Listening to Atlanta MC JID’s third studio album *The Forever Story*, it’s hard to imagine the Dreamville signee pursuing a career in anything other than rap, but according to the man born Destin Choice Route, establishing himself as one of his generation’s most clever wordsmiths was plan B. “I ain\'t always want to be a rapper, artist, or nothing like this,” he told Apple Music’s Ebro Darden ahead of the album’s release. “This wasn\'t my dream. This was just like, ‘I’m really fire at this. I\'m really gifted at this.’ I always wanted to be a football player, you feel me? That was my whole shit.” Though he’s long ago moved on from any delusions of playing the sport professionally, the voicemail tacked on to the end of album intro “Galaxy” reveals a closeness to the sport, and more specifically those who helped him learn it. “That\'s my old football coach,” JID says of the voice we hear chewing him out for not answering the phone. “He was just giving me shit. That was his whole demeanor, but it was always for the better. He was my father away from home. He was just a big part of the whole story.” *The Forever Story*, to be specific, is a deep dive into the MC’s family lore and an exploration of what growing up the youngest of seven meant for his outlook. If JID’s last proper album, *The Never Story*, was an introduction to his lyrical prowess and a declaration that he had a story to tell, *The Forever Story* is an expansion of that universe. “*Never* came from a very humble mindset,” he says. “It was coming from, I *never* had shit. *The Forever Story*\'s just the evolved origin story, really just giving you more of who I am—more family stories, where I\'m from, why I am kind of how I am.” He tells these stories in grave detail on songs like “Raydar,” “Can’t Punk Me,” “Kody Blu 31,” and “Can’t Make U Change” and then includes collaborations with heroes-turned-peers (“Stars” featuring Yasiin Bey, “Just in Time” with Lil Wayne) that acknowledge a reverence for his craft. He raps about his siblings on songs like “Bruddanem” and “Sistanem,” but it’s “Crack Sandwich,” a song where the MC details an encounter in which his family fought together, that seems the most like a story JID will enjoy telling forever. “We were all together like Avengers and shit,” he says. “Back-to-back brawling in New Orleans. It was crazy.”
“The de-evolution of man.” That’s how Viagra Boys frontman Sebastian Murphy sums up the theme of the band’s third album. “My inspirations were how divided everyone is, people’s ideas of why things are happening, and just general craziness—especially reactions to the pandemic,” he tells Apple Music. “I was also very inspired by a few documentaries about monkeys.” As always, the American-born vocalist of the Swedish punk group puts a witty and humorous spin on the subject matter, but its roots come from the genuine despair he feels viewing his home country from abroad. “I definitely use the States as a reference point because it’s a real melting pot of insanity, in my opinion,” he says. “I mean, those types of people definitely exist here in Sweden, but they’re not storming the Capitol or anything.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Baby Criminal”** “My girlfriend said, ‘I used to be a baby, now I’m just a criminal.’ She said she had that feeling once, and I could really relate to that. There’s been times in my life where I’ve excused everything I do because I was just a kid. And then it just got to this point where I’m dealing drugs and getting into trouble. I’m just a criminal. But I took a more playful twist on it—I made up a character named Jimmy, who’s this guy sitting in his basement making a nuclear reactor. That’s inspired by a true story. I think there was a kid in the States who did that when he was 14 or something.” **“Cave Hole”** “This is a freestanding interlude made by a guy called DJ Hayden. He works with our producer, and he was working side by side with us while we were recording some of these songs. He makes super-cool electronic music, and I just wanted to have a few weird interludes between the songs. I actually wanted to call the album *Cave Hole*. I like it because it reminds you of a K-hole, so I’m glad I got to fit it into the tracklist.” **“Troglodyte”** “If one of these school shooters or mass shooters were to live back in the days when we were apes, and they had these ideas of doing a mass murder or some shit like that, they wouldn’t have a chance because the other apes would just maul the shit out of them. It’s basically a mixture of me saying that we would have been better off as monkeys, and at the same time, it’s a fuck-you to a lot of these angry idiots with extreme right-wing ideas.” **“Punk Rock Loser”** “I’m painting a picture of this guy who’s a real asshole, but at the same time, I’ve been that asshole as well. It’s a song I could’ve written a couple of albums ago because I was that person. Sometimes I definitely feel like I’m a punk-rock loser. It’s like a flashback to my life five years ago. I’m making fun of it, and I’m also kind of romanticizing it in a way, like when you’re walking down the street and you feel like you’re the king of the world. I love that feeling, but it’s not often I get to feel that way.” **“Creepy Crawlers”** “This is very inspired by this dude I saw get interviewed by Channel 5 News. He started ranting about the vaccine causing kids to grow tails and animal hair. I’m like, ‘How do you know if the hair is human or animal?’ But I have a love for extreme absurdities, like stuff you would read in the *Weekly World News*—stories about two-headed babies or the idea of Hillary Clinton using adrenochrome to stay young, or the idea that the global elite are these reptiles plotting against us. So, this is me putting myself in the shoes of a conspiracy theorist.” **“The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis”** “This is based on a documentary about chimpanzees that has the same title. It’s about this trade-off that happened millions of years ago, when we were all still chimpanzees and lived up in the trees. We could count at incredible speeds to assess a threat really easily, like a pack of predators coming in. When the chimpanzees moved from the trees down to the savanna, they suddenly developed a need to communicate with each other about these threats, like, ‘There’s a lion over there—maybe don’t go there.’ So, they developed the ability to speak, and the theory is that we traded our ability to count things really fast—really good short-term memories—for long-term memories. And my idea is, that’s what fucked us. Long-term memories gave us the ability to plan murder and shit like that. Monkeys don’t think about that. They live in the now.” **“Globe Earth”** “That’s another DJ Hayden thing, and the name is obviously from flat-earthers. When they try to diss us globe-earthers, that’s what they call us. Like, ‘You fucking globe-earther.’ I love it.” **“Ain’t No Thief”** “This is about being accused of something that I obviously did, but being a bit delusional about it, which I have been in many periods of my life. Especially when I was a speed freak, I would get accused of something and I would just be like, ‘How the fuck could you think that about me?’ Like this feeling of being betrayed because someone thinks that you’re a certain way, when in fact you are that way. It’s supposed to be a bit funny.” **“Big Boy”** “We were pretty drunk in the studio at, like, 3 am, and we had this idea of sounding like a ’70s rock band recording a blues song. So, we all got in there and we’re playing our instruments and it sounded like shit. But at the same time, it was cool. We ended up adding a hip-hop beat, and I made up lyrics on the spot that were the stupidest thing I could think of—feeling like a big boy. It goes back to that feeling you had when you were a kid, but you’re an adult. Like, ‘I’m a big boy. I’ve got an apartment with a big TV’—as if that makes you a grown person. It doesn’t. You can still be very childish and pay your rent.” **“ADD”** “I wanted to write a song about ADD because it’s been a part of my life since I was a teenager. I’ve just always had this inability to concentrate, and I forget things all the time. I’ll leave the house without my keys or put something down and forget it right away. Or someone sends me an important email and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to answer this.’ And then I never do. It’s about this inability to do menial tasks—that’s what defines ADD for me. I just can’t motivate myself to do the easiest thing in the world.” **“Human Error”** “This is another DJ Hayden instrumental.” **“Return to Monke”** “I saw a meme that was just a picture of a monkey, and it said, ‘Return to Monke,’ spelled like that. I love meme culture, and especially that meme. So simple and yet so strong. When I wrote the song, I imagined us playing live and I pictured people in the crowd completely losing it and turning into monkeys—flying all over the place, throwing shit, taking off their clothes. It was inspired by Rage Against the Machine as well. I wanted to create a song that people could sing along to, like chanting in a cult. That phrase ‘leave society, be a monkey’ is just taking the piss out of these people who think the world is a big conspiracy against them. Maybe they should just leave.”
The most jarring part about listening to the London band black midi isn’t how much musical ground they cover—post-punk, progressive rock, breakneck jazz, cabaret—but the fact that they cover it all at once. A quasi-concept album that seems to have something to do with war (“Welcome to Hell,” “27 Questions”), or at least the violence men do more generally (“Sugar/Tzu,” “Dangerous Liaisons”), *Hellfire* isn’t an easy listen. But it’s funny (main character: Tristan Bongo), beautiful, at least in a garish, misanthropic way (the Neil Diamond bombast of “The Defence”), and so obviously playful in its intelligence that you just want to let it run over you. The first listen feels like being yelled at in a language you don’t understand. By the third, you’ll be yelling with them.
black midi’s new album Hellfire will be released on 15th July. Hellfire builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet.
