Passion of the Weiss's Best Albums of 2022

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.

It can be unwise to play favorites in the music biz, but maybe nobody told that to The Alchemist. “I really made an album with my favorite rapper and it drops tonight at midnight,” the producer tweeted ahead of the release of his and Roc Marciano’s *The Elephant Man’s Bones*. “I’m tripping.” Hempstead, Long Island-originating Marciano is no stranger to peer adulation, however. His time as a recording artist dates at least as far back as a stint with Busta Rhymes’ late-’90s Flipmode Squad collective, but the name he has today was made from the string of gritty and impressive solo projects he released across the 2010s. You do need a specific kind of ear to fully appreciate the MC. Roc Marciano raps in the kind of street code that reveals itself to be genius to those who can grasp its nuances. Take this couplet from *The Elephant Man’s Bones*’ “Daddy Kane”: “I been getting off that soft white long before shorties was rocking Off-White/Water-colored ice, I call it Walter White/Walk with me like a dog might, I got 44 bulldogs, you ain’t got a dog in the fight.” The bars themselves are less complex than they are both slimy and razor-sharp. These are raps to be heeded and, maybe more importantly, enjoyed at a safe distance. Unless, of course, you’re The Alchemist—or album guests Action Bronson, Boldy James, Ice-T, or Knowledge the Pirate—in which case you can’t wait to add some of your own ingredients to Marciano’s cauldron.

Long before he made his name at jazz’s vanguard, editing together off-the-cuff live sessions like a hip-hop beatmaker, drummer, and producer, Makaya McCraven set out to create a comprehensive record of his collaborative process—a testament to the intuition of improvisation. Its sessions recorded over the course of seven years, between multiple projects and releases, *In These Times* is McCraven’s sixth album as a bandleader, and it showcases the virtuosic instrumentalists he has spent his career building an almost telepathic bond with—bassist Junius Paul and guitarist Jeff Parker among them. It’s also the warmest and most enveloping album he’s produced to date. Frenetic beat-splicing might underpin the polyrhythms of tracks such as “Seventh String” and “This Place That Place,” but the soft melodies played by Parker and harpist Brandee Younger always permeate—a reminder of the clarity of the moment of creation, rather than its post-production manipulation. Indeed, *In These Times* is a reflection of the past decade of McCraven’s instrumental expertise, but it’s also a powerful reminder of the freedom inherent in this time, in the here and now of making music together, when the artist lets go and surrounds us with the ineffable beauty of collective creation.

In These Times is the new album by Chicago-based percussionist, composer, producer, and pillar of our label family, Makaya McCraven. Although this album is “new," the truth it’s something that's been in process for a very long time, since shortly after he released his International Anthem debut In The Moment in 2015. Dedicated followers may note he’s had 6 other releases in the meantime (including 2018’s widely-popular Universal Beings and 2020’s We’re New Again, his rework of Gil Scott-Heron’s final album for XL Recordings); but none of which have been as definitive an expression of his artistic ethos as In These Times. This is the album McCraven’s been trying to make since he started making records. And his patience, ambition, and persistence have yielded an appropriately career-defining body of work. As epic and expansive as it is impressively potent and concise, the 11 song suite was created over 7+ years, as McCraven strived to design a highly personal but broadly communicable fusion of odd-meter original compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” that he’s honed over a growing body of production-craft. With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators – including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill – the music was recorded in 5 different studios and 4 live performance spaces while McCraven engaged in extensive post-production work from home. The pure fact that he was able to so eloquently condense and articulate the immense human scale of the work into 41 fleeting minutes of emotive and engaging sound is a monumental achievement. It’s an evolution and a milestone for McCraven, the producer; but moreover it’s the strongest and clearest statement we’ve yet to hear from McCraven, the composer. In These Times is an almost unfathomable new peak for an already-soaring innovator who has been called "one of the best arguments for jazz's vitality" by The New York Times, as well as recently, and perhaps more aptly, a "cultural synthesizer." While challenging and pushing himself into uncharted territories, McCraven quintessentially expresses his unique gifts for collapsing space and transcending borders – blending past, present, and future into elegant, poly-textural arrangements of jazz-rooted, post-genre 21st century folk music.

The New Yorker has finally gotten his flowers as one of the finest MCs in the contemporary underground after a cool couple decades grinding it out with his label, Backwoodz Studioz; 2021’s *Haram*, from Woods’ Armand Hammer duo with E L U C I D, felt like a high watermark for a new NY scene. On *Aethiopes*, Woods’ first solo album since 2019, he recruits producer Preservation, a fellow NY scene veteran known for his work with Yasiin Bey and Ka; his haunted beats set an unsettling scene for Woods’ evocative stories, which span childhood bedrooms and Egyptian deserts. The guest list doubles as a who’s who of underground rap—EL-P, Boldy James, E L U C I D—but Woods holds his own at the center of it all. As he spits on the stunningly skeletal “Remorseless”: “Anything you want on this cursed earth/Probably better off getting it yourself, see what it’s worth.”

DIGITAL VERSION OF THE ALBUM DROPS ON APRIL 8, 2022. Aethiopes is billy woods’ first album since 2019’s double feature of Hiding Places and Terror Management. The project is fully produced by Preservation (Dr Yen Lo, Yasiin Bey), who delivered a suite of tracks on Terror Management, including the riveting single “Blood Thinner”. The two collaborated again on Preservation’s 2020’s LP Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, which featured a memorable billy woods appearance on the song “Lemon Rinds”, as well as the B-side “Snow Globe”.

Jamie Teasdale’s music as Kuedo has always struck an interesting balance between the physicality of the big beat and the drifting, icy quality of early-’80s synth music: think Vangelis’ *Blade Runner* soundtrack or Tangerine Dream circa *Risky Business*—with drops. Where 2011’s *Severant* drew on the rhythms of dubstep and UK bass, *Infinite Window* sounds closer to American hip-hop: the galloping trap of “Time Glide,” the stabbing synth pads of “Harlequin Hallway.” That Teasdale’s other professional work includes sound design and composition for brands like Fendi, Bulgari, and Iris van Herpen makes sense: Even *Infinite Window*’s most propulsive moments don’t evolve so much as hover like luxury objects on crystal pedestals—sleek, beautiful, alluringly out of reach.

