Passion of the Weiss' Best Albums of 2016

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.

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.

The Kendrick Lamar associate sprawls out on his poetic, contemplative second album. Making good on 2014’s enormously promising *Cilvia Demo*, *The Sun’s Tirade* echoes late-night ‘70s soul and its ‘90s counterparts (Erykah Badu, Outkast) rendered in booming, contemporary colors—a fitting backdrop for Rashad’s unsparing reflections on race (“BDay”), youth (“Free Lunch”), depression (“Dressed Like Rappers”), and ambition (“Park”).

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.”

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.

Every element of Kendrick Lamar’s *untitled unmastered.* tells you something about the Compton MC’s provocative, multi-layered genius. Take the contrast of the collection\'s ultra-generic title and its attention-grabbing, out-of-left-field release. Take the retro-futuristic, Funkadelic-inspired grooves that simmer under tracks like “untitled 02” and “untitled 06.” These are only the beginning of the album\'s hypnotic, nuanced nod to hip-hop’s deep roots and unstoppable political and expressive currency. Songs like “untitled 03” and “untitled 05”—with layered references, wild-eyed jazz solos, and cutting insight—continue Lamar\'s winning streak.

A taster’s menu of bite-sized songs and sonic vignettes, *Yes Lawd* is a feast for fans of R&B and hip-hop. Knxwledge’s unpredictable beats stoke the imaginative impulses of Anderson .Paak, whose raspy, melodic vocals on “Livvin” and “Suede” erase any division between rapping and singing. The collage of retro samples preserve an indie rap ethos, but with “Sidepiece” and “Link Up” the duo sculpts a new strain of sexy, smoked-out soul music.

YES LAWD! As temping as it may be to just let that exclamation suffice as your sole introduction to NxWorries, we should go a little deeper. The men at the heart of this LP — soul styler Anderson .Paak and loop beast Knxwledge — make an exceedingly clean pair, even as they deal almost entirely in the gritty: vocals that sound lived in for a couple of lifetimes; beats that kick up dust as they bump; and an 18-track set that plays like a mixtape merging skits, songs, and snippets into a package of fluid groove and rough-cut rap 'n' soul gems. You may have heard these two out in the world, on their own or sprinkling some of their musical gold dust on someone else's songs, but this is what happens when .Paak and Knx get home, lay back, light up, and let it go. If there's a Blaxploitation vibe to Yes Lawd!, that's just the depth of NxWorries' funk and strut showing. If there's gospel in the grits, that's the history of the cooks. Each grew up with religion. It was Knxwledge's job to tidy up the family church in Jersey as a kid, and when he was done, he got to play on the instruments. Better still, when those instruments went bad, he kept them. Similarly, he'd soon find sounds in his growing vinyl cache, and when he moved to Los Angeles in 2008 as a beat maker, his compositions ensured he'd be home at Stones Throw. His hypnotically dank 2015 LP Hud Dreems was the tip of an iceberg—75 Bandcamp collections, and counting. Paak was neck deep in those songs when Knxwledge reached out. The singer grew up in Oxnard drumming in his own family's church. His folks got locked up when he was a teen, and while he'd eke by on odd jobs (grocer, trimmer, personal assistant), he was homeless for a spell with a newborn son. But .Paak pushed forward, building a career via imaginative albums (2016's Malibu), and collaborations that always seem to make him the star, even when he's just there to sing the hook. So when they got together, of course it was going to flow. As Knx points out, one of the reasons it's taken so long to deliver Yes Lawd! is the fact that every time they get together, they make more music. Their come-up was strangely synchronicitous too. Knx landed on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly ("Momma") after the Aftermath MC heard one his beats on Knx's Bandcamp-culling Anthology release. And it was NxWorries' first single, the unforgettable "Suede," that got Dr. Dre's attention, earning .Paak's no fewer than eight appearances on the Compton album and, ultimately, a deal with Aftermath. The point is: neither is a stranger to the head-down hustle, even if each was born for the spotlight. Which feeds back into the theme of NxWorries' debut. On Yes Lawd!, .Paak – who calls the album “my best work” – plays theatrically brash version of himself who sings like a '70s superstar and talks shit like a stone cold player. But the performance is seeded with details from his life, which has seen a fair share of struggle and hard-won triumph. Meanwhile, Knx weaves a tapestry of sampled bits and live fragments—bass, brass and violin—that smooths everything over, reminding us that despite whatever struggle it took to get here... well, you already know the name: NxWorries.