To call Conway the Machine’s raps gritty is akin to calling summer in Arizona hot. Take this passage from “Piano Love,” off *God Don’t Make Mistakes*: “We don\'t play fair, drive-bys right in front of the daycare/We spray hairpin triggers, that FN on the waist here/Yeah, garbage bags wrapped around the Ks here/Told you it\'s spooky, my n\*\*\*a, it\'s Camp Crystal Lake here.” He’s long had a way with words, but in 2022, with well over 20 projects to his name, the Buffalo-hailing MC is opening up in a way hasn’t before. Too many lines on *God Don’t Make Mistakes* were likely painful to record. “Not too long after my cousin hung his self/I never told nobody, but I lost a son myself/Imagine bein\' in the hospital, holdin\' your dead baby/And he look just like you, you tryna keep from goin\' crazy,” he raps on “Stressed.” “You don\'t know the feeling of never seein\' your kid again/And it\'s a Russell Wilson-type n\*\*\*a raisin\' your lil\' man/Real shit, I know the feeling, ain\'t seen my son in a minute/BM don\'t answer for me, so fuck her, I\'m in my feelings,” he says on “Tear Gas.” A single like the Daringer- and Kill-produced “John Woo Flick,” with its claims of Conway having “enough shooters on my team to embarrass the Pistons” and a “door on my bedroom thick as a vault,” likely delivered plenty of new ears when it was released in advance of the album. But if it succeeded in bringing listeners all the way through *God Don’t Make Mistakes*, they’ll be leaving knowing as much about the Machine’s life—if not more—as those who’ve heard everything before it.
Traditionally, a band releases their debut album and heads out for an extended stretch on the road, honing their live chops, twisting their songs into new shapes. But when Black Country, New Road released *For the First Time* in February 2021, that route was blocked off by the pandemic. Instead, the London-based band set out to tweak and tamper with their experimental post-rock sound for a transformative second album. They might not have been able to travel, but their music could. “By the time the first album came out, those songs had existed for so long that we were very keen to change the way we wrote music,” bassist Tyler Hyde tells Apple Music. The material that makes up their second record, *Ants From Up There*, soon came to life, the group using the labyrinthine “Basketball Shoes,” which had been around before their debut, as a springboard. “We wanted to explore the themes we’d created on that song,” says Hyde. “It’s essentially three songs within one, all of which relatively cover the emotions and moods that are on the album. It’s hopeful and light, but still looks at some of the darker sides that the first album showed.” The resultant record sees the band hit hypnotic new peaks. *Ants From Up There*, recorded before the departure of singer Isaac Wood in January 2022, is less reliant on jerky, rhythmic U-turns than their debut (although there is some of that), with expansive, Godspeed You! Black Emperor-ish atmospherics emerging in their place. “Fundamentally, we relearned an entirely new style of playing with each other,” says drummer Charlie Wayne. “We learned a lot about how to express ourselves just for each other rather than for anything else going on externally.” Here Hyde, Wayne, and saxophonist Lewis Evans take us through it, track by track. **“Intro”** Lewis Evans: “This uses the theme from ’Basketball Shoes,’ compressed into these little micro cells and repeated over and over again. It’s just a straight-up, impactful welcome to the album.” **“Chaos Space Marine”** Tyler Hyde: “In this song, we allowed ourselves to get out all the stupid, funny joke style of playing. It was just our way of saying yes to everything. There are many things across the album—and in previous songs from the last album—that are seemingly good ideas, but they’ve come about through a joke. I think the rest of the album is much more considered than that. It’s our silly song. It’s a voyage. It’s a sea shanty. It’s a space trip.” **“Concorde”** Charlie Wayne: “I love how it follows the same chord progression the whole way through, and it’s driven but very soft. It’s got real moments of delicacy, and it’s a song that we all thought quite a lot about when we were getting it together. When you’re restricted to that one-chord sequence, you want it to feel as though it’s going somewhere and progressing, so the peaks and troughs have to be considered.” **“Bread Song”** LE: “It’s like two different songs in one. You’ve got this really quite flowing and free track in a melodic and conventional harmonic way, but rhythmically free and flowing accompaniment to Isaac’s vocals. It feels quite orchestral, and the way that we all play together on this recording is so in sync with each other. We were listening to each other so much, so the swells that one person starts making, people start responding to, and everybody is swelling at the same time and getting quieter at the same time. Then it turns into this almost Soweto, kind of township-style pop tune at the end. It’s a really fun ending to an intense, emotional tune.” **“Good Will Hunting”** LE: “This is another slightly silly one, and it’s got a really silly ending which actually never made the cut on the album, but it’s heavily driven by the riff on the guitars. I think at the time we were listening to quite a bit of Kurt Vile, especially rhythmically. I can remember a conversation about when we wanted the drums to come in and to be super straight, super driven. Then for the choruses, rhythmically, to completely flip and not feel like they were big at all. So for both the choruses, the drums are just tiny.” **“Haldern”** TH: “We were playing at Haldern Pop Festival in north Germany during lockdown. We’d just been allowed to fly for work purposes, and we were doing this session. We did two performances there, and the second one was a livestream, and we weren’t allowed to play songs that weren’t released. At the time, that left us with not very much that we weren’t already bored with, so we decided to do some improv. It was a very lucky day where we were all very in sync with one another. So ‘Haldern’ was totally from improv, which is not how we write ever.” **“Mark’s Theme”** LE: “This is a tune written kind of for my uncle who passed away from COVID in 2021. I wrote it on my tenor saxophone as soon as I found out. I just started playing and wrote that. It’s a reflection on him and my feelings towards him passing away and everything being really bleak. He was a massive fan and supporter of the band, so it felt right to put that on the album and to have his name remembered with our music.” **“The Place Where He Inserted the Blade”** CW: “For me, this is about as far away as we went from the first album. Aesthetically, where the first album has moments of real dissonance and apathy, ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’ is very warm and rich and quite uplifting. I think it strikes right to the heart of what the album is for me, which is fundamentally being in the room, making music with my friends.” **“Snow Globes”** LE: “This is another tune where we really thought about what we wanted from it before we wrote it. We had examples of things we liked, and one of them was Frank Ocean’s ‘White Ferrari.’ We liked the idea of it almost being like two different bands \[playing\] at the same time. So you’ve got this quite simple but quite heart-wrenching, fugal-sounding arrangement of all the instruments with a drum solo that is just crazy and doesn’t really relate too much to what is going on in the other instruments. We react to the drum solo, but he doesn’t react to us. It’s that kind of idea.” **“Basketball Shoes”** TH: “It’s essentially a medley of the whole album. It’s got literal musical motifs that are repeated on different songs in the album. It touches on all the themes that we’ve been exploring, and it’s the most climactic song on the album. It wouldn’t really make sense to not finish with it, it’s so exhausting. It’s such a journey. I think you just wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to anything that followed it because you’d be so wiped out after listening to it.”
