “Whatever is happening in the verse between the vocal and the keyboard part and the beat and the bassline felt like the DNA for the album, the blueprint. It was the bit I liked most. The song came right out of \[next track\] ‘Wake Me Up’—we were jamming it and then Jimmy went into that keyboard bit. The next day I said, ‘Let’s split it.’ Lyrically, the song is set along that coast between Seattle and Vancouver, where my partner is from, conversations that happen in private in car journeys along the Pacific Northwest.” **“Wake Me Up”** Jimmy Smith: “There’s always a bit of choice about which song to put out first, but this had the most immediate impact.” YP: “And it’s the most bombastic. We just felt that the message and the immediacy of the grooves and the boldness of the parts would be a wake-up call. It would demarcate the new era of the band and also be the kind of song that should come out after a pandemic. It felt like it was energizing and defiant, it wasn’t introspective. Normally we throw curveballs out first, we put something out that shocks people. I guess maybe it did in some way, but it also felt like it sets you up for what’s to come.” **“2am”** YP: “This started off more melancholic. I messed around with a keyboard during the depths of lockdown, late at night. I was missing the pub, missing the potential that a nightlife allows—the potential to make mistakes, the potential for wrong decisions, for wild decisions, for waking up in a very different place to the one you intended when you went out, the type of infinite choice that can occur if you do a night out well. It got moved into a bigger and poppier direction when we started recording with \[producer\] Dan Carey.” JS: “There was a smoky late-night version, which we were all down for. But as soon as we experienced the Dan Carey version, it made the smoky version seem unbelievably slow and dull.” **“2001”** YP: “This is one that really benefited from working on it with \[producer\] A. K. Paul. It’s almost a collaboration with A. K. Paul; he plays the bass on it and he wrote the chorus bass. It reminds me of The Rapture and ‘House of Jealous Lovers.’ Lyrically, I was thinking about the frustration that people were feeling in lockdown. It made me think about being a teenager and feeling frustrated when you are cooped up and you don’t have autonomy—and how the cure for that is to run away to the seaside and have a wild weekend. It’s partly looking back at when we moved to Brighton \[in 2001\], the excitement of leaving Oxford and us living in a house together for the first time. We moved there and it was a really exciting time for the band and an exciting time for the music scene.” **“(summer sky)”** YP: “This was essentially a jam with A. K. Paul. We’d wanted to work with him for a long time. We come from two different worlds, so it was a really fruitful collaboration.” JS: “Pretty much everything he did was amazing. He had to edit out a lot of his own stuff, but it was pretty special. We just sat on a sofa, watching it happen, watching this man use his amazing brain to make the song better.” **“Flutter”** YP: “I was looping something on the guitar and the vocal part came very quickly. We were playing it over and over, and Jack sat back on a beat, and the riff came out of that same jam. Everything was there in the first few hours, basically. We didn’t work on it more as we wanted it to be simple, like, ‘Let this be a slice of the moment.’” **“Looking High”** JS: “This is one of the ones that I started. It was an experiment of very, very simple guitar playing and pop structuring, that two-chord pattern back and forth, and I had a drum machine playing a Wu-Tang beat which I copied from ‘Protect Ya Neck.’ It all slotted in really quickly, and then Yannis added the other parts of the song, the more reflective, dancier bits in the drop-downs. When I listen, it feels like that moment at a show when you lose yourself a little bit and then it snaps back into the verse and it’s completely different. I really like the to-ing and fro-ing; there’s a cleanliness to it.” **“Under the Radar”** JS: “It came straight out of the practice room when we were writing. There’s a few on the record that were written on the spot, like nothing brought in from the past.” YP: “Probably 30 percent of our songs come from jams, but we always jam our ideas. No one ever comes in with a complete song, as in, ‘That’s it, learn the song.’ We tried to keep this really simple. It felt quite different for us. I think it feels New Wave-y, like something we haven’t written before.” **“Crest of the Wave”** YP: “This goes back to a recording session we did in about 2012, with Jono Ma from Jagwar Ma. It was this syrupy, sweaty jam known as ‘Isaac,’ and we parked it because I couldn’t find the vocals, but this time I did. Something happened between the bassline changing and the vocals, and we just cracked it. To me, it feels like a companion to \[2010 single\] ‘Miami’ because it’s set in Saint Lucia. It’s got longing and a bittersweet feeling of rejection in it; it’s somewhere idyllic, but you’re melancholic. There’s high humidity and there’s tears.” **“The Sound”** YP: “We don’t normally do that uplifting, classic penultimate track. This is us at our most electronic and clubby. It’s inspired by Caribou, that slightly dusty and dirty vibe; there’s crackle and a slight wildness to it. I like the fact that there’s a slightly West African-style guitar part that contrasts with the clubbiness of the synths. I had a lot of fun with the vocals on that. I wanted to layer up lots of shards of lyrics and approach it in a slightly Karl Hyde-ian way.” **“Wild Green”** JS: “The album finishes in such an organic way, it almost falls apart. I love how it just drops straight into the studio ambience. It seemed to happen quite naturally.” YP: “It’s about life cycles, the cycle of spring, expectation of spring and regeneration. In the first half of the song, there’s lyrics about wanting to fold oneself in the corner of the day and wait for the spring to reemerge. Then there’s a shift. Once you get to the second half of the song, spring is passed and now it’s actually the wind-down and it’s departure and it’s death. It’s not in a dark way, but it’s passing through states. It’s about the passing of time. That’s why it felt like a good album closer, because it’s basically saying, in a veiled way, farewell to the listener.”