Though she has recently collaborated with Anderson .Paak and Mayer Hawthorne, Kadhja Bonet’s exquisite, nearly classical voice recalls Sarah Vaughan more than anyone on the current pop scene. “Honeycomb” sounds like a classically trained singer flowing over an Al Green track, while “Fairweather Friend” and the beautifully cooing folk ballad “Nobody Other” shows her articulating each and every note even when she’s delivering in a whisper.

“The newly signed, genre defying Kadhja Bonet has announced the release of her debut The Visitor. On the album, Kadhja – pronounced “kod-ya” – invites us into a world not wholly our own, where past and future meet in a parallel, yet far lovelier, present. In anticipation of the release, Gorilla vs. Bear has shared the first track “Honeycomb”. Now available for streaming and free download, the song drifts listeners into a timeless, unplaceable realm of Kadhja’s own making. Fat Possum and Fresh Selects, two respected labels from different genres, have joined forces to bring us this transcendent debut – available in full on October 21. The Visitor opens with an awe you’d expect from the golden age of cinema. In its half-mythical atmosphere, “Earth Birth” offers keys and choirs science-fictionally echoing down from deep space. This overture fades and Kadhja’s voice velvetly emerges on “Honeycomb” with a timelessness sending listeners scrambling to find her nearest genre. After running through classical, jazz, soul, folk, and even psychedelia, you find it ultimately impossible to comfortably place her. This is all by Kadhja’s design. For if she were “folk” it would only be the folk of some future aeon, a thousand hears hence. If her rich instrumentation of strings and wind strikes us as a “classic,” it’s not because it harkens to any past era, but because Kadhja paints perennial imagery that could as much be now as then as any other time. Kadhja stays pretty mum – if not a little mysterious – about her own life story. She insists that her audience convene with her on imaginative and musical planes, instead of through byword associations with any scene or venue, be it in Los Angeles or on the beaches of Rio De Janeiro. What we do learn and should know about Kadhja is her early and formal training in classical music quarters, where she mastered violin and viola, learned flute and guitar, and gained the sharp compositional talents that frame every note and curve of The Visitor. All writing and arrangement— except for the Jaco Pastorius melody put to her words on Portrait of Tracy— is entirely of Kadhja’s creation. While calling in friends like Te’amir Yohannes Sweeney for drums, as well as Low Leaf, Peter Dyer, Randal Fisher, and Itai Shapira for harp, synth, flute, and bass, Bonet still plays a good half of the instruments herself, including guitar, violin, flute, and the backup vocals that fill up the skies of her music. Kadhja also produced The Visitor, though with much of its mixing and engineering handled by her assistant producer Itai Shapira, one of the few souls trusted behind the curtains of her musical process. The Visitor is an opus unpolluted by the mixed advice or overproductions that plague other albums. It plays through like one individual’s lucid dream in what is sometimes an all-too-dreamless musical landscape. Once we hear it, we recognize it as something that’s been harder and harder to find in the last thirty or forty years, though so badly missed. Kadhja has humbly learned from her predecessors while following their signs ever forward.”