Kuedo is set to release his new album ‘Infinite Window’ on 29th July 2022 on the award-winning Brainfeeder record label. Blending synth-driven avant garde compositions and thunderous drum programming, the album sonics owe as much to modern R&B icons like Frank Ocean and The Weeknd as they do to legendary composers such as David Axelrod, Tangerine Dream and the sadly recently-departed Vangelis or contemporary breakbeat aficionados such as Sully and Jlin. “I’m split between thinking about what makes spacey synth driven music production work, what makes rap and UK jungle work, and what makes pop and R&B work,” explains Kuedo. “I found myself turning more to what I just enjoy listening to, or to what’s really endured through history, even if it’s new to me. I realised that old music can speak to the current moment as well or better than new music. Particularly in terms of ecological, planetary anxieties, and hopes too”. Renowned for his composition and sound design work for the likes of Fendi, Bvlgari, Iris Van Herpen and Nike, the release follows a 2017 collaboration with label-head Flying Lotus on the “Blade Runner: Black Out 2022” OST (directed by Cowboy Bepbop director Shinichirō Watanabe), with Kuedo also scoring Metahaven’s “Eurasia (Questions on Happiness)” and “The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda)” films. Released is the new single “Sliding Through Our Fingers”, the first taster from the forthcoming album that showcases Kuedo’s mastery of emotive synth composition. “The music gives me a feeling of how time slides past us, how we try to hold it,” says Kuedo. “I thought of sand sliding through open fingers. And how time is such a blurry moving stream, like we dream of our future lives, that open horizon turns into memories, how the current time keeps recalling the past to us. How we just sail through time, no matter how we feel about that.” Notions of ‘time’ — of looking both forward and backward — run deep throughout the album and its recording process. The genesis for ‘Infinite Window’ began in early 2021 when Kuedo sat down to begin composing a full length album for Brainfeeder, but the finished record is a meticulously assembled collage of new composition and various demos and sound recordings, some of which stretch back almost 10 years. “Almost a third of the album comes from rough sketches I had written for a previous Kuedo album that never was.” he explains. ”Turning these into finished tracks and assembling them into a unified album, into something that moved as one body… that was a complex experience. It felt like negotiating with previous versions of myself, down corridors of time. It was a little odd hearing a much younger me trying to get better at playing keys, and then having the me now playing alongside that. It felt like time-travelling. In that process, I probably made some peace with that earlier version of myself too, for not having the confidence to finish it at the time” “I didn’t have a conceptual conceit when I made the tracks or sequenced the album,” he continues. “But whenever I needed an image to anchor or aim toward, the images that came were something about the world after all this, if we almost lost everything. Hot, dry landscapes, remnants of this time, the wonder of this current green world, our relation to future generations, the waves of time. When I was mixing it, I imagined it feeling weathered by time, or out of place in time, like something crash landed, or excavated, half buried in the sand.” The limited edition yellow vinyl LP features artwork by fast rising visual artists Monja & Vincent and sleeve design by Raf Rennie (Acronym, Prada, Nike). “Monja & Vincent and I met when they asked if I could contribute any music to their graduate animation short,” says Kuedo. They said their art style had been somewhat influenced by my music, which was incredible to me. I found the art they showed me so inspiring for my own music, it helped me write my own stuff. So I asked them if they would be interested in making an image for the album.” “I’ve been a fan of Raf Rennie since the mid 2010s, I’m really buzzed to work with him,” he continues. “We have a good shared language & understanding of each other. Some similar inspirations too, like the original Alien film. He developed the Kuedo logo into his own full typeface, “Geiger”. To me his work has a minimalist, composed, slightly detached vibe, in a Kubrick-like way. I really like how it works around a more relaxed and expressive illustration, like Monja & Vincent’s.” ‘Infinite Window’ is out on 29th July on Brainfeeder.

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

“You can’t come get this work until it’s dry. I made this album while the streets were closed during the pandemic. Made entirely with the greatest producers of all time—Pharrell and Ye. ONLY I can get the best out of these guys. ENJOY!!” —Pusha T, in an exclusive message provided to Apple Music

Thebe Kgositsile emerged in 2010 as the most mysterious member of rap’s weirdest new collective, Odd Future—a gifted teen turned anarchist, spitting shock-rap provocations from his exile in a Samoan reform school. In the 12 years since, he’s repaired his famously fraught relationship with his mother, lost his father, and become a father himself, all the while carving out a solo lane as a serious MC, a student of the game. Earl’s fourth album finds the guy who once titled an album *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside*, well, going outside, and kinda liking it; on opener “Old Friend,” he’s hacking through thickets, camping out in Catskills rainstorms. There’s a sonic clarity here that stands apart from the obscure, sludgy sounds of his recent records, executed in part by Young Guru, JAY-Z’s longtime engineer. Beats from The Alchemist and Black Noi$e snap, crackle, and bounce, buoying Earl’s slippery, open-ended thoughts on family, writing, religion, the pandemic. Is he happy now, the kid we’ve watched become a man? It’s hard to say, but in any case, as he raps on “Fire in the Hole”: “It’s no rewinding/For the umpteenth time, it’s only forward.”