Black Country, New Road return with the news that their second album, “Ants From Up There”, will land on February 4th on Ninja Tune. Following on almost exactly a year to the day from the release of their acclaimed debut “For the first time”, the band have harnessed the momentum from that record and run full pelt into their second, with “Ants From Up There” managing to strike a skilful balance between feeling like a bold stylistic overhaul of what came before, as well as a natural progression. Released alongside the announcement the band (Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Charlie Wayne, Luke Mark, Isaac Wood, Tyler Hyde and Georgia Ellery) have also today shared the first single from the album, ‘Chaos Space Marine’, a track that has already become a live favourite with fans since its first public airings earlier this year - combining sprightly violin, rhythmic piano, and stabs of saxophone to create something infectiously fluid that builds to a rousing crescendo. It’s a track that frontman Isaac Wood calls “the best song we’ve ever written.” It’s a chaotic yet coherent creation that ricochets around unpredictably but also seamlessly. “We threw in every idea anyone had with that song,” says Wood. “So the making of it was a really fast, whimsical approach - like throwing all the shit at the wall and just letting everything stick.” Their debut “For the first time” is a certain 2021 Album of the Year, having received ecstatic reviews from critics and fans alike as well as being shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. Released in February to extensive, global, critical support - perhaps best summed up by The Times who wrote in their 5/5 review that they were "the most exciting band of 2021" and The Observer who called their record "one of the best albums of the year" - the album made a significant dent on the UK Albums Chart where it landed at #4 in its first week, a remarkable achievement for a largely experimental debut record. The album also reached #1 on Any Decent Music, #2 at Album Of The Year and sat at #1 on Rate Your Music for several weeks, remaining the record to generate the most fan reviews and site discussion there this year. Black Country, New Road were also declared Artist Of The Week and Album Of The Week by The Observer, The Line Of Best Fit and Stereogum, and saw features, including covers and reviews, from the likes of Mojo, NPR, CRACK, Uncut, The Quietus, Pitchfork, The FADER, Loud & Quiet, The Face, Paste, The Needle Drop, DIY, NME, CLASH, So Young, Dork and more. With “For the first time” the band melded klezmer, post-rock, indie and an often intense spoken word delivery. On “Ants From Up There” they have expanded on this unique concoction to create a singular sonic middle ground that traverses classical minimalism, indie-folk, pop, alt rock and a distinct tone that is already unique to the band. Recorded at Chale Abbey Studios, Isle Of Wight, across the summer with the band’s long-term live engineer Sergio Maschetzko, it’s also an album that comes loaded with a deep-rooted conviction in the end result. “We were just so hyped the whole time,” says Hyde. “It was such a pleasure to make. I've kind of accepted that this might be the best thing that I'm ever part of for the rest of my life. And that's fine.” Black Country, New Road's live performances have already gained legendary status from fans and has seen them labelled "one of the UK's best live bands" by The Guardian. After the success of their livestream direct from London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, stand-out performances at SXSW and the BBC 6 Music Festival, and following a sold-out UK tour this summer, high-profile festival appearances, and a 43 date UK & EU tour to follow in the Autumn with sold out US dates next year, the London-based seven-piece today announce further UK & IE dates in support of the album for April 2022, preceded by their biggest London headliner to date at The Roundhouse in February. Black Country, New Road Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road, will be available as part of the Deluxe LP and CD versions of ‘Ants From Up There’. Fans who pre-order any format of ‘Ants From Up There’ from the Black Country, New Road store, their Bandcamp page and the Ninja Tune shop, will be able to gain access to the pre-sale for the 2022 UK headline tour dates. The full set of dates are as follows: 22/10/2021 - Rotondes, Luxembourg 23/10/2021 - Bumann & Sohn, Cologne – DE (SOLD OUT) 24/10/2021 - Botanique Orangerie, Belgium – BE (SOLD OUT) 25/10/2021 - Le Trabendo, Paris - FR 27/10/2021 - Le Grand Mix, Tourcoing - FR 28/10/2021 - Lieu Unique, Nantes - FR 29/10/2021 - Rockschool Barbey, Bordeaux - FR 1/11/2021 - Teatro Duse, Bologna - IT 2/11/2021 - Auditorium Della Mole, Ancona - IT 05/11/2021 - Circolo della Musica, Turin - IT 06/11/2021 - Bogen F, Zürich - CH (SOLD OUT) 08/11/2021 - Underdogs', Prague - CZ (SOLD OUT) 09/11/2021 - Frannz Club, Berlin - DE (SOLD OUT) 10/11/2021 - Hydrozagadka, Warsaw - PL (SOLD OUT) 11/11/2021 - Transcentury Update Warm Up @ UT Connewitz Leipzig - DE 12/11/2021 - Bahnhof Pauli, Hamburg - DE 14/11/2021 - Le Guess Who? Festival, Utrecht - NL 16/11/2021 - Paradiso Noord, Amsterdam - NL (SOLD OUT) 20/11/2021 - Super Bock En Stock, Lisbon - PT 21/11/2021 - ZDB, Lisbon - PT (SOLD OUT) 29/11/2021 - Chalk, Brighton - UK (SOLD OUT) * 30/11/2021 - Junction 1, Cambridge - UK (SOLD OUT) * 01/12/2021 - 1865, Southampton - UK * 03/12/2021 - Arts Club, Liverpool - UK (SOLD OUT) * 04/12/2021 - Irish Centre, Leeds - UK (SOLD OUT) * 06/12/2021 - O2 Ritz Manchester, Manchester – UK * (SOLD OUT) 07/12/2021 - Newcastle University Student Union, Newcastle Upon Tyne - UK * 08/12/2021 - SWG3, Glasgow - UK * 09/12/2021 - The Mill, Birmingham - UK * (SOLD OUT) 10/12/2021 - The Waterfront, Norwich - UK * 12/12/2021 – Marble Factory, Bristol – UK (SOLD OUT) * 13/12/2021 - Y Plas, Cardiff - UK * 15/12/2021 - Whelan's, Dublin - IE (SOLD OUT) * 08/02/2022 - Roundhouse, London - UK 18/02/2022 – DC9 Nightclub, Washington, DC – US (SOLD OUT) 19/02/2022 – The Sinclair, Cambridge, MA – US (SOLD OUT) 22/02/2022 – Sultan Room, Turk’s Inn, Brooklyn, NY – US (SOLD OUT) 23/02/2022 – Elsewhere, Brooklyn, NY – US 25/02/2022 – Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia, PA – US (SOLD OUT) 26/02/2022 – Bar Le Ritz, Montreal, QC – CAN 28/02/2022 – Third Man Records, Detroit, MI – US 01/03/2022 – Lincoln Hall, Chicago, IL – US 03/03/2022 – Barboza, Seattle, WA – US (SOLD OUT) 04/03/2022 – Polaris Hall, Portland, OR – US 05/03/2022 – The Miniplex, Richard’s Goat Tavern, Arcata, CA – US 06/03/2022 – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – US 08/03/2022 – Zebulon, Los Angeles, CA – US (SOLD OUT) 09/03/2022 – Regent Theater, Los Angeles, CA – US 06/04/2022 - The Foundry, Sheffield - UK 07/04/2022 - O2 Academy, Oxford - UK 09/04/2022 - Liquid Room, Edinburgh - UK 10/04/2022 - The Empire, Belfast - UK 11/04/2022 - 3Olympia, Dublin - IE 13/04/2022 - Albert Hall, Manchester - UK 14/04/2022 - Rock City, Nottingham - UK 16/04/2022 - Concorde 2, Brighton - UK 17/04/2022 - O2 Academy, Bristol - UK 02/06/2022 – Primavera Sound Festival, Barcelona - ES 08/07/2022 - Pohoda Festival, Trencin – SK * - with Ethan P. Flynn Pre-sale to The Roundhouse show and April 2022 UK / IE dates available from Tuesday 19th October at 9am BST. Tickets go on general sale on Friday 22nd October at 9am BST.
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.
Like its title suggests, *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You* continues Big Thief’s shift away from their tense, early music toward something folkier and more cosmically inviting. They’ve always had an interest in Americana, but their touchpoints are warmer now: A sweetly sawing fiddle (“Spud Infinity”), a front-porch lullaby (“Dried Roses”), the wonder of a walk in the woods (“Promise Is a Pendulum”) or comfort of a kitchen where the radio’s on and food sizzles in the pan (“Red Moon”). Adrianne Lenker’s voice still conveys a natural reticence—she doesn’t want to believe it’s all as beautiful as it is—but she’s also too earnest to deny beauty when she sees it.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record. In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band met up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. They started the process at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. It was here that the band procured ‘Certainty’ and ‘Sparrow’. For the next session in Topanga Canyon, California, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry in the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think,” including ‘Little Things’, which came out of this session. The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of today’s ‘Time Escaping’ create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. When her puppy Oso ran into the vocal booth during the final take of the song, Adrianne looked down and spoke “It’s Music!” to explain in the best terms possible the reality of what was going on to the confused dog. “It’s Music Oso!” The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. Monks' attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song ‘Change’ for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d captured the practice and it was perfect as it was. The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson, Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle, and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. If the album's main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside. All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.” The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence.
It’s not easy to dance with one’s tongue buried deeply in cheek. But Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul effortlessly combine lean, punchy electro-pop with an unapologetically sarcastic sense of humor. On the Belgian duo’s debut album, *Topical Dancer*, the two musicians draw on their multicultural backgrounds to take sly potshots at racism, sexism, and self-doubt. On “Esperanto,” Adigéry riffs on microaggressions over plunging electric bass, and on “Blenda,” she marries a crisp, funky groove with a surprisingly vulnerable chorus: “Go back to your country where you belong/Siri, can you tell me where I belong?” Co-produced by their longtime collaborators Soulwax, the album slices neatly across the overlap between punky disco, indie dance, and underground house; ’80s avant-pop influences (Art of Noise, Talking Heads) brush up against the sing-speaking wit of contemporaries like Marie Davidson and Dry Cleaning. Some of the album’s most powerful moments transcend language entirely: On “Haha,” Adigéry’s laughter is chopped up and dribbled over an EBM-inspired beat, making for a slow-motion floor-filler that’s as surreal as it is captivating.