‘…the Sound Of Crenshaw is in everything I touch, from Kendrick to Herbie. So with SOC I’m gonna bring it all back and give y’all the whole package: 100% the Sound of Crenshaw’ Velvet Portraits, a 2017 Grammy Nominee for Best R&B Album, is a wide ranging record with a common distinct style. With a core band of Terrace Martin on sax, Curly Martin on drums, Brandon Eugene Owens on bass, and Robert ‘Sput’ Searight on Keys, Velvet Portraits also features appearances from Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, Lalah Hathaway, Thundercat, Rose Gold, Tiffany Gouche, Marlon Williams and more. Recorded in Omaha Nebraska and Los Angeles, Velvet Portraits portrays the evolution of Martin as a player, producer, and a musician with a deep sense of history.

BADBADBADNOTGOOD is the talented young quartet of Matthew Tavares on keys, Chester Hansen on bass, Alex Sowinski on drums & Leland Whitty on saxophone. They formed and became inseparable friends at Humber College's Music Performance program in 2011 and have been on a critically acclaimed, rule bending musical journey ever since. BBNG took the music world by storm with their 2014 LP, III, a brash yet refined record of angular jazz improvisations, lush ballads, kraut rock, & futuristic hip-hop tinged rhythms which led to a couple years of touring the world & collaborating with some of the best and brightest artists around the globe The boys are back with the new album IV, their most impressive and highly anticipated project yet. IV continues their forward thinking progression, sounding something like a jam session in space between Can, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters, Weather Report, Arthur Russell & MF DOOM. With tracks like "Time Moves Slow" featuring haunting vocals from Sam Herring of Future Islands, the syncopated groove of "Lavender," a collaboration with Montreal based producer Kaytranada, the rumbling fusion build of "Confessions Pt. II" featuring Colin Stetson on the bass sax, "Love" which is highlighted with smokey left field raps from Mick Jenkins & the epic chords of "Speaking Gently," IV is an exploration in post-genre virtuosity. Out Summer 2016 on Innovative Leisure Records, BBNG prove yet again that the possibilities & discovery in their musical quest are infinite.

The Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates has never been much for jokes. Earnest, unsparing, and intensely personal, his full-length major-label is a downcast trip through tales of the grind (“La Familia”) romantic woes (“Pride”), and the trials of balancing the two (“2 Phones”). He delivers it all with enough charm and hope to keep things from getting too dark or gritty. “Man in the mirror you way outta order,” he raps on “The Truth”—fitting words for an artist who named his album (and his daughter, for that matter) after an Arabic word meaning \"to improve.\"

The first sound on Nicolas Jaar’s new record Sirens is a flag whipping in a gale. It’s the sort of sound you don’t realize you know until you hear it. But it’s unmistakable. And pregnant with meaning: nation, memory, conquest—but also frailty, a delicate thing buffeted by mercurial winds. The second sound is breaking glass. Nicholas Jaar has been busy. Since 2015, he’s released Nymphs, a series of four EPs, and Pomegranates, an alternate soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's 1969 film The Colour of Pomegranates. If Nymphs and Pomegranates represent two sides of the coin of Jaar’s work—club and experimental ambient respectively—Sirens, he says, is“the coin itself”: the terrain, the constraints, the material conditions from which the others emerge. Sirens is animated by an ambivalence at the heart of American music: that, in some fundamental sense, the history of American popular culture is a history of theft. The six lush tracks move seamlessly from rock to reggaetón to doo-wop, each exhibiting Jaar’s signature sensitivity to restraint and exuberance, disjuncture and groove, comfort and disquiet. Foregrounded throughout is the question of what these forms—artifacts of empire and its resistance both—can do for us today. Jaar, whose parents lived under dictatorship in Chile and whose grandparents are Palestinian, ascribes to Víctor Jara’s philosophy that you’re making political music whether you want to or not. The injustices of the past weigh heavily on the living, structuring the possibilities of the present. As Jaar sings, “we’re all waiting for the old thoughts to die.” For now, they’re our thoughts too. Jaar composed and recorded all the music on Sirens himself, with one exception: a sample of the Andean folk song “Lagrimas”—tears—which appears, almost unadorned, in the middle of “No,” the fourth track on Siren. “No” recalls the Chilean national plebiscite of 1988, when artists and activists organized millions of Chileans to vote “no”to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The song is a meditation on the seeming futility of protest against systems that structure our very reality. Over a loping reggaetón beat, Jaar laments, “ya dijimos no, pero el Si está en todo.”We already said no, but the Yes is everywhere. The songs on Sirens are fiercely critical, but they are generous too, even loving. “I made these songs to play for my friends, for people going to see music,” Jaar says. The place he wants to be is liminal: between the precious sense of freedom that only music can provide, and the reality that there’s no escape; between “knowing that we’re trying to get away and knowing that we can’t. That maybe,” he says, “we shouldn’t.” After the glass shatters, a rush of sound, fluttering pianos and synth mingle with the shards. The shimmering music billows and quiets. There is calm. Then the glass shatters again.