“Often, for me,” Dan Snaith tells Apple Music, “the worst enemy of making music is thinking too much about it. I just *do* it, and what it is and why it is comes into focus later.” Doing, and making people dance, were the drivers for the Toronto producer’s first Daphni album since 2017’s *Joli Mai*. *Cherry* is a dazzlingly diverse set—there are bold expressions of house, techno, and disco here—with Snaith (who also releases music as Caribou and Manitoba) admitting it reflects the roller coaster of the early 2020s. “There are tracks on here that were made in the depths of the pandemic, when I was yearning for clubs to return and experiencing music collectively,” he says. “And there were tracks made as things started to reopen. I wanted something to play at my first DJ gigs and wondered what would connect people after so long away.” One of the record’s most striking characteristics is its directness. Tracks are relatively short—and cut deliciously to the chase. “They’re mostly without intros or outros,” Snaith says. “The music just careens between ideas and moods—as if under the control of a particularly mercurial DJ. I like that style of DJing anyway. Alternating between hypnosis—the same loop for a long time—and surprise. This album captures that, I hope.” Read on for Snaith’s track-by-track guide. **“Arrow”** “The loop that makes up this album is so simple but somehow alluring. It doesn’t need to do much of anything—it just needs you to keep staring at it. One of my favorite things about dance music is that, with the aid of repetition, small variations can seem momentous. I also like the idea that the album starts with no messing around—straight in at full speed—and then stands pretty much still throughout this track.” **“Cherry”** “This is one of the last tracks I made and, somehow, filled in a puzzle piece that I didn’t know was missing. As soon as I’d finished it, I knew that it was going to be a central track on the album. That twisting, turning synth line that’s both disorienting and compelling is like a musical ouroboros—the snake eating its own tail.” **“Always There”** “This is one of my favorite tracks to play out in my DJ sets, probably because it works when it shouldn’t. The textures in this track—the fast guitar lines, snaking reed instrument, and shakers—stand out immediately in a club, where people are used to dancing to drum machines and synthesizers. The arrangement makes you wait for things to drop a couple times, and often, when I play it in a club, I tease it out for much longer, so that the riff has been weaving in and out for a long time before it drops.” **“Crimson”** “I’m not much of a ‘gear’ person, but every so often, I come across a piece of equipment that sounds so fantastic and has so much character that it feels like it writes the music for you. The synthesizer playing the main blippy pattern here is an ARP 2600, and you can almost hear me moving the sliders on it as I try to lure the track to a climax.” **“Arp Blocks”** “The title here refers to the ARP 2600 that is the only instrument in this track. I don’t think I’ve ever released any music that is one live take of one instrument playing solo before. The ‘Blocks’ of the title refers to a piece of software that allowed me to control the 50-plus-year-old ARP synthesizer in a completely new way and get sounds out of it that would not have been previously possible, allowing the synth pattern to twist and turn and jump up and down to different harmonic registers.” **“Falling”** “People who know my music probably know that I have a hard time resisting a repeated hook—a mantra that takes on more meaning the more it’s repeated. This one could have stayed longer and been built out into a larger track, but to keep the pace fast, it sticks around for only a little over a minute before we’re on to something else.” **“Mania”** “A lot of the tracks on this album have a loose, playful feeling, and that really reflects how it was making them. Even though it’s just me in the studio, it’s still possible to capture that sense of jamming—putting one loop or sound together and then rushing to another piece of equipment and playing the first thing that comes to mind on it. This track came together pretty much in the order that you hear the elements being introduced into the track. There’s a point, halfway through, where the harmony changes and the track feels like it’s floating—that’s always a really nice moment when I play this out in a club.” **“Take Two”** “So much of my favorite dance music is about the search for a perfect loop—often a loop that harkens back to house music’s antecedent: disco. This track weaves a few different loops together. In fact, it started out as two different tracks that I realized, at some point, were in the same key, the same world—but hopefully sound like they could almost be the parts from a forgotten disco record. Music that almost sounds like a live band, but not quite.” **“Mona”** “I love techno that’s based around one repeated stab sound. The best of those tracks tend to last a long time and do very little other than roll along, using repetition as their central premise. This track sets up that way but is an example of how I decided to shift the focus of some of these tracks away from making arrangements that would be most effective in a club and stick to what’s most exciting on the album, where the shorter tracks mean that different sounds and vibes are flying by rapidly. Digital DJing means that it’s not hard to rearrange and extend the tracks you’re playing on the fly—when I play this track in a DJ set, it usually ends up being about twice the length it is here.” **“Clavicle”** “This track almost didn’t end up on the album. I’d put a version of it on my *Essential Mix* in 2020 and then mostly forgot about it. But just as I was assembling this album, a couple people asked me about it and if I was ever going to release it. I had finished all the other tracks on the album and was about to send the album off to have it mastered and just added this track in at the last minute. I’m glad I did!“ **“Cloudy”** “I grew up playing the piano as my main instrument. There was a time when I thought that I was going to try and make a living as a jazz pianist. I must have spent thousands and thousands of hours playing the piano when I was a kid—so much time that that familiarity will always be with me. The piano you hear on this track isn’t a real one—it’s a software emulation played on a controller keyboard—which is why I can warp it and give it the character that you hear, but feeling so at home with the sound of a piano is why I’ll always return to look for ideas there. There have been a bunch of people online asking what the piano sample is for this track, but it’s not a sample—it’s a loop that I played while noodling around in the studio.” **“Karplus”** “The word ‘Karplus’ refers to a delay effect named after Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong, where a short, pitched delay on a sound creates a note similar to the sound of a plucked string. I’m not sure whether what I’m doing with this track is really the Karplus-Strong effect though—it’s mostly just a drum loop through a phaser!” **“Amber”** “I love the big, chunky, awkward swing of this track. It’s a loop that always feels like it’s just about to topple over and collapse. When I first started going to clubs when I lived in Toronto, DJs from New York would come through town all the time, and when people like Masters at Work would play, people who could really dance would show up—not just people shuffling their feet and pumping their fists in the air like I, and most of us, do when we’re at a club. In my mind, this is the kind of loop that I can imagine getting the kind of reaction that I remember seeing from the dancers at those nights.” **“Fly Away”** “I’m always looking for those tracks that are like a breath of fresh air in a club—that, after hours of playing music with relentless, heavy kick drums, are melodic and euphoric. I made this track with that kind of feeling in mind, and it always has that kind of effect on the room when I’ve played it. People stop dancing and look around; they start whistling and shouting. It’s a great one to play at the end of the night, so why not at the end of an album?”

On the one hand, you could hear the big beats and blacklight-ready synths of *Icons* as an exercise in ’90s nostalgia—the soundtrack to historically accurate raves made by modern hermits who watched them on YouTube. On the other, it’s a canny next step in the evolution of UK club and bass music, whose bright, propulsive sound served as a rejoinder to the grim majesty of dubstep. Like hyperpop, it’s both stylish and playful: Just follow the mournful robot guides of “Dust” and “Mainframe,” or the rhythm track of “Ghosts,” which simulates the squirming, slightly out-of-control feeling of a strong tickle. They’re weird. But they come in peace.

Before becoming a progenitor in the microgenre chillwave—defined by a 2000s indie rock culture obsessed with 1980s electro-synth sounds and nostalgic, dreamy bedroom pop—Toro y Moi (Chazwick Bradley “Chaz Bear” Bundick) was known for his experimental production, leading to a long run of widely lauded albums. *MAHAL* is his seventh, its title taken from the Tagalog word for “expensive.” It\'s also a good time in 13 songs, from the Parliament funk of “Postman” and the psychedelic percussion of “Clarity” to the garage-psych of “The Medium” featuring New Zealand band Unknown Mortal Orchestra and the smoky “Mississippi.” If chillwave was a flash-in-the-pan moment, Toro Y Moi has long since survived it.

The 13-track project marks the seventh studio album from Bear under the Toro y Moi moniker. To celebrate the announcement, Toro y Moi shares two singles from the forthcoming record "Postman" b/w "Magazine." Each of the new singles arrives with accompanying visuals. "Postman," directed by Kid. Studio, sees Toro and friends riding around the colorful San Francisco landscape in his Filipino jeepney, seen on the cover of MAHAL. "Magazine," directed by Arlington Lowell, sees Toro and Salami Rose Joe Louis, who supplies vocals on the track, dressed vibrantly in a photo studio spliced with various colorful graphics and playful edits. MAHAL's announcement and singles arrive on the heels of Toro's highly celebrated 2019 album Outer Peace, which Pitchfork described as "one of his best albums in years" along with his Grammy-nominated 2020 collaboration with Flume, "The Difference," which was also featured in a global campaign for Apple's Airpods. Today's releases mark the first from Toro y Moi since signing to Secretly Group label Dead Oceans. Dead Oceans is an independent record label established in 2007 featuring luminaries like Japanese Breakfast, Khruangbin, Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes, Mitski, Slowdive and more. Toro y Moi is the 12+ year project of South Carolina-reared, Bay Area-based Chaz Bear. In the wake 2008’s global economic collapse, Toro y Moi emerged as a figurehead of the beloved sub-genre widely known as chillwave, the sparkling fumes of which still heavily influence musicians all over today. Over the subsequent decade, his music and graphic design has far, far surpassed that particular designation. Across 9 albums (6 studio as Toro y Moi along with a live album, compilation and mixtape) with the great Carpark label, he has explored psych-rock, deep house, UK hip-hop; R&B and well-beyond without losing that rather iconic, bright and shimmering Toro y Moi fingerprint. As a graphic designer, Bear has collaborated with brands like Nike, Dublab and Van’s. And as a songwriter and producer, he’s collaborated with other artists like Tyler, The Creator, Flume, Travis Scott, HAIM, and Caroline Polachek.

In recent years, both Jay Worthy and Larry June have established themselves as what might be called lifestyle rappers. Over their respective individual projects, these Californian lyricists go beyond luxury tropes to build new lexicons for living one’s best life and living it well, with the lushest beats to match. For this inevitable team-up, their similarities outweigh their contrasts as they revel in the wink-and-mid behind their chosen punny title. Admittedly, the pimp game interplay on *2 P’z in a Pod* gets gleefully over the top, evident on “Hotel Bel-Air” and “Vanilla Cream” along with the explicit segues. To that end, Worthy’s production duo LNDN DRGS outdo themselves here, calling back to electro-funk and ’80s R&B boogie on “Sock It 2 Me” and the Roc Marciano-laced “Maybe the Next Time.”