‘HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE is a sonic exploration of the ways that subjects under late capitalism are constrained and set in motion via the various structures that uphold stratification and oppression in urban contexts. It is inspired by brutalist, postmodern and utilitarian architectural structures that are found throughout post-industrial cities, hauntological in nature, being designed to provide for the populace through affordable housing but ultimately cost-cutting exercises and unfit for purpose. The term hostile architecture refers to design elements in social spaces that deter the public from using the object for means unintended by the designer, e.g. anti-homeless spikes, which the album presents as emblematic of a foundational contempt for the poor and working class, an exemplification of a status quo fortified in concrete. The album invites the listener to explore the dissonance of these contradictions in their own circumstances and perhaps consider possibilities for a world beyond what Mark Fisher called “Capitalist Realism.”’ Tragic Heroin Video: youtu.be/XBNY-l3NT9s
“Since 2014 we have been releasing albums under the death’s dynamic shroud name in pairs or as individuals, but Darklife is the strongest representation of our combined sensibilities, shifting from heavy electronic dance music to bubblegum pop, from gentle ballads to harsh digital abstractions; it is an outpouring of ideas and acts as a new beginning for the group. Much of the album is about the nature of love as a metaphor for our individual philosophies sparking and melding in the music, examining love as a social construct, or as the fabric of the universe, or as not existing at all. As our debut for 100% Electronica, Darklife can also be seen as a bridge between the underground tape and electronic scene of the 2010s into the dance and pop world the label has been shepherding.” -death’s dynamic shroud CRITICAL RECEPTION 8/10 -The Needle Drop “On a new double album, the experimental collective continues its journey from vaporwave toward fractured, maximalist pop music… Darklife documents DDS’s humanity emerging from their once purely digital world. While it still features the internet-damaged sample manipulation that has become their trademark, it also incorporates more original production, instrumentation, and vocals than previous releases.” -Pitchfork "A dizzying, idea-packed journey into fractured maximalist pop from Death's Dynamic Shroud." -Bandcamp "...Tech Honors, James Webster, and Keith Rankin of Orange Milk Records are in fine form with the new project, which demonstrates a poppier development since their niche beginnings on tracks like "Fall For Me," "Neon Memories," and "Judgement Bolt." -FADER “Stunningly beautiful” -The Needle Drop on ‘Messe de E-102 during NMF The Needle Drop: Best Tracks of the Week in Weekly Track Roundup: 4/17/22" “Messe de E-102” is a spooky electro-pop thriller brimming with tension and triumph." -What's Good on ‘Messe de E-102’ "It’s a bear that death’s dynamic shroud have wrestled with for years and consistently come out on top with adventurous triumphs like 'Neon Memories.'" -FADER on Neon Memories 10 songs you need in your life this week: 4/18/22 "...indie-pop track that evolves into a massive electronic behemoth... there’s never been a better time to be a fan of Death’s Dynamic Shroud." -Lyrical Lemonade on Neon Memories “...Fucking awesome…” -The Needle Drop on ‘Judgment Bolt’ during NMF “‘Judgment Bolt’ continues the search for untraditional dancefloor bangers, channeling Skrillex and the digital miasma of classic vaporwave.” -THE FADER on ‘Judgment Bolt’ “…a pixelated, dancefloor-shaking blur of digitized beats, trippy orchestral passages and mutated vocals that stoke excitement for the full-length to come.” -Columbus Alive on ‘Judgment Bolt’
Unique, strong, and sexy—that’s how Beyoncé wants you to feel while listening to *RENAISSANCE*. Crafted during the grips of the pandemic, her seventh solo album is a celebration of freedom and a complete immersion into house and dance that serves as the perfect sound bed for themes of liberation, release, self-assuredness, and unfiltered confidence across its 16 tracks. *RENAISSANCE* is playful and energetic in a way that captures that Friday-night, just-got-paid, anything-can-happen feeling, underscored by reiterated appeals to unyoke yourself from the weight of others’ expectations and revel in the totality of who you are. From the classic four-on-the-floor house moods of the Robin S.- and Big Freedia-sampling lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” to the Afro-tech of the Grace Jones- and Tems-assisted “MOVE” and the funky, rollerskating disco feeling of “CUFF IT,” this is a massive yet elegantly composed buffet of sound, richly packed with anthemic morsels that pull you in. There are soft moments here, too: “I know you can’t help but to be yourself around me,” she coos on “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA,” the kind of warm, whispers-in-the-ear love song you’d expect to hear at a summer cookout—complete with an intricate interplay between vocals and guitar that gives Beyoncé a chance to showcase some incredible vocal dexterity. “CHURCH GIRL” fuses R&B, gospel, and hip-hop to tell a survivor’s story: “I\'m finally on the other side/I finally found the extra smiles/Swimming through the oceans of tears we cried.” An explicit celebration of Blackness, “COZY” is the mantra of a woman who has nothing to prove to anyone—“Comfortable in my skin/Cozy with who I am,” ” Beyoncé muses on the chorus. And on “PURE/HONEY,” Beyoncé immerses herself in ballroom culture, incorporating drag performance chants and a Kevin Aviance sample on the first half that give way to the disco-drenched second half, cementing the song as an immediate dance-floor favorite. It’s the perfect lead-in to the album closer “SUMMER RENAISSANCE,” which propels the dreamy escapist disco of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” even further into the future.
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”.
There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut LP. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over 40 minute runtime, God’s Country displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.
Recent years have seen a surge of progressive artists find their footing in country music, bringing new and necessary perspectives to a genre traditionally dominated by those of straight white men. Adeem the Artist is one of the finest of that bunch of up-and-comers, introducing their clever, compassionate, and often complex take on country songwriting via 2021’s breakout hit *Cast Iron Pansexual*. *White Trash Revelry* follows that LP, marking Adeem’s first release on their own Four Quarters Records label and building upon its predecessor’s exploration of identity, class, and marginalization. Opener “Carolina” offers Adeem’s origin story, doing so with a level of nuance rarely heard in the genre. “Heritage of Arrogance” and “Redneck, Unread Hicks” both challenge stereotypes of the uneducated Southerner while admitting the region’s many sins. And closer “My America” caps the project with a weary but quietly hopeful vision of the country, though one imbued with a sense of loving skepticism and concern. “It was really important to me that I have a record that had bold, unapologetic representation but also had real characters from my family and my community,” Adeem tells Apple Music. “I wanted it to feel like these are not mutually exclusive characters or ideas. This is the only way we have of moving forward—to allow these voices to live alongside of each other and find some way to get along.” Below, Adeem shares insight into several key tracks on *White Trash Revelry*. **“Carolina”** “My dad named me after Kyle Petty. He’s a NASCAR driver. He’s a songwriter, too—pretty good songwriter. But he’s not the best NASCAR driver. No disrespect. His dad, Richard Petty, was the best NASCAR driver. They call him The King. So, my dad, with no sense of irony, named me after the son of the best ever. I saw that Kyle was playing Johnson City, and I called the owner of the venue, and I was like, ‘Look, I was named after Kyle Petty. I will sell tickets to this show. I will promote my ass off. You don’t have to pay me. Please let me open.’ That was a pretty good deal, so she gave me the gig. So, I wrote this song as I was imagining getting up in a room full of NASCAR fans at The Willow Tree coffee shop in Johnson City, Tennessee, on Bristol race weekend.” **“Heritage of Arrogance”** “I have this memory of being in Charlotte in the early ’90s, and I don’t know if it’s implanted. I don’t know if it’s a true memory or not because everything gets a little muddy back then. But it’s a memory of seeing the Klan gathered on one side of the road, and a bunch of Black activists on the other side of the road, with their fists in the air, all pissed off. And my dad just kind of being like, ‘Yeah, they hate each other.’ I had this idea for this song, and I was trying to remember if it was real or not, or if it was just a story I heard somebody in my family tell or something. And so, I googled to see if the Klan was still holding rallies in Charlotte in the ’90s. And they were. A lot. Probably a true memory.” **“Middle of a Heart”** “I wrote the song mostly for my friend Bob. He was a retired Knoxville police officer and a Navy veteran. He worked on boats. I would go have breakfast with Bob and make him bacon and eggs. And he’d be like, ‘Make some for yourself, buddy.’ We’d watch the birds outside and eat bacon and eggs, and that’s what we did. All of his kids had died and \[his wife\] Carlene died. And we would just sit there and watch TV and watch the birds. He was a good friend to me. He was a dude who disagreed with me about politics more than anybody I’ve ever known, but he put his humanity first. And, yeah, that song’s for him.” **“Redneck, Unread Hicks”** “It becomes really easy to, I don’t know, kind of view the South through a very myopic lens. It’s all white supremacists or bucktoothed rednecks, yada, yada, yada. And it’s endowed with a lot of classism, and it’s a really dangerous form of erasure, too. It’s true that Bill Lee, the \[Tennessee\] governor who ran on dismantling gay marriage, is from this area and that those are his values. But it’s also true that Martin Luther King, Jr. is from this area. Amelia Parker’s from this area; she helped found Black Lives Matter here in Knoxville and now works for the city council. There are a lot of queer folks who have fought hard and a lot of Black folks who have fought hard. There’s a lot more diversity here and a lot more nuance than people want to give it credit for.” **“My America”** “There’s this guy named Aaron Lewis, and he\'s kind of a shithead. He wrote this song called ‘Am I the Only One.’ And in this song, he has lyrics like, ‘Am I the only one willing to bleed for America?’ This guy’s not a fucking veteran. I listened to this song exactly one time, and I felt so annoyed by it that I parodied it in a silly way on Twitter. I said things like, ‘Am I the only one who’s a self-centered child? I’m only mad because my kids won’t call.’ And people told me I should put it on the record, which was really silly. But it did make me think, ‘Man, what if Aaron Lewis had enough compassion and sensitivity and care that he tried to articulate the perspective of the people he was trying to capitalize on? What if he actually loved them? What if he actually tried to understand them?’ And that song became that for me.”