KAYTRANADA\'s debut LP is a guest-packed club night of vintage house, hip-hop, and soul. The Montreal producer brings a rich old-school feel to all of these tracks, but it’s his vocalists that put them over the edge. AlunaGeorge drops a sizzling topline over a swervy beat on “TOGETHER,” Syd brings bedroom vibes to the bassline-driven house tune “YOU’RE THE ONE,” and Anderson .Paak is mysterious and laidback on the hazy soundscape “GLOWED UP.” And when Karriem Riggins and River Tiber assist on the boom-bap atmospheres of “BUS RIDE,\" they simply cement the deal.

Inspired, exploratory, and bewitchingly funky—a hot jazz debut.

Rugged Atlanta rap gets a new dynamic duo on a murky, minimal EP that brings out the best in its precocious players. For producer Metro Boomin—in-demand architect of Drake and Future’s irrepressible “Jumpman”—it’s a chance to darken his palette with foreboding bells (“No Heart”) and muffled 808s (“Feel It”). And then there’s 21 Savage: dabbling with playful, raspy boasts (“Mad High”) while never losing the hard-edged authenticity of a true trap king.

When the four members of Preoccupations wrote and recorded their new record, they were in a state of near total instability. Years-long relationships ended; they left homes behind. Frontman Matt Flegel, guitarist Danny Christiansen, multi-instrumentalist Scott Munro and drummer Mike Wallace all moved to different cities. They resolved to change their band name, but hadn’t settled on a new one. And their road-tested, honed approach to songwriting was basically thrown out the window. This time, they walked into the studio with the gas gauge near empty, buoyed by one another while the rest of their lives were virtually unrecognizable and rootless. There was no central theme or idea to guide the band’s collective cliff jump. As a result, ‘Preoccupations’ bears the visceral, personal sound of holding onto some steadiness in the midst of changing everything. Flegel is quick to point out how little mystery is in the titles of these songs: Anxiety, Monotony, Degraded, Stimulation, Fever.  “Monotony is a dead end job; Anxiety is changing as a band,” he says. “Memory is watching someone lose their mind; Fever is comforting someone. It’s all drawing from very specific things.” These things — bigger ones like breakups, smaller ones like simply trying to calm someone down —  are ultimately the things that explode our brains, that keep us up at night. And so where their previous album ‘Viet Cong’ was built in some ways on the abstract cycles of creation and destruction, ‘Preoccupations’ explores how that sometimes-suffocating, sometimes-revelatory trap affects our lives. “We discarded a lot, reworking songs pretty ruthlessly,” Munro explains. “We ripped songs down to the studs, taking one piece we liked and building something new around it. It was pretty cannibalistic, I guess. Existing songs were killed and used to make new ones.” Sonically, it’s still blistering. But it’s a different kind of blister, less the the scorched earth of the band’s previous LP, more like a blood blister on a fingertip: something immediate and physical that you push and stare at. It’s yours.   Opener “Anxiety” articulates that tension: clattering sounds drift into focus, bouncing and echoing off one another until one bone-shattering moment when the full band strikes at once, moving from something untouchable to get to something deeply felt. “Monotony” moves at a narcoleptic pace by Preoccupations’ standards, but snaps to attention to make its point, that “this repetition’s killing you // it’s killing everyone.” “Stimulation” opens with a snarl and hurls itself forward at what feels like a million bpm, pausing for one mortal moment of relief before barreling onward. “Degraded” surprises, with something like a traditional structure and an almost pop-leaning melody to its chorus, twisting the bigness of Preoccupations’ music to sideswipe the clear, finite smallness of its subjects and events. And the 11-minute-long “Memory” is the album’s keystone, with an intimate narrative and a truly timeless post-punk center. There’s love piercing through the iciness here, fighting its way forward in each of the song’s distinct sections.  As always, there is something crystalline to what they’ve made, a blast of cold air in a burning hot place. All this adds up to ‘Preoccupations’: a singular, bracing collection that proves what’s punishing can also be soothing, everything can change without disrupting your compass. Your best year can be your worst year at the same time. Whatever sends you flying can also help you land.  