Questions of value, respect, and legacy preoccupy the Detroit-raised rapper and producer Quelle Chris on his seventh solo album, *Deathfame*. The underground mainstay has been called everyone’s favorite rapper’s favorite rapper’s favorite rapper; here he wrestles with what that reputation entails, unpacking the satisfactions and sacrifices of quiet integrity. There’s skeptical indignation (“King in Black”) and smirking pride (“Feed the Heads”), but Chris leads with humility and grace on the gorgeous bluesy number “Alive Ain’t Always Living,” on which he makes clear, “You can keep the feast and wine. I just want my peace of mind.” That song extends a fruitful running partnership with the Oakland-based producer and pianist Chris Keys, although Quelle handles most of the album’s production himself, stretching his elastic flows with obtuse basslines and dusty drums. It’s bittersweet work, wry and wise, and destined for the longevity Chris ultimately claims as his goal.

When an artist consistently creates at the forward edge, there are no guardrails. Quelle Chris has been comfortable at the boundaries, leading Hip-Hop since he started.     Quelle’s vision extends beyond genre or format. He continued broadening his creative ambitions even beyond his own legendary four album run (BYIG, Everything's Fine, Guns, Innocent Country 2) and worked with Chris Keys to compose part of the score for the Oscar-winning film “Judas and The Black Messiah” with director Shaka King. The new album, “DEATHFAME,” is a sonic treatment produced by Quelle himself, along with Chris Keys and Knxwledge. The record carries on like an incredible lost tape found at a flea market. It explores, unflinchingly, every moment of the trials the early 2020s has brought to all of us. Guests Navy Blue and Pink Siifu lend brilliance to the dynamic and unexpected new album coming May 13th on Mello Music Group.

Rather than a set of songs, think of Colombian-born, Berlin-based artist Lucrecia Dalt’s eighth album, *¡Ay!*, as a room cast in sound: smokey, low-lit, seductive but vaguely threatening; a place where fantasy and reality meet in deep, inky shadow. Dalt’s takes on the bolero, son, ranchera, and merengue that form the romantic spine of Latin pop are genuine enough to feel folkloric and off-kilter enough to conjure the art and experimental music she’s known for—a contrast that pulls *¡Ay!* along on its hovering, dreamlike course. Squint and you can imagine hearing “Dicen” in a dusty bar somewhere or swaying to “La Desmesura” or “Bochinche.” But like the great exotica artists of the ’50s, Dalt teeters between the foreign and the comforting so gracefully, you don’t recognize how strange she is until you’re in her pocket. *¡Ay!* is lounge music for the beyond.

Lucrecia Dalt channels sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where the sound and syncopation of tropical music encounter adventurous impulse, lush instrumentation, and metaphysical sci-fi meditations in an exclamation of liminal delight. In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment. Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began.

Fans of Brent Faiyaz love him for his shamelessness, and on his second album, he leans all the way into that. Opening with a collage of clips that address his reputation (aptly called “VILLAIN\'S THEME”), he sets out on a quest in search of honesty—an answer to the question “What purpose do your vices serve in your life?” That tension between vice and intent—between love and a lifestyle that actively discourages it—is immediately introduced on “LOOSE CHANGE” and snakes its way through the album. Three skits at the beginning, middle, and end provide an underlying narrative of baby-mama drama and betrayal that culminates in a devastating turn of events; it\'s all fun and games until people get hurt. But the cost can\'t be known until it\'s known, and so Faiyaz barrels towards romantic oblivion. All of his sweet talk comes affixed with disclaimers. On “ALL MINE,” he tries to get his girl back—despite the fact that she may not even be available. (“You told me your new man don\'t make you nut, that\'s a damn shame,” he coos at one point.) “WASTING TIME,” which features fellow toxic king Drake, doesn\'t even try to hide its here-for-a-good-time-not-a-long-time attitude, while the album\'s centerpiece, an apologetic ballad titled “ROLLING STONE,” could also double as its mission statement: “First I\'m exciting, then I\'m gaslighting, make up your mind/I\'m rich as fuck and I ain\'t nothing at the same time/People hate me and they love me at the same time/I guess I\'m everything and nothing at the same time.” But to only appreciate the persona of the music is to miss the atmospheric details that give it shape. His production choices—the expansive creep of “PRICE OF FAME” or the anthemic swirl of “GRAVITY” or the plodding drama of “ROLE MODEL”—help to keep listeners off balance and cultivate an air of mystery that furthers the impact of his lyrics and brings the lothario to life. It becomes difficult to tell where the line between fantasy and reality exists, whether this is a character or Faiyaz himself. One thing is certain, though: It\'s impossible to turn away, repulsive and alluring at once, like the best toxic relationships are.

Nancy Mounir’s debut album, Nozhet El Nofous, is a remarkable communion with ghosts. Moody, hypnotic, and sneakily catchy, the album—whose title means “Promenade of the Souls'' in Arabic—explores microtonality, non-metered rhythms, and bold vulnerability through a musical dialogue between Mounir’s own arrangements and the sounds of archival recordings of once-famed singers from Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. Adding her own ambient arrangements over voices haunted with passion and desire as she creates a sound that is warmly familiar but utterly new. On the album, Mounir slips into the gaps left by the lost frequencies of the aging recordings, finding space for counterpoint and harmony in a traditional sound built on monophony. Elegant melodies unfold in measured gestures as Mounir—who plays most of the instruments herself —revels in the plaintive intonations and brash lyrics of the departed singers. With layers enmeshed together, it’s at times hard to pin down when the past ends and the present begins, but beneath it all is a liberating attitude of defiance that feels timeless. Nozhet El Nofous is brilliant in the way it explores the techniques and perspectives of a more freewheeling time period in Arabic music, before Arabic maqam (modal systems) and other musical foundations were standardized by the Middle East’s cultural power brokers in the early 1930s. As she summons a rich, atmospheric landscape of tone and texture, Mounir engages an older generation of musical rebels in a creative dialogue across time and space—and the results are stunning in their ambition and beauty.

Growing up in Chicago, later Detroit-based music producer, Theo Parrish is internationally well known for his own inimitable downtempo house music style. The approach Parrish took to compiling DJ-Kicks was very ambitious, inviting his Detroit peers to produce a collection of brand new material, and in turn creating the first ever all exclusive entry to the esteemed series. "Detroit creates. But rarely imitates. Why? We hear and see many from other places do that with what we originate. No need to follow. Get it straight. In the Great Lakes there are always more under the surface than those that appear to penetrate the top layer of attention and recognition. What about them that defy tradition? Those that side step the inaccurate definitions often given from outside positions? This is that evidence. Enjoy."