I was born in Gastonia in 1988 a few months after my grandpa Booge died. He no longer remembered dad because of the Alzheimer’s and I can't imagine how painful it must've been for my father. I don't know what their financial situation was like, to be honest. I know that my grandfather had his little garage and that he didn't charge people very much to work on their cars. I know that he worked his daddy’s farm and then as a machinist, then managed an auto-parts store, that they owned a house in Mecklenburg County. Booge was blue-collar and my dad was blue-collar. I can't say if we were ever people of means. I just don’t know. My dad dropped out, got his GED, and started running the lathe when he was a teenager. One time he told me about running away to the beach with a girl he’d pined over. He described it wistfully as a teenager’s dream. She soon grew lackluster, though, and one day she was just gone. I don’t think he ever told me her name but I remember it as Tiffany. My parents were young. Dad was 23 and mom was 19 when they found themselves expecting me. They couldn't afford me. They didn't know each other. They did the Christian thing and we became a family- a package deal. The first place I can remember is the trailer on Thomas Fite in Belmont. I must've been a little over a year old when we moved in there. I played Power Rangers in the yard. Their friends would come ‘round still in the early years. I remember nights of drinking and partying and I remember these as the fondest years. There is warmth there in the trailer. In Locust, our driveway is lined with Pecan trees. Sarah & I, that is my sister, collect them and crack them when it gets cold and we fill bags and we leave them for the postman and the waste workers and Grady & Dessie who lived next door. We eat them too. Pecans are good. At night, I stay up late with my mother and we watch La Femme Nikita on the television together, fawning over Roy Dupuis. It’s a callback to the trailer where we sit snuggled close on the couch with Days of Our Lives flickering on the tube television. Marlena is possessed by a demon and I mention it over dinner. Dad gets so angry about it- me, cozied up studying the drama. Sometimes, my Grandpa- mom's dad- comes over and he smells stale. I can remember the scratch of his beard and the fullness of his laugh. He is mischievous and jovial. Sometimes Uncle Dave stops by, grandpa's brother. He's loud and raucous and funny and full of contagious joy. My uncle Richard lived with us in the trailer- moms brother. Richard has a laugh like grandpa's, like moms- sometimes, I hear it in my own throat if I'm lucky and I try to recreate it like it'll get me closer to grandpa. It's a kind of hiccupping laugh that rises from the gut like a horse, galloping. Richard is some kind of witch or Satanist- I remember through a fog- and he is reading anarchist theory. He tells me that there are demons and teaches me to see spirits in the sky; gives me a charm. It is a silver wolf with red gems for eyes. He likes good music. Mom is smoking Mexican dirt weed on the other side of the trailer. She has two friends in the neighborhood that she spends time with. Mostly we go over to their houses and I am forced to play with her kids. Lucinda is a good friend to my mother. They are bonded by their survival; victims of extreme trauma. Lucinda has bipolar disorder. She lives up the lane in a cul-de-sac. I grow up knowing her as my aunt. Faye is the other friend & alternative neighborhood aunt. Faye lives in a house on the corner that turns down our street. To me, this is the upper echelons of Belmont in my childhood imagination. She lives with Joel who is the first musician I ever meet. Joel plays Dungeons & Dragons. He has long, beautiful hair and very empathetic eyes. He always smells like weed & speaks softly. My mother told me that he was in love with her and asked her many times to leave dad to be with him. Cannot verify. He gives me my first guitar pick- it is 2mm and dark purple. Joel & Faye have been together for several years but they are not married. This is tough for me to understand at this age. When he died, I was in my teenage years. It was an overdose. Faye was devastated. She gave me a CD of his songs. I still have it. He was a beautiful songwriter. I'll never forget giving him his Dungeons & Dragons books back and explaining how they were wrong because they were against the bible. My father was truly proud of me, I think, in that moment though it brings me great shame now. Given the chance, I'd sure like to see him one more time. I’d tell him that while I’ve never made it above level 8 with any character that I’ve still learned a few spells of my own over the last thirty years. In the trailer, dad and I play games together. We wrestle like the fighters on the TV and we line up army men and throw bouncing balls to see who can knock over the most. My dad would take me to hockey games back then and sometimes we would pick up a box of tacos on the way home if the Checkers scored enough points. I loved Chubby and the cold games with my dad. We had souvenir Checkers cups and a brown food processor. Dad would toss ice cream, milk, and peanut butter in that food processer and we would have peanut butter milkshakes on weekends. We'd drink them out of the Checkers cups. Mom is obsessed with Collective Soul and Nine Inch Nails. We play it on the boombox while they take turns playing Final Fantasy III. One day, mom is so scared by a level that she calls dad and asks him to come home and help her & he does. The building where my dad works looks like a castle and it smells like the metal that is cut and milled by the big machines. His work shirts stink of aldehydes & ketones & even now, I sometimes catch a faint taste of it and I’m instantly transported back. These are some of my favorite memories. Cigarette stained memories. Alcohol scented memories. Everyone is loud. Everyone is profane. Every callous exchange imbued with irreverent humor. Aunt Peggy & her twin sister Daphne’s harmonious, boisterous laughter. Marty’s Budweiser breath, gravel voice full of slurred words and his childlike demeanor, soft & sad & pitiable like a wounded bird. Even now I can almost hear Aunt Peggy singing with her breathy, mournful soprano. My grandma tells me that my parents are lying to me and that there are monsters under the bed. She says if I get up in the night, they'll eat me. Also, I'm getting very fat. I can't say if Booge's Alzheimer’s and death severely wounded her but from stories I'm told, I surmise she was always a little evil. But she feeds me chicken skins and vinegar and buys me action figures from the dollar store. Absolute elation. In the yard at her 700 sq. ft house, I play with uncle Porter’s old toys. Po was a card, my dad tells me. He died on the lawn and nobody did anything. My cousin reminds everyone in the family of Po and for many years I looked up to him as one of the few to get out okay. I still do. Po’s boy made himself a family now. Married his dream girl and they worked together on a pair of sons sweeter than a cobbler. He comes to pick me up from school before the bell rings and I am enraptured with this vicious, frenetic energy. In the parking lot, he asks me what the safe word is and I tell him. “You were supposed to ask me!” He says. “Did you bring the Sega?” I have these power ranger action figures- a whole mess of them- and Ninja Turtles too. The power rangers’ masks pivot into their chests to reveal their natural faces. The pink ranger is in love with me. I am in love with the white ranger (formerly green) and the way the sun sets on the trailer park adjacent to our lot in reds and oranges and purples. Out in the yard, I am assembling a circus of slugs. They have assigned roles but they are underperforming and I am conducting their torpid, enervating movements with a loblolly twig and a hint of mischief. I am enamored with slugs the moment I discover them. The ignominious love affair is short-lived but oft-recalled in pleasantries and hindsight. Mom has met Jesus at a Baptist Church, though. She’s crying when she comes home and has repented from her life of sin. She tells me about him in hurried, urgent breaths. Later, she tells me that upon my birth she offered me up to God as a gift to him. Cannot verify. Certainly, though, I was born into the faith of my ancestors. Christianity was my birthright and though I try to reimagine, it will always stain the pages of my moral guide. I am twenty-two years old when I leave my parents’ house for the first time, out into the infinite unknown. In a flurry of symbolism and rage, my unconscious exorcises the first large, looming specter of my childhood trauma & I am thrust towards the truest parts of myself uncomfortably, armed with a watered-down accent and an arsenal of potato chip casserole recipes. My entire childhood is white trash revelry. Big Dave, the biker my grandfather is friends with, who is on the run from the Hell’s Angels’ pops by the trailer for a meal. Richard brings his girlfriend by and they smoke a joint and we rent a film from the blockbuster in Gastonia. I wish I could slip back inside. I wish I could visit the trailer and see my parents in their youth, still full of hope and playing video games. I wish I could make my grandpa pizza. I'm proud of the way I resemble him when my beard is full and I bet he would love my pizza. I feel so far and away from all of the people who were pillars of my youth. Hardly a one remains. I am just this lost villager from a forgotten & abandoned people; a punchline in some white liberal's social media diatribe. A white trash wanderer- living ghost of my ancestors. ++++++++ This record was funded largely through $1 contributions via Venmo, Cashapp, & PayPal from people who believed in me or thought it was a quirky fundraising idea. It was an impossible dream to create this album that meant so much to me manifested by the kindness of others. The above essay was written 2 years ago and the songs on this record largely fell out of it. The players on this record were folks I had dreamed to be able to pay well to perform with. The studio we recorded in was a block or so from the first apartment I ever lived on my own. A lot of meaningful pieces came together for this and it all began with a phone call to my friend Kyle on October 30th, 2021. I said, "I want you to do something on my new album yet but I haven't decided what yet." He said, "Why don't you let me produce it & my buddy Robbie Artress can engineer?" I said, "Well, we'd have to raise at least 5k by the end of the week to hire the folks I'd want to hire and all that." Kyle said, "Maybe you can, I don't know." So, that night I posted a silly Tik Tok saying all I needed was 15,000 people to donate $1 each for the album to be funded. That included a budget for production, mastering, publicist, radio, & the whole shebang. By Tuesday, we had $5,000. I paid for the studio time and started asking people if they'd come. By the end of December, all the parts had been tracked & I was slack jawed. I threw a little party at my buddy Troy's tattoo shop. We got tattoos and ate barbecue & listened to the first mixes and took photos for the album cover & accompanying lyric book. What a rush, the whole thing. A whirlwind.