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.

Gloriously unpredictable electro-R&B that oozes confidence.

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.”

Indie-rap mainstay Aesop Rock has announced his new album, The Impossible Kid, dropping April 29th on Rhymesayers Entertainment, marking his first solo venture since 2012’s Skelethon. On the new album, Aesop continues finding new ways to improve on the skills that have made him one of the kings of indie hip-hop. His creative process now includes a newfound willingness to open up about his personal life, going deep on topics like depression, his sometimes rocky relationship with his family, and the turbulent handful of years that culminated in Aesop leaving his adopted home of San Francisco to live in a barn out in the woods, where he recorded the foundations of The Impossible Kid. There’s also moments of levity though, as Aesop taps into the funny side of his persona that he suppressed during the period where being taken as a serious lyricist was more of a priority. Like Skelethon, Aesop exercised complete creative control over every aspect of the album, from the production (which he handled himself, with instrumental help from Philly’s Grimace Federation) to conceptualizing the cover art by his friend Alex Pardee.

On the gritty, star-studded *Blank Face LP*, ScHoolboy Q is at his very best. Through 17 tracks of heavy-lidded gangsta rap, the incisive L.A. native joins forces with guests both legendary (E-40, Jadakiss, Tha Dogg Pound) and soon-to-be (Vince Staples, Anderson. Paak). “Robbin’ your kids too,” he says on “Groovy Tony / Eddie Kane,” a haunting double feature. “My heart a igloo.”

Radiohead’s ninth album is a haunting collection of shapeshifting rock, dystopian lullabies, and vast spectral beauty. Though you’ll hear echoes of their previous work—the remote churn of “Daydreaming,” the feverish ascent and spidery guitar of “Ful Stop,” Jonny Greenwood’s terrifying string flourishes—*A Moon Shaped Pool* is both familiar and wonderfully elusive, much like its unforgettable closer. A live favorite since the mid-‘90s, “True Love Waits” has been re-imagined in the studio as a weightless, piano-driven meditation that grows more exquisite as it gently floats away.

In the four years between Frank Ocean’s debut album, *channel ORANGE*, and his second, *Blonde*, he had revealed some of his private life—he published a Tumblr post about having been in love with a man—but still remained as mysterious and skeptical towards fame as ever, teasing new music sporadically and then disappearing like a wisp on the wind. Behind great innovation, however, is a massive amount of work, and so when *Blonde* was released one day after a 24-hour, streaming performance art piece (*Endless*) and alongside a limited-edition magazine entitled *Boys Don’t Cry*, one could forgive him for being slippery. *Endless* was a visual album that featured the mundane beauty of Ocean woodworking in a studio, soundtracked by abstract and meandering ambient music. *Blonde* built on those ideas and imbued them with a little more form, taking a left-field, often minimalist approach to his breezy harmonies and ever-present narrative lyricism. His confidence was crucial to the risk of creating a big multimedia project for a sophomore album, but it also extended to his songwriting—his voice surer of itself (“Solo”), his willingness to excavate his weird impulses more prominent (“Good Guy,” “Pretty Sweet,” among others). Though *Blonde* packs 17 tracks into one quick hour, it’s a sprawling palette of ideas, a testament to the intelligence of flying one’s own artistic freak flag and trusting that audiences will meet you where you’re at. In this case, fans were enthusiastic enough for *Blonde* to rack up No. 1s on charts around the world.