Ten years on from Wizkid’s debut single, 2020 witnessed the Nigerian’s coronation as an undisputed Afrobeats icon. Global names including Justin Bieber and Damian Marley as well as emerging ones (see: Tems and producer P2J) helped Wizkid’s fourth album *Made in Lagos* strike a sonic balance to electrify bases at home and overseas, and unlocked fresh dimensions to his signature Afro-fusion. “That was where I\'m from. And now you know it’s time for me to show the world what else we actually need at this moment,” Wizkid tells Apple Music. “And that’s a whole lot of love. I\'m reminding myself, reminding the world, and reminding everybody.” On *More Love, Less Ego*, the task is made smoother with P2J again by his side. Their percussive, midtempo palette makes for a rich, winning combo, and the duo lean into it here—with Wizkid’s pillowy vocals and the bright, unifying themes of passion and celebration the ideal complements. But, as the title suggests, a more emotionally exposed artist emerges across the album’s 13 tracks. “All the time, I want to show up as my highest self,” he says. “I\'m really trying to show how God has blessed me with this talent and what I can do with it. And I’m here on earth to take this to the highest of my abilities.” As Wizkid’s Grammy-nominated “Essence” galvanized the thrilling rise of Tems, on “2 Sugar”—a sultry, toe-tapping duet—Ayra Starr is the beneficiary of the Starboy’s magic touch. And it’s far from the only inspired collaboration. Wizkid\'s cultural crosswinds take in talent including Jamaica’s breakout stars Shenseea and Skillibeng (“Slip N Slide”) and British Nigerians Skepta and Naira Marley (“Wow”) in a confident show of the diaspora’s effortless genre-fusing. Amapiano, meanwhile, is also explored on album highlight “Plenty Loving”—indicating another rich area for Wizkid to mine in the future. “I’ve been in the clubs for the past couple months—traveling, doing shows, touring,” he says. “Of course, I\'ve been partying to amapiano. I\'ve been making that \[sound\] for years, with \[DJ\] Maphorisa back in South Africa. So I’ve made what I really love and just put it out there. I can do amapiano, I can do music from Mali, I can do sounds from anywhere, I\'m African.”

a tape called component system with the auto reverse

“If I ever win a Grammy, I’m gonna thank him,” Queens-born vocalist, producer, and multi-disciplinary artist Yaya Bey tells Apple Music about one of the many songs on *Remember Your North Star* inspired by an unnamed ex-lover. He was a music industry player and that relationship, which lasted some three years, revealed many things to Bey—not just about the industry itself, but about who she is and what she values. “It was like, ‘Well, where am I going? Where am I headed and what should I remember?’ And I guess in trying to move towards love—love for self, love romantically, platonically—I’m remembering that that’s where I’m going. That’s my North Star.” While that relationship opened her eyes to some of the industry’s—and men at large’s—more sordid practices, Bey managed to keep her joy intact, delivering a robust collection of music that spans Billie Holiday-inspired jazz crooning, lovers rock reggae, and the bubbling form of South African house, amapiano. Within these spoonfuls of sugar, Bey supplies medicine aplenty, lambasting the intrinsically toxic systems that would, at one time, have her questioning her own self-worth. “To be a woman in this male-dominated industry means you get judged and valued by things that really don’t matter,” she says. “But I can’t have apprehension about what I do with my music because it’s the only place I have a voice. Being a Black woman, an up-and-coming artist, and especially in my thirties, the only place I have a voice is in my music. I can’t be silent there. I’ll just disappear.” Below, Bey takes us through some of the key tracks on *Remember Your North Star*, a project that casts her more visible than ever. **“Intro”** “So, \[talk show host\] Wendy Williams had said some shit about \[vegan lifestyle influencer\] Tabitha Brown on her show. And then Tabitha Brown retaliated in this way that insinuated Wendy Williams doesn’t know love or doesn’t have anyone to love her. And then someone on Black Twitter tweeted that even though Tabitha Brown didn’t say very much, we all knew it was an insult because we all kind of know Black women have a wound around not being loved and not knowing love. And that got me to thinking about how Black women respond to that. There’s the ‘city girl’ approach, which is like, ‘Fuck love, just provide for me financially’—and all of it is defense mechanisms—because a lot of times we’re afraid to ask for the things that we want, or we assume that we can’t get the things that we want, emotionally. I’m saying, ‘N\*\*\*\*s going to n\*\*\*a, so you might as well get paid.’ That’s just my take on not feeling secure that men will show up in a way that is supportive of my emotional needs.” **“big daddy ya”** “I was having this realization that most all of my problems can somehow be tied to either racism, patriarchy, or capitalism—literally everything in my life that’s going wrong. And as it pertains to patriarchy, misogyny, and all that shit, it’s always just fucking men at the root of my problems. Even when it’s a woman, it’s still some woman enacting patriarchy, enacting misogyny. What I learned about the male ego is just to laugh at it because it’s utterly ridiculous. It isn’t built on supporting the collective, uplifting the collective. It’s built on scarcity and that’s why it’s so fragile. And so, ‘big daddy ya’ is just me mocking men.” **“nobody knows”** “I had just signed to Ninja Tune, and they sent me to D.C. to start the album. It was one of the first songs that I wrote. I had been going back and forth with this guy for three years, and we weren’t in contact at the time. And he was bouncing back and forth between me and this other woman. I was really fucked up because I had lost my job. Like, the song starts off, ‘I ain’t paid my rent in three months’—that was very true for me. And this guy, the last time I saw him, he was rubbing it in my face that \[his other woman\] is a doctor and I’m unemployed. I have to work so hard under the system of capitalism to be worthy. I can’t just wake up in the morning and be worthy. I have to have all of these things to be worthy of love, to be worthy of a roof over my head. Me just being me is not enough for this world—I think it’s a song that means the most to me on the album because I was at my lowest point, but I was still fighting for myself.” **“alright”** “I was listening to a lot of Frankie Beverly & Maze, and what I like about Frankie Beverly & Maze is that they make music to uplift the spirit. I knew I needed live musicians because a lot of the album was made on a 404 or from sliced samples. It’s all digital. \[My friend\] Temi introduced me to \[co-producer\] Aja Grant, and it was easy. It was a jam session sort of thing. I just hummed out the melody lines and they picked it up, and then added to it and extended it.” **“meet me in brooklyn”** “My family is from Barbados. I always say that I’m an African American of Western Indian descent. I grew up deeply in both cultures. So, I felt like I needed to put some of that on the album because it’s part of who I am. And the album, overall, is about me dealing with and navigating misogyny externally and internally, and even internalized misogyny through my romantic dealings. And some of romance is about fun, like when you first meet someone at a party—like, the first time I ever danced with a boy was at a reggae party. So, it’s in my DNA, and culturally and socially growing up in New York, and I wanted to include that sound.” **“pour up” (feat. DJ Nativesun)** “My friend Chris is an amazing DJ, and he plays a lot of house and dance, and I was working on a song with another artist at a session in D.C. at this big house that had all these little studio rooms. Chris comes into the session, and he has a track. At first, I was afraid because it’s amapiano. But when I think about the music that’s coming out of Africa, that’s dancehall, that’s soca, it’s house music—and I think, once we get past the whole diaspora wars thing, all of us fighting for the scraps, we’re all Africans at the very bottom of this capitalist, imperialist food chain. Because you can’t talk about Fela without talking about James Brown without talking about \[Wizkid’s\] *Made in Lagos*—that was an Afrobeats album because it was made by an African from Nigeria, but if we take that away, that was a dancehall record. At first, I was afraid that I would experience some backlash, but when I thought about it, I’m like amapiano is house music, and I’m allowed to be a part of the conversation.” **“reprise”** “Sometimes relationships that you go through are a catalyst for you to get to know yourself more, or for you to really see where you’re playing yourself, where you’re doubting yourself, where you are not showing up for yourself. It’s really about how I had a lack of self-worth, and I was afraid to see myself as capable. And I had this other song where I was, like, tearing his ass a new one. But it was coming from a place that was more about bashing him than it was about uplifting me. And it isn’t really my desire to bash anyone. So, I didn’t put the song out and, instead, I wrote ‘reprise,’ which is more reflecting on how I got to where I am, and the things that I’ve seen. It gave me a space to even have compassion for him because he’s somebody with his own trauma and insecurities that are informing the way he’s moving through the world.” **“rolling stoner”** “I probably smoke the heaviest when I’m going through shit. Two months before the pandemic started, I was working 13-hour shifts in a homeless shelter, seeing crazy shit. I’m riddled with guilt because I’m working there, and I feel like I’m a part of the problem. Even though I’m just an art teacher there, it’s still like I shouldn’t be here because this is hella problematic. I come home, I smoke my life away, I make music, I go to sleep for two hours. I do it again. I mean, I had smoked before then, but that was my introduction to, ‘Now I’m a pothead.’” **“i’m certain she’s there”** “So, my parents were teenage parents. My mom, she didn’t raise me. She came from different circumstances. Her family was not as supportive. Her mom died. Her dad was just really disappointed that she had a baby so young. And my dad, on the other hand, he just had more support, more help raising me. Either people don’t ever talk about my mom at all, like she’s this thing that never happened, or they have terrible things to say about her. Which, as a child, it fucked with my own self-image, to have this mom that is a pariah, I guess. So, as I got older, I realized that some of that is misogyny. And I just wanted to address that.” **“street fighter blues“** “‘Street fighter blues’ was the starting point of the album. I had someone else that I was supposed to work with, and the session was a nightmare. I ended up snatching my equipment out the wall and leaving. But then, I called my friend Nate Jarvis, who is a longtime collaborator, and once I got in the right environment, it was easy. I was listening to a lot of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, which is what informed the vocals. And then, I went on the 404 and sampled my voice, busted out a drum pattern, and it was over with.” **“mama loves her son”** “A long, long time ago, I had this conversation with my friend, and she was like her mother—always kind of taught her not to trust women. And we’re taught not to trust women and not to trust ourselves because we see other women as competition for male validation. It’s not even just romantic male validation, it’s just love from men, acknowledgement from men—in the workplace, in friendships, in social settings, on social media, in relationships, in every power dynamic in marginalized groups. I needed a way to address the way that women act out misogyny.” **“blessings”** “I wrote ‘blessings’ when I was in D.C. It’s one of the first songs I wrote. At the time, I was not talking to the same person I’ve been talking about. We were not on speaking terms. I guess I was going through breakup blues. I felt like I wasn’t enough for that person, and I was figuring out how to be enough for myself. But at the same time, I was in D.C. A label had paid for me to go out there and make an album. I was too sad to get out of bed, but if I could just get out of this funk and realize there’s blessings around me, I could find a way to be present for them. And wherever you are, a person needs that. And life goes on, with time, you know?”