In the eight years since their last album, punk supergroup OFF! has gone through a significant lineup shift. Vocalist Keith Morris (also of the Circle Jerks) and guitarist Dimitri Coats remain, but they’re joined on *Free LSD* by new drummer Justin Brown (Thundercat) and bassist Autry Fulbright II, formerly of …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. And while the music maintains the short-sharp-shock tactics OFF! is known for, *Free LSD* is peppered with jazz-skronk interludes and features a lyrical direction that was birthed out of *Blowmind Show*, Morris’ podcast with Thelonious Monster drummer Pete Weiss. “These songs are based on conspiracy theories,” Morris tells Apple Music. “And ultimately these conspiracy theories come back to our government or to heads of corporations or to scientists who are on the wrong track. I’m mostly talking about evil, greedy people who only want us to buy stuff. And they’ve dragged us along with them. I would love to be an optimist, but we’ve dug ourselves into a hole that’s going to be extremely difficult to get out of.” Below, he discusses some key songs from the album. **“War Above Los Angeles”** “In our unidentified flying object research, Pete and I came upon an incident that happened…well, before we had rockets—because if we’d had rockets, we would’ve fired them upon this thing. So, a big silver object is moving through the sky at a snail’s pace. They don’t know what it is. And, of course, when they don’t know what something is, they send the military to start firing upon it with guns and tanks. So it flies over Los Angeles and heads out over the ocean around Santa Monica Bay. It goes out a mile or two, turns around, and comes back. And then it disappears.” **“Kill to Be Heard”** “Dimitri and I were listening to a lot of Ravi Shankar. When George Harrison went on a spiritual quest to India, he learned to play sitar, and he couldn’t have had a better instructor than Ravi Shankar, who was one of the greatest sitar players to ever live. He had an Indian orchestra playing tablas and sitars and other instruments from that part of the world. Dimitri picked up on bits and pieces of that stuff and turned them into riffs for our songs. I think you can really hear the Ravi Shankar in this song.” **“Murder Corporation”** “We wouldn’t have NASA if it wasn’t for Wernher von Braun. At the end of World War II, there was a mad scramble between us and the Soviet Union to scoop up all of these German scientists because they were designing military capabilities—like the first fighter jet—that were much better than ours. So we got Wernher von Braun on our side, and he’s responsible for all of our rocket technology. This is a guy who was a Nazi, a member of the SS, and he becomes a key figure in NASA.” **“Suck the Bones Dry”** “One of the threads that’s happening through our songs is the everyday man versus the powerful people that want to step on us. These people are only happy when we’re buying products and pumping gas into our cars, and there’s one person per car and we’re driving a hundred miles a day to go to work. So, ‘Suck the Bones Dry’ is an us-versus-them song. We’re trained from birth to be a culture of shitheads, and the powerful will twist everything around to fit their agenda.” **“Free LSD”** “A flood of bands came out of Laurel Canyon in the ’60s, like Buffalo Springfield, Love, The Byrds, The Mamas & The Papas, and Frank Zappa’s band. Neil Young was hanging out with Mama Cass and David Crosby, and they were all doing LSD and partying. Where did that LSD come from? It’s believed that 400 million hits of free LSD were given out in Southern California. All these clubs had just opened on Sunset Boulevard, and they needed bands to play to draw people into these venues. And they all came from Laurel Canyon. It’s interesting, because The Byrds didn’t even play on some of their early songs. It’s the Wrecking Crew playing the instruments.”
From his first releases as the Meridian Brothers in the late 2000s, Colombian artist Eblis Álvarez has served as a kind of rogue anthropologist, conjuring ghosts of Latin music with a sense of color and imagination that makes the past feel like the undiscovered country it is. Conceived of as a lost album by a B-grade ’70s salsa dura band, *Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento* is both his most idiosyncratic LP and his most straightforward. You’ll notice some sour harmonies and trails of echo and a generally rubbery air that tells you you’re not in Bogotá anymore (“Descarga profética,” “Metamorfosis”). But the rhythms are ripe and the playing is hard, and no matter how far out Álvarez gets, the music stays grounded in the feet and the guts. This isn’t nostalgia—it’s homemade party music for the day after the apocalypse (“Bomba Atómica”).
'Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento' excavates the forgotten sounds of the fantastical 1970s salsa dura group El Grupo Renacimiento. The group identifies as “B-class” salsa whose music explores human struggles in the urban city landscape, with themes such as police brutality, social marginalization, and addiction. Meridian Brothers collaborated with El Grupo Renacimiento in Bogota's Isaac Newton studios to capture their "fantasy salsa dura” sound. Although the group came out of myth, its members have been created in spirit. Embodied by Meridian Brothers and depicted in the graphic creations of illustrators Glenda Torrado and Mateo Rivano, the members of El Grupo Renacimiento have now come to life. *** ELGRUPO RENACIMIENTO está de vuelta con más Latin-soul, y salsa clase B para la juventud. Nos complacemos en presentar al Grupo Renacimiento. Uno de los grupos más resignados de la escena salsera colombiana de los años setenta, su estilo y molde perseguidos insistentemente por los eternos buscadores de la fama internacional, toman como base las provocativas y bailables melodías de este conjunto musical que ha permanecido sepultado por las ingratitudes del olvido social y el desprecio del público. Ya en los años setenta este conjunto de estilo Latin-soul, había cautivado los corazones de la juventud bogotana inspirando más que varias expresiones de aceptación, guiños interesados y admiración por parte de su club de seguidoras. Desgraciadamente, la vida y los avatares de la juventud hicieron que todos los integrantes de este virtuoso septeto cayeran en LA DROGA y el olvido. Sin embargo, después de una larga rehabilitación el GRUPO RENACIMIENTO vuelve a grabar, de la mano de las producciones de los estudios Isaac Newton en el barrio Teusaquillo y logran poner en las listas de reproducción de la Internet sus temas "La policía" y "Poema del salsero resentido". Al amparo del nombre GRUPO RENACIMIENTO, existen historias simpáticas que se transforman en verdaderas joyas antológicas latinocéntricas que propios y extraños cantarán, y a la luz de 2022, junto al sello legendario ANSONIA, presentamos un LP completo que hace justo honor a la trayectoria y trascendencia que EL GRUPO RENACIMIENTO ha merecido largamente. Después de que el talento plasmado en este LP penetre la interfaz de percepción del público joven y con ello el tan deseado baile que las nuevas generaciones buscan incansablemente para lograr algo de diversión y relajación en sus hoy desdichadas vidas, el GRUPO RENACIMIENTO habitará nuevamente en el corazón de los jóvenes con sus locuras y acciones excéntricas. LANZAMIENTO DEL DISCO COMPLETO: 4 de Agosto de 2022 a las 3:00 AM hora colombiana
“I like that rock ’n’ roll is simple, that it’s 12 bars—the ineptitude of it,” Jason Pierce tells Apple Music. It’s a funny statement to hear from an artist notorious for spending years meticulously fine-tuning his records and hiring enough guest instrumentalists to fill a 747. But as the Spiritualized leader has proven time and time again in his three decades of space-rock exploration, minimalism provides the clearest path to maximalism. “I like the American bands that wanted desperately to sound like The Rolling Stones, but by pure accident, it all came out wrong, and it became their own thing. They were just seeing where it goes. And I still follow that. With records, they say the devil’s in the details, and there’s thousands of details on the record. I’m trying to find a way of crushing all these things together to make something that doesn’t sound like anything else.” On Spiritualized’s ninth album, two of those details jump out at you: a woman’s voice announcing the title of the record, followed by a lunar-shuttle transmission beep—the very same effects that introduced their 1997 psychedelic-gospel masterwork, *Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space*. And much like that album’s opening track, *Everything Was Beautiful*’s first song, “Always Together With You,” builds a simple repeated melody and romantic lyric into an orchestral surge that’s a little overwhelming. It’s the first of many audio Easter eggs on an album that takes a number of sonic and lyrical cues from Spiritualized’s trailblazing ’90s-era explorations in interstellar rock, to the point that *Everything Was Beautiful* often feels like a greatest-hits retrospective made of new songs. But as much as he’s cultivated a reputation as an all-seeing auteur, Pierce insists such callbacks aren’t part of some grand design. For instance, the seeds for “Always Together With You” were actually first planted back in 2014, when an embryonic version of the song appeared on a Record Store Day compilation called *Space Project*, which featured songs incorporating recordings captured by NASA. Pierce knew he always wanted to take another pass on that hastily recorded demo, but even after embellishing it into the rapturous curtain-raiser we hear on *Everything Was Beautiful*, he still felt it was missing something—until work on the 2021 reissue of *Ladies and Gentlemen* inspired a late-game revision. “I felt like it was a big ask to have people listen to six minutes of three-note chords at the top of an album, and I couldn’t resolve that,” Pierce says. “I couldn’t find a way that I wanted to listen to it and present it. So, I did two very simple steals—the transmission beep from the Apollo landing, which is at the top of *Ladies and Gentlemen*, and the announcement of the album. Suddenly, the whole thing felt like a strange transmission—like somebody outside of the planet looking down. It adds some kind of drama to it that wasn’t there.” Such spur-of-the-moment decisions defined the creation of *Everything Was Beautiful*, which is effectively the second half of a double album that began with 2018’s *And Nothing Hurt*. (The titles form a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s *Slaughterhouse-Five*.) Pierce is grateful his record company talked him out of approaching the two albums as a single piece. “My focus was too wide,” he says. “If I had tried to do the whole thing together, I think I’d still be working on it now.” By splitting the project into two separate releases, Pierce gave himself the time and space to exhale and let the songs evolve according to his gut instincts rather than some master plan. To wit, the epic centerpiece track “The Mainline Song” began life as a tremolo-heavy instrumental in the vein of longtime live favorite “Electric Mainline” (“It was almost like giving the audience an intermission,” Pierce says) only to suddenly receive lyrics late in the process and get reborn as the album’s most exultant anthem. Even the seemingly simple country ballad “Crazy” had, in Pierce’s words, “its own perverse end.” Due to budgetary constraints, Pierce’s original vision of an orchestral serenade modeled after Lee Hazlewood and Jimmy Holliday gave way to a Mellotron-backed recording, and when he couldn’t decide between two different mixes of the song, he opted to use both in separate channels. But as a result, “Crazy” transcends the realm of pure country pastiche and takes on the undefinable, otherworldly quality that’s allowed Spiritualized to maintain their own lofty orbit for more than 30 years. “Most people edit down—they have 15, 16 tracks that they edit down to eight or nine for an album,” Pierce says. “I feel like I edit up: I haven’t got enough songs to ever edit something out of the equation, so I drag everything up to be the best it could be. And as some songs get better, the bar gets raised for the others.”