London duo Jockstrap first gained attention in 2018 with an almost unthinkable fusion of orchestral ’60s pop and avant-club music. On their debut album, conservatory grads Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye continue to push against convention while expanding the outline of their sui generis sound. Skye’s electronic production is less audacious this time out; *I Love You Jennifer B* is more of a head listen than a body trip. There are a few notable exceptions: The opener, “Neon,” explodes acoustic strumming into industrial-strength orchestral prog; “Concrete Over Water” violently crossfades between a pensive melody reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and zigzagging synths recalling Hudson Mohawke’s trap-rave. But most of the album trains its focus on guitars, strings, and Ellery’s crystalline coo, leaving all the more opportunities to marvel at her unusual lyricism. Her writing returns again and again to questions of desire and regret, and while it can frequently be cryptic, she’s not immune to wide-screen sincerity: In “Greatest Hits,” when she sings, “I believe in dreams,” you believe her—never mind that she’s soon free-associating images of Madonna and Marie Antoinette. And on “Debra,” when she sings, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go” over a cascading beat that sounds like Kate Bush beamed back from the 22nd century, all of Jockstrap’s occasional impishness is rendered moot. At just 24 years old, these two are making some of the most grown-up pop music around.

When Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye make music as Jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy. Meeting in 2016 when they shared the same com- position class while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ellery and Skye founded Jockstrap as a creative outlet for their rapidly-developing tastes. While Ellery had moved from Cornwall to the English capital to study jazz violin, Skye arrived from Leicester to study music production. Both were delving deep into the varied worlds of mainstream pop, EDM and post-dubstep (made by the likes of James Blake and Skrillex), as well as classical composition, ‘50s jazz and ‘60s folk singer-songwriters. The influence of the club and a dancier focus, which was hinted at on previous releases, now scorches through their new material like wildfire. Take the thumping, distorted breakbeats of ‘50/50’ –inspired by the murky quality of YouTube mp3 rips –as well as the sparkling synth eruptions of ‘Concrete Over Water’, as early evidence of where Jockstrap are heading next. Jockstrap’s discography is restless and inventive, traversing everything from liberating dancefloor techno to off-kilter electro pop, trip-hop and confessional song writing; an omnivorous sonic palette that takes on a cohesive maturity far beyond their ages of only 24 years old. They have cemented themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures.

Silky-smooth vocals and alt-R&B jams ignite an assured debut LP.

Harlequin is the new album by the Viennese artist and singer-songwriter Sofie Royer. The album showcases the musician’s passion for her native city’s opera and ballet traditions as well as the baroque lyricism of cabaret, medieval performances and the court jester. Blended with nostalgia for early aughts reality television and American mall punk subculture, Harlequin presents a montage of peculiar characters, vernacular settings and mysterious chronologies that are as theatrical as they are musical. After the release of her debut album Cult Survivor in 2020, Sofie started to experiment with her own identity through the act of dress-up. From Harlequin’s artwork through to Sofie’s live performances, she adopts the visual aesthetic and gestures of the court jester, clown and cabaret artist.

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