Learning to channel her intensity in lockdown was where Amber Mark began to fuse together ideas for her much-anticipated debut album, *Three Dimensions Deep*. “It was like putting pieces of a puzzle together,” the singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “I had these songs. I didn’t have a concept or know exactly where I wanted to go with it all. So, on a paper to-go bag, from some food I had got delivered, I began to section it out into three clear parts.” For her deeply ruminative record, Mark soars through a galaxy of stirring anthems, helmed primarily by producer Julian Bunetta (a key part of One Direction’s hitmaking machine). “He’s my sensei,” she says, “and one of the only producers that I work with. My anxiety means I tend to make music by myself, but I left my comfort zone for this album. I used to be very against the idea of writing camps, but trusted Julian, and agreed to do one, which was so amazing.” On her endearing quest for healing, Mark embraces stages of grief (“One”), loss (“Healing Hurts”), and deep insecurity (“On & On”), advancing her sound and herself under the sharp light of futurist-feel R&B. “There’s been so much growth involved whilst making this album,” she says. “Just through the different points in my life—losing my mother, moving around. But since 2020, I’ve just been seeing the world differently.” Read on for her insights on each track from her debut album. **“One”** “I started really questioning myself at the start of 2019. You go into business with others, and you won’t always agree on things. So, this song initially came from a state of anger; I was angry, and I wanted to get it out. I’ve been attracted to the idea of rap-singing more, and lyrically, this is the perfect song to dip my toe in with and experiment.” **“What It Is”** “I’m a sucker for big, very in-your-face harmonies. I had just seen the Bee Gees film \[*The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart*\] and was so inspired by their journey. I remember writing this in one day. It’s a very bold song for me, and it started with writing out what this album means, conceptually.” **“Most Men”** “I wanted to express on the conversations you have with friends, trying to console them after a breakup, after something fucked up went down. And it’s always advice that I give to myself: ‘You need to be able to find happiness on your own—find the joy of being alone in these moments.’” **“Healing Hurts”** “I had just gone through a breakup, and I’m kind of processing on this song. After my mom passed away, that period showed me that time is the ultimate healer. And, as I know that, I know I’ll move on from this and get over the heartbreak. But right now, I’m in my bed, and I’m emotional!” **“Bubbles”** “This is also quite specific to the breakup—the aftermath. ‘Push those feelings aside, go out, and have fun.’ We wrote this at the \[writing\] retreat—where we all became close really quickly. We had dinners and got to know each other. It was like taking a vacation with great friends, except they would all be doing tequila shots. I used to, in my late teens, early twenties, but the idea doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I’m *always* down for a glass of bubbles, though, and somehow that became the joke of the trip.” **“Softly”** “When I was younger, living in Nepal, I had a very, very intense Craig David obsession. The beauty stores sold bootleg CDs there, and I bought his first two albums. I heard \[2001 single\] ‘Rendezvous’ quite recently on a summer day in New York and fell in love with it again. That synthesized harp is such a big staple of the early-’00s sound. I was like, ‘I need to sample this shit! We have to bring this back.’” **“FOMO”** “I was starting to have a little bit of cabin fever whilst \[writing\], a little frustrated at not getting anywhere. Looking at my friend’s \[Instagram\] Stories—they’re out, having fun, doing shit, and I’m missing all these amazing opportunities to be with them. So, I ended up getting inspiration from that—staying home and wrote this song about it.” **“Turnin’ Pages”** “This is where we really start to address my inner turmoil. This is the next chapter.” **“Foreign Things”** “Because the feeling of running away and leaving life behind is something that’s *so* tempting—this is about being faced with those problems, head-on, when you can longer hide or escape from them.” **“On & On”** “This song is a long-standing favorite of mine on the album. This touches on a lot of old insecurities and the ways I was dealing with them, which was not working. So, in need of a sign, this is where my mom comes into play: She would always say, ‘You have to surrender to the issues that you’re dealing with.’” **“Out of This World”** “This is the introduction to section three, essentially. Another ‘mom’ song, but here, things start getting a little spacey, sonically. The song is from her perspective, and it’s her talking to me, trying to console me.” **“Cosmic”** “I love playing with the idea of higher dimensions, associating them with the afterlife or the soul, because so many scientists have theories that prove they exist. They have the math for it but can’t portray it. So, I’m tapping more into the spirituality of science here.” **“Darkside”** “OK, I am *obsessed* with super-cheesy ’80s sounds, especially the really wet snares. And I was inspired by a really beautiful song I Shazamed in my yoga class. I went home, sampled it, and that was the start of this track. In my head, the approach was, ‘How can I make this sound like a really weird Prince, Phil Collins, and Michael Jackson love child?’” **“Worth It”** “I wrote this after releasing \[2020 single\] ‘Generous.’ People loved it, but I also received comments like, ‘Ah, it’s a different sound!’ ‘It’s not the same Amber Mark. I miss \[2017 EP\] *3:33am* Amber.’ So, I made a beat, thinking, ‘Oh, y’all want old Amber Mark? Fuck y’all. I’m going to make a beat that sounds exactly like her.’ I was giving them what they wanted…in an angry way.” **“Competition”** “This is another from a writing camp. On one of the nights, we decided to separate into teams and play a game. We had to write a song in 30 minutes, and I was also the judge, which was weird, as I was playing. But this song we ended up choosing as the best. It’s all about how it’s not actually competition. Wouldn’t it be better if we all work together?” **“Bliss”** “This is the comedown from the out-of-body experience, sonically. It’s about that euphoric state that you never even imagined possible. I was really falling in love at the time we wrote this. I’d never experienced anything like it. I wanted to talk about it. I mean, I didn’t even know this stage even existed.” **“Event Horizon”** “We were in mixing mode \[on the album\] when I wrote this. A really close friend of mine, Lincoln Bliss, sent me some stuff he had worked on to a BPM; I ask all my really talented musician friends to just send me shit I can try to make a beat from. He wrote this beautiful guitar riff that sounded like a lullaby. Normally, I sing gibberish for a few hours before I start writing. I tried to come up with the melody, but I wanted it to feel like a dream state. So, I’m also musing on some key questions I have about the universe. And finally, I ask, ‘What is the end when there is no time?’”