London duo Jockstrap first gained attention in 2018 with an almost unthinkable fusion of orchestral ’60s pop and avant-club music. On their debut album, conservatory grads Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye continue to push against convention while expanding the outline of their sui generis sound. Skye’s electronic production is less audacious this time out; *I Love You Jennifer B* is more of a head listen than a body trip. There are a few notable exceptions: The opener, “Neon,” explodes acoustic strumming into industrial-strength orchestral prog; “Concrete Over Water” violently crossfades between a pensive melody reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and zigzagging synths recalling Hudson Mohawke’s trap-rave. But most of the album trains its focus on guitars, strings, and Ellery’s crystalline coo, leaving all the more opportunities to marvel at her unusual lyricism. Her writing returns again and again to questions of desire and regret, and while it can frequently be cryptic, she’s not immune to wide-screen sincerity: In “Greatest Hits,” when she sings, “I believe in dreams,” you believe her—never mind that she’s soon free-associating images of Madonna and Marie Antoinette. And on “Debra,” when she sings, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go” over a cascading beat that sounds like Kate Bush beamed back from the 22nd century, all of Jockstrap’s occasional impishness is rendered moot. At just 24 years old, these two are making some of the most grown-up pop music around.
When Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye make music as Jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy. Meeting in 2016 when they shared the same com- position class while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ellery and Skye founded Jockstrap as a creative outlet for their rapidly-developing tastes. While Ellery had moved from Cornwall to the English capital to study jazz violin, Skye arrived from Leicester to study music production. Both were delving deep into the varied worlds of mainstream pop, EDM and post-dubstep (made by the likes of James Blake and Skrillex), as well as classical composition, ‘50s jazz and ‘60s folk singer-songwriters. The influence of the club and a dancier focus, which was hinted at on previous releases, now scorches through their new material like wildfire. Take the thumping, distorted breakbeats of ‘50/50’ –inspired by the murky quality of YouTube mp3 rips –as well as the sparkling synth eruptions of ‘Concrete Over Water’, as early evidence of where Jockstrap are heading next. Jockstrap’s discography is restless and inventive, traversing everything from liberating dancefloor techno to off-kilter electro pop, trip-hop and confessional song writing; an omnivorous sonic palette that takes on a cohesive maturity far beyond their ages of only 24 years old. They have cemented themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures.
“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
**100 Best Albums** In 2017, *Ctrl*—a 14-track project rife with songs about love, sex, self-doubt, and heartbreak—became one of the most influential albums in R&B. *Ctrl* was the soundtrack for many people in their twenties, highlighting the growing pains of young adulthood. SZA’s vulnerability and raw honesty, coupled with ultra-relatable lyrics full of diary-like ruminations and conversations from friend group chats, are what made her debut so impactful. Where *Ctrl* reflected SZA’s journey towards finding self-love and acceptance, her long-awaited sophomore LP *SOS* finds the St. Louis-born singer-songwriter dealing with some of the same topics of love and relationships from a more self-assured place. She ditches the uncertainties of her romantic entanglements to save herself—most of the time. On the soulful and gritty album opener “SOS,” SZA reintroduces herself and says precisely what’s on her mind after a night of crying over a lost relationship: “I talk bullshit a lot/No more fuck shit, I’m done,” she swaggers. This isn’t the only song that shows her weariness towards relationships that no longer serve her; see also “Smoking on My Ex Pack” and “Far.” She finds the confidence to know that she doesn’t need to depend on a man to find happiness on “Conceited” and “Forgiveless.” However, not every song on the project is about moving on and leaving her past relationships behind her; SZA still has a penchant for making wrong decisions that may not end well for her (“Too Late,” “F2F”) and questions her worth in some instances (“Special”). The album sketches the ebbs and flows of emotions, with strength in one moment but deep regret and sadness the next. There’s growth between her debut and sophomore album, not just lyrically but sonically as well, blending a mix of her beloved lo-fi beats and sharing space with grunge- and punk-inspired songs without any of it sounding out of place. On the Phoebe Bridgers collaboration “Ghost in the Machine,” the duo take a deeper look at the realities of stardom, looking for a bit of humanity within their day-to-day interactions. The track is not only progressive in its use of strings and acoustic guitars but haunting in its vocal performance. Throughout the journey of *SOS*, there are moments of clarity and tenderness where SZA goes through the discomfort of healing while trying to find the deeper meaning within the trials and tribulations she endures. She embraces this new level of confidence in her life, where she isn’t looking for anyone to save her from the depth of her emotions but instead is at peace with where she’s at in life.
We only hear acclaimed hip-hop producer Kenny Beats’ voice one time—that we can be sure of—on *LOUIE*. On “The Perch,” a young Beats can be heard interacting with his father, Kenneth Blume II, as co-host of a fictional radio show his father conjured up to give personality to the mixtapes he would make for friends and family. *LOUIE* is likewise a gift, from Beats (Kenneth Blume III) to his father, created in December 2020 after finding out his dad had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Though *LOUIE* contains a heap of vocalist features—including contributions from Vince Staples, Mac DeMarco, slowthai, JPEGMAFIA, Thundercat, Omar Apollo, and Fousheé, among others—there is very little in the way of formal verses. The project is much closer to an audio collage, with Beats curating moods across the project’s 17 tracks through a combination of sampling and live musical arrangement. None of the directions he takes things in are particularly obvious for the man who’s produced entire albums for artists like Vince Staples, 03 Greedo, KEY!, and Denzel Curry, to name but a few. Here, he’s spotlighting some of his favorite musical factors, exalting bright guitar licks on “Hold My Head,” a pacing akin to lovers rock reggae on “Hooper,” and on “Rotten,” a neo-soul aura so true it would make the Soulquarians proud. The beat for “Still,” which features contributions from JPEGMAFIA, is maybe the single thing a classically operating MC might rush to rap over. Without speaking directly to Beats, or even Kenneth Blume II, it’d be impossible to decipher the musical connections and/or messages *LOUIE* carries for Beats’ father. Most of the speech is distorted, and few samples therein are anywhere near as recognizable as the usage of Foster Sylvers’ “Misdemeanor” on “Drop 10.” But the fact that we’ve been granted access to what is essentially a love letter from a son to his ailing father—Beats’ original plan for *LOUIE* did not include releasing it publicly—is proof that no matter how far the producer goes, he’ll never forget where he got his rhythm.
From his formative days associating with Raider Klan through his revealing solo projects *TA13OO* and *ZUU*, Denzel Curry has never been shy about speaking his mind. For *Melt My Eyez See Your Future*, the Florida native tackles some of the toughest topics of his MC career, sharing his existential notes on being Black and male in these volatile times. The album opens on a bold note with “Melt Session #1,” a vulnerable and emotional cut given further weight by jazz giant Robert Glasper’s plaintive piano. That hefty tone leads into a series of deeply personal and mindfully radical songs that explore modern crises and mental health with both thematic gravity and lyrical dexterity, including “Worst Comes to Worst” and the trap subversion “X-Wing.” Systemic violence leaves him reeling and righteous on “John Wayne,” while “The Smell of Death” skillfully mixes metaphors over a phenomenally fat funk groove. He draws overt and subtle parallels to jazz’s sociopolitical history, imagining himself in Freddie Hubbard’s hard-bop era on “Mental” and tapping into boom bap’s affinity for the genre on “The Ills.” Guests like T-Pain, Rico Nasty, and 6LACK help to fill out his vision, yielding some of the album’s highest highs.