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.”

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.

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.

There are years that ask questions. There are years that give answers. “To every thing there is a season.” —Ecclesiastes 3:1 “What a time to be alive.” —Futuredrake It’s tempting to think that here, in early 2016 we, the Americans, are on the brink of something. Our first black president leaves office with neither a whimper nor a bang, as an orange-haired demagogue is railing away on our televisions. Marijuana is halfway legal, the U.S. Embassy in Havana is open and the police can’t stop killing black people. New York is the safest city in the country, Brooklyn is the most expensive and homelessness is through the roof. Antonin Scalia is dead. So is Amiri Baraka. A mass shooting probably just happened. Racial tensions are “higher than ever.” Oil is taking a beating. The Iraq War is lost, the Afghan War will never end and football players are retiring early, spooked. But that might just be vanity. Perhaps this is where America has always been, teetering above the abyss. The latest album from Backwoodz Studioz is no different. The label is excited to announce the April 15th, 2016 release of Save Yourself, the much-anticipated debut solo album from ELUCID. Born in Queens and raised in Long Island, longtime Brooklyn resident ELUCID is New York’s best-kept secret. He’s worked with some of indie hip-hop’s most celebrated artists: Open Mike Eagle, Tanya Morgan, J*Davey, Beans from Antipop, milo, billy woods, Busdriver, Small Professor and Rob Sonic, amongst others. He’s put out a few mixtapes and a couple collaborative projects—as part of Cult Favorite with A.M. Breakups, and Armand Hammer with billy woods—but never a solo album. Until now. Save Yourself was created between summer 2014 and fall 2015, in a proudly crumbling East New York brownstone. Equal parts exorcism and reckoning, Save Yourself crystallized during a tulmultous time in the artist’s life. “I had just ended a 7-and-a-half-year-long relationship, quit a job i hated, and moved to a new hood in three months time,” ELUCID explains. “I got a shit job that let me stay up all night. I lived simply. I stayed woke. Got woker. I lost mad weight. I went to weird shows by myself. I got a library card and sometimes I made simple loops with an old school hardware sampler that a friend was tossing in the trash. I chopped drums. I sampled free jazz, post punk and gospel. I made dubbed-out noise collages. I played my own synth lines. I met someone who played synth way better than me.” While a couple outside producers like Willie Green, Messiah Musik and A.M. Breakups, make memorable contributions, Save Yourself is primarily self-produced. And although this is ELUCID’s first time taking the production reins on an LP, he had quietly been working to this point for years. He engineered and co-produced much of Armand Hammer’s Furtive Movements EP (2014) and was the executive producer behind billy woods’ critically acclaimed LP Today, I Wrote Nothing (2015). “Save yourself is my most immediate and personal record to date. It's difficult to articulate but handling the bulk of production may have had something to do with that. I didn't really know what I was making. When the spirit moved, the raps poured out. I was talking about myself. My community. About where I came from and future possibilities,” ELUCID says. “At its core, Save Yourself is about rebirth—of both self and community. An examination. An assessment. A shedding. I was working through personal issues that spilled over into the music. Events regarding police brutality and shootings of unarmed black folk dominated news headlines in a way that I've never seen in my lifetime. Liberation was on my mind. I reaffirmed myself in the idea that I couldn't truly be free until we were all free.”

Zomby’s fourth album cements his place as one of techno’s most seductive doomsayers. Riffing on robotic soul (“Fly 2”), nightmarish video-game blips (“Yeti”), industrial churn and heavy-lidded trap (the Burial collaboration “Sweetz”), *Ultra* evokes both menace and calm—the sound of something lurking in an alley just around the corner.