“Initially this was just about us collecting some of the things we’d been working on individually outside of the band,” explains Dom Maker, one half of Mount Kimbie. “Then over the course of trying to collate it all, we thought, ‘Hang on, we might have two albums here.’” For their fourth album, *MK 3.5: Die Cuts City Planning*, the London-formed duo has taken an entirely new approach. With the pair already split between the US and the UK (Maker is now based in LA, Kai Campos is in London), the complexities of the pandemic ensured the duo spent more time working on music apart than together. Maker crafted rap- and R&B-flavored beats, collaborating with the likes of Danny Brown, slowthai, and James Blake, while Campos became increasingly inspired by DJ-ing and Detroit techno of the late ’90s and early 2000s. The result is two contrasting yet complementary solo albums. One, *Die Cuts*, is a collaboration-heavy and slowly enveloping blend of honeyed rap, R&B, and electronica. The other, *City Planning*, is an off-kilter, techno-led journey into the gritty heart of an imaginary city and back. Here, the pair talk us through some of the key tracks from *MK 3.5: Die Cuts City Planning*. **“Dvd” (feat. Choker)** Dom Maker: “I did a session with a producer called Michael Uzowuru who’s worked with everyone from Beyoncé to Frank Ocean to Earl Sweatshirt, and he brought Choker along. I wasn’t familiar with his music, but he makes what you might term experimental pop. Michael took away one of the ideas I worked on that day and recorded Choker’s vocals over it. Then Duval Timothy sent over a voice memo of a session he had done with Sampha where they were just noodling around on the piano and we sampled that and added it in as another melodic switch in the middle. It sets the tone for the album perfectly.” **“In Your Eyes” (feat. slowthai & Danny Brown)** DM: “slowthai was in LA finishing off his second album *TYRON* and we made ‘Feel Away’ for that with James \[Blake\], and then in the afternoon after that, he laid down the verse for this track. He actually laid it down on an old beat which I later replaced, which is quite common on this album. I originally used a sample of ‘In Your Eyes’ by the American jazz singer Blossom Dearie, but we couldn’t clear it, sadly. Getting slowthai and Danny Brown together is such a dream link-up. The track begins like a thunderstorm with Thai’s verse, and it’s a bit dark and ominous. Then the clouds clear in the mid-section and the beat changes up and the Danny verse at the end brings in this different flavor.” **“Heat On, Lips On”** DM: “This is one of the only tracks on the album I made without a collaborator. It’s made up of two separate beats that I made using some sounds from a free sample website. The samples came from a jazz-style song. Then I found Hollie Poetry, who’s a street poet, and I took one of her poetry readings, chopped out each word, and built my own sentences with it. It’s less vocal-led than the rest of the album, and as much as I love working with all of the collaborators on the album, I like that this one’s truly my expression.” **“Say That” (feat. Nomi)** DM: “This is a love ballad, I suppose, and probably my favourite song on the album. Nomi’s an amazing unknown vocalist based in Houston, Texas, and this is the first song she’s ever put out. There’s a soul sample in there, but then I also sampled some ASMR \[autonomous sensory meridian response—a tingling sensation sometimes triggered by hearing soft or whispered speech\] of a girl saying things like ‘I love you’ and whispering sweet nothings in your ear, and there’s a sample of a crackling fire really low in the mix there too.” **“If and When” (feat. Wiki)** DM: “Wiki’s one of my favorite rappers, and he actually toured with us for a while. I immediately wanted him involved in this album, and initially he recorded this whole track on another beat I made and sent it over to me. Then I spent a long time reworking the beat. I got my friend Chris Trowbridge to play bass on it. I love what Wiki’s saying on the track. It’s all about his torment with trying to be healthier, which I can relate to.” **“Q”** Kai Campos: “‘Q’ establishes the world of the record very well. I was attracted to gear which had been used on a lot of the late-’90s Detroit techno and electro, and the Roland TR-606, which is prominent on this track and a lot of the album, is a classic drum machine from that era. It’s quite metallic and has a futuristic vibe to it. I wanted the start of the record to be earthy and rugged, and this does that perfectly.” **“Transit Map (Flattened)”** KC: “‘Transit Map’ is a collaboration with Andrea Balency-Béarn, who’s a key part of our live setup and an amazing composer for film and TV in her own right. She wrote this long piano improvisation and I stole a snippet of her long recording. It’s quite a strange arpeggio. She sent me the midi version so I could replay it, but I quite liked the rough sound of the midi version so put that straight in.” **“Satellite 9”** KC: “I broke the record down into different sections in my head and imagined it as a journey from the outskirts of a city to the center and then back again. ‘Satellite 9’ is almost like the train journey going into the city. It really hones in on the Detroit influence of the album and the futuristic vibe of the 606 again.” **“Zone 1 (24 Hours)”** KC: “This is the peak moment of the record for me. It’s a bit longer and a bit more clubby. It began as another track which I was about to scrap, but as I was mixing it and cutting it up quite aggressively, this other idea came out of it. I was playing it live, mixing it and recording it all at the same time, so it came together very instinctively.” **“Human Voices”** KC: “I think of this record as a trip, as clichéd as that sounds, so for the final track on the album, we return to something more naturalistic. I worked on music for this album for a long time, but what’s actually on the record all came together quite quickly at the end of the sessions. And this was another track where something I really liked came from mixing and playing around with something I was initially that happy about.”

MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning shows how Dom Maker and Kai Campos have grown over the past decade, and demonstrates the two sides of Mount Kimbie’s aesthetic coin - each side produced entirely by either member. Dom’s side, Die Cuts, is colourful and melody-led, thriving on the spark of collaboration; Kai’s, City Planning, is tactile and unpredictable, the product of a deeply personal aesthetic voyage. The two sides complement each other through their contrasts. But in other ways they’re not so different. Both artists present a unique vision which stands apart from their peers; neither side could have been made by anyone but Mount Kimbie.

Los Angeles producer and artist Nosaj Thing AKA Jason W. Chung returns with his fifth album, Continua - featuring a stellar ensemble cast including HYUKOH, Toro y Moi, Kazu Makino (Blonde Redhead), serpentwithfeet, Sam Gendel, Coby Sey, Julianna Barwick, Mike Andrews, Slauson Malone, Pink Siifu, Panda Bear & Eyedress. Nosaj Thing's expertise is in crafting exquisite soundscapes that hold a mirror up to his journey from noise and punk shows at DIY venue The Smell, to his debut sets at Low End Theory, to touring with The xx and The Weeknd. Throughout, he has innovated with a live experiences conceived with Tokyo-based AV savant Daito Manabe. Chung's music carries such visceral humanity it feels like a disservice to refer to the 'mood' which pervades his records. But it's exactly that distinct mood which has made Nosaj Thing such a cult artists across his 16-year-deep discography.

Burial’s music has always been steeped in atmosphere; the omnipresent sounds of vinyl hiss, rainfall, and cavernous reverb are as much a part of his signature as cut-up breakbeats and mournful vocal melodies. But until *Antidawn*, the UK producer’s work had almost always remained rooted in dance music. This five-song, 44-minute EP—long enough to qualify as his third album, if he wanted it to—definitively breaks with the club. Like 2017’s *Subtemple / Beachfires*, *Antidawn* strips away virtually everything resembling a beat, save for a few brief rhythmic flourishes, so muted they’re barely noticeable beneath the static. What’s left is a purely ambient swirl of brooding synthesizers, crackling white noise, and eerily processed vocal snippets. It can be pretty doleful going: “Nowhere to go,” murmurs a voice in the opening “Strange Neighbourhood.” “I’m in a bad place,” intones another in “Antidawn.” But as is usual for Burial, even the blackest cloud is ringed with blinding light: Church organs suggest a hint of uplift, and many of his chords are major, rather than minor. All five tracks unspool like discrete parts of a single overarching composition; they’re murky enough that it can become easy to feel lost in the fog, casting about for a recognizable landmark. But even at his bleakest, Burial’s world radiates a sense of calm. The overall effect is as hypnotic as it is haunting: Burial distilled to his most desolate essence.

Antidawn reduces Burial’s music to just the vapours. The record explores an interzone between dislocated, patchwork songwriting and eerie, open-world, game space ambience. In the resulting no man's land, lyrics take precedence over song, lonely phrases colour the haze, a stark and fragmented structure makes time slow down. Antidawn seems to tell a story of a wintertime city, and something beckoning you to follow it into the night. The result is both comforting and disturbing, producing a quiet and uncanny glow against the cold. Sometimes, as it enters 'a bad place', it takes your breath away. And time just stops.

Unfold, the lost follow-up album to Melody’s Echo Chamber’s self-titled debut, will now be available on LP. In their unexpurgated and unvarnished states, sometimes almost finished and sometimes in fragments, Unfold’s seven tracks demonstrate a splurge of righteous creation cut off at an inopportune moment and preserved like the ruins of Pompeii.

The music of Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré was often exported under the banner of “African blues”—a term Touré, who died in 2006, disliked in part because he said his traditions were considerably older. A collaborative tribute from his son Vieux (a well-regarded musician in his own right) and the globally sourced psychedelic band Khruangbin, *Ali* doesn’t try to modernize Touré’s music but also isn’t afraid to put it in conversation with other sounds, from funk (“Tongo Barra”) and ’70s soul (“Alakarra”) to Indian-inspired drone (“Ali Hala Abada”). And as those familiar with Khruangbin’s stuff more generally might understand, it satisfies the magical auditory illusion of being both great background music and music intricate and textured enough to stand up to a closer listen.

Heaven Come Crashing, the sophomore electronic full-length from Brooklyn-based composer and producer Rachika Nayar, finds the protean guitarist and producer pivoting from the ghostly netherworlds of her debut into vivid, fluorescent, cinematic maximalism. On Our Hands Against the Dusk, Nayar used her guitar as the primary source for sound design, mutating the instrument beyond recognition through layers of digital processing. Soon after, the album’s companion EP, fragments, demonstrated the types of raw guitar-playing that would be transfigured into those grander compositions—miniature genre sketches that touched upon everything from post-rock to Midwestern emo. With these two 2021 releases, Rachika resculpted the limits of both guitar and electronic music, placing her at the forefront of various contemporary music scenes in her current home of New York City and more broadly amongst the likes of Fennesz, Julianna Barwick, and Tim Hecker. Heaven Come Crashing retains Nayar’s mangled guitar stylings but expands the color palette by looking not so much to the fretboard, as to the dance floor and the silver screen. Influences enter into the frame ranging from ’90s trance, to early M83, to Yoko Kanno anime soundtracks. With its M1 piano stabs, supersaws, and glimpses of Amen breaks, the album charts a luminescent space between 5 a.m. warehouse raves and the urban freeways of its cover image—romantic, nocturnal, and reckless in its velocity and emotional abandon. On the topic, Nayar says: “I both love and feel so wary of melodrama, because its entire premise is to be uncritical. Taking your most massive emotions at face-value feels so fraught when they partly originate with structures you can’t control, with structures you maybe even feel at war with.” Within this conflicted relationship to its own theatrics, the album wages a battle between surrendering to desire and incinerating it. Heaven Come Crashing invites the listener to revel within fantasy, before helping light the match to burn it down—one final embrace in the dream world before it shatters to pieces ~~~ “Fantasy is scenario, but a scenario in bits and pieces—always very brief, just a glimmer of the narrative of desire. What’s glimpsed is very sharply contoured, very brightly lit, but all of a sudden it’s gone: a body I catch sight of in a car as it goes round a bend, before it plunges into the shadows“ — Barthes, How To Live Together

When Ahmed Ololade put out his *Ololade Asake* EP in February 2022, few people knew what to expect from an eclectic artist whose Olamide-assisted “Omo Ope” remix had announced his belated arrival to mainstream audiences. In the seven months between *Ololade Asake* and the release of this, his debut album, the Lagos-based artist scored further hits and seized control of the Afropop zeitgeist with his dizzying mix of street-inspired lyricism, signature chanted vocals, and a fascinating fusion of amapiano, hip-hop, and Fuji instrumentals. *Mr. Money With The Vibe* sees Asake lean into the larger-than-life persona that songs like “Sungba” and “PALAZZO” established. He details his new realities with swagger—contemplating romance, life, and his position in the game over beats delicately crafted by close creative ally Magicsticks. His flair for experimenting within the amapiano framework continues here as he loops the call-and-response pattern of classic Afrobeat over the log drums, sax, and piano on “Organise.” Elsewhere, he brings back a revamped version of blog-era favorite “Joha” and offers a soulful ode to the grind on “Nzaza.” Russ joins for a cautionary tale on “Reason,” and a blistering remix of “Sungba” sees Burna Boy make an appearance here—but the narrative of *Mr. Money With The Vibe* belongs to Asake alone as he continues to blaze a new path for street-pop.