Melt My Eyez See Your Future arrives as Denzel Curry’s most mature and ambitious album to date. Recorded over the course of the pandemic, Denzel shows his growth as both an artist and person. Born from a wealth of influences, the tracks highlight his versatility and broad tastes, taking in everything from drum’n’bass to trap. To support this vision and show the breadth of his artistry, Denzel has enlisted a wide range of collaborators and firmly plants his flag in the ground as one of the most groundbreaking rappers in the game.
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.
With their first album in seven years, Bay Area death-metal titans Autopsy continue the gore-splattered comeback run they began with 2011’s *Macabre Eternal*. This time, the classic lineup of vocalist/drummer Chris Reifert and guitarists Danny Coralles and Eric Cutler are joined by new bassist Greg Wilkinson (also of Brainoil), who signed on in 2021. “What’s Greg bringing to the table?” Reifert asks, repeating Apple Music’s question. “A lot of liquor, so there’s that. But he’s also adding some cool dimensions to the songs and coming up with some really creative basslines. He’s just a cool person to have around, too.” On *Morbidity Triumphant*, Reifert returns to the fertile lyrical ground of early Autopsy staples like 1989’s *Severed Survival*, writing songs inspired by ’80s horror movies, serial killers, and bizarre cults of his own creation. Below, he comments on each track. **“Stab the Brain”** “We wanted to start off with something right out of the gate that just laid into things. We wanted to immediately stab your brain musically. Lyrically, it’s about a cult ritual where a woman is standing over a coffin spread-legged and squirts a baby out into the coffin and then stabs it in the brain. So, that part’s pretty literal. Things get nonsensical from there—all of a sudden, she’s like a dead queen that everyone needs to worship.” **“Final Frost”** “The end of the world is a popular theme in metal because the apocalypse is always fun to talk about. But rather than the Earth going up in a scorching ball of flame or something like that, it slowly freezes, and everyone gradually turns into frozen statues. I tried to pick interesting words that fit together well, that aren’t just like, ‘You’ve been hacked in half’ or whatever. Everything’s been done, so you’ve got to do better these days. Greg wrote the riff to that song. That was his contribution to the album, and he did a hell of a job.” **“The Voracious One”** “There’s two songs on this album that harken back to my favorite scenes from horror movies or horror stories from the olden days. I just had a rare moment of horror reflection, I guess. For some reason, I thought about that story from the first *Creepshow*, whether it’s from the movie or the book—‘The Crate.’ We used to write about horror stuff more back in the old days, on *Severed Survival* and stuff, but now we hardly ever do it anymore. But fuck, there’s no rules here. Musically, it’s a slower kind of shambling, stoner-y thing.” **“Born in Blood”** “Lyrically, this doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot. It’s just blood and guts and gruesomeness and all things slimy and squishy and nasty. It\'s not a cohesive story, but I did steal the title from a line in the new *Dexter* season, so that kind of stood out. Musically, this is pretty old-school death metal, to use that tired old chestnut of a term. It’s pretty straightforward, but it’s a lot of fun.” **“Flesh Strewn Temple”** “This is a Danny song—he wrote most of the riffs for the record. Lyrically, it’s another cult reference, this time about a modern-day human sacrifice cult. I imagine it exists in some remote place in the world that no one goes to and that has no access to technology or anything like that. One of those places that’s frozen in time but still exists in 2022. And there’s flesh strewn everywhere, pretty much.” **“Tapestry of Scars”** “That one is about someone who’s super into self-harm—cutting and scarring and all that—but in an artistic way. Not even because they’re trying to make up for something wrong with their life or whatever—or maybe that’s completely what it’s about. Either way, they’re obsessed with turning their entire body into one giant scab or cut or sore or scar or whatever. The object is to have nothing unscarred, from head to toe—not even a millimeter. So, you’re a walking tapestry or scars, basically.” **“Knife Slice, Axe Chop”** “This is another rare moment of reflection. I’m usually not a looking-back person. But I thought it’d be cool to do a song about watching horror movies back when we were obsessed with finding the goriest, splatter-iest, bloodiest movies. Just go to the video store, rent a pile of movies, and watch them over and over. You’re rewinding your favorite scenes, like, ‘Did you see that head fly across the street?’ I think the video we did for this one perfectly captured that essence.” **“Skin by Skin”** “That one is about someone that preys on people who are vulnerable. They meet people in the street and say, ‘Hey, I’ll take you home and make you safe and give you food and shelter.’ And then, when it’s too late to get out, they notice everything in the entire house is made of human skin sewn together: faces, legs, hands, feet, torsos—you name it. I’m talking the ceiling, the floor, the walls, everything. And guess what? This person that just got suckered into the house is the next piece.” **“Maggots in the Mirror”** “Here’s another one where I was thinking about a scene from an old horror movie. I don’t know why I thought of it, but I had a flashback to the scene in *Poltergeist* where the dude is looking in the mirror and, next thing you know, he’s ripping his face off and shit. Kind of a classic scene. So, that was the inspiration for that one. One of my favorite lines in the song is, ‘Your face is a worm farm.’ I prefer not to reference old movies anymore, but once in a while, you’ve just got to fucking go for it.” **“Slaughterer of Souls”** “This is another one that’s not really about anything in particular. It’s just a matter of putting cool words together in cool structures. There’s no storyline. Looking back at the lyrics, it just seems like a kind of weird psychosis that I can’t explain. I was alerted to the At The Gates album *Slaughter of the Soul*, but this is just different enough to not worry about it. Plus, we’re not calling our album that. Plus, At The Gates is cool, so it’s not a terrible thing to be mentioned with.” **“Your Eyes Will Turn to Dust”** “Again, there’s no storyline on this one. It’s just a title that sounded cool and kind of scary. It’s just words strung together in a way that I thought was cool. And it’s fun to read. Even if it wasn’t set to music, it’s something I can trip out on reading.”
THE LONG-AWAITED FULL-LENGTH RETURN OF THE US DEATH METAL PIONEERS FOR A NEW BOUT OF SUPREME SICKNESS. “Absolutely brilliant. "Morbidity Triumphant" is definitely one of the year's best death metal albums” - Blabbermouth Since first bursting onto the death metal scene with the now genre classic ‘Severed Survival’ back in 1989, and following up with the equally revered ‘Mental Funeral’ album, the influential US quartet has carved an unwavering legacy over three decades as masters and purveyors of the vile sides of the extreme metal spectrum. And now, Autopsy marks its reinvigorated return, presenting the first new full-length studio opus since 2014’s ‘Tourniquets, Hacksaws and Graves’ with ‘Morbidity Triumphant’; a savage offering of brutal death, showing the US legends still have an unbridled hunger for the sadistic, never reluctant to step beyond the threshold of decency. ‘Morbidity Triumphant’, the band’s eighth album, is truly a dark delight for seasoned and new listeners alike, with a raw organic sound perfectly encapsulating what makes Autopsy so distinguishable among its peers, for what could easily be considered one of its strongest offerings to date. The driving force of Autopsy as ever is the virtuoso guitar pairing of Eric Cutler and Danny Coralles, effortlessly trading off their schizophrenic leads and switching from all-out death metal madness to groove-laden heavy doom, with unmistakable drum/vocal legend Chris Reifert being master of proceedings, spewing his own infinitely creative maniacal musings. ‘Morbidity Triumphant’ also notably marks the first album to feature new bassist Greg Wilkinson, currently also seen in Static Abyss along with Chris. ‘Morbidity Triumphant’ was recorded at Opus Studios, with long-associated engineer Adam Munoz at the helm. Mastering was completed by Ken Lee. The cover artwork appears courtesy of Wes Benscoter (Slayer, Bloodbath), with a new work of twisted and sinister genius. Autopsy will be supporting ‘Morbidity Triumphant’ with a series of dates throughout the remainder of 2022.
Like AC/DC before them, Beach House’s gift lies in managing to make what feels like the same album a hundred different ways. Even the new inflections on *Once Twice Melody*—the string section of “ESP,” the rhythmic nods to hip-hop (“Pink Funeral”) and Italo-disco (“Runaway”)—fit immediately into their plush, neon-lit world. And while specific moments conjure specific eras (“Superstar” the triumph of an ’80s John Hughes movie, “Once Twice Melody” a swirl of ’60s surrealism), the cumulative effect is something like a fairytale rendered in sound: majestic, inviting, but dark enough around the edges to keep you off-balance. And just like that (snap), they do it again.
Once Twice Melody is the 8th studio album by Beach House. It is a double album, featuring 18 songs presented in 4 chapters. Across these songs, many types of style and song structures can be heard. Songs without drums, songs centered around acoustic guitar, mostly electronic songs with no guitar, wandering and repetitive melodies, songs built around the string sections. In addition to new sounds, many of the drum machines, organs, keyboards and tones that listeners may associate with previous Beach House records remain present throughout many of the compositions. Beach House is Victoria Legrand, lead singer and multi-instrumentalist, and Alex Scally, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. They write all of their songs together. Once Twice Melody is the first album produced entirely by the band. The live drums are by James Barone (same as their 2018 album, 7), and were recorded at Pachyderm studio in Minnesota and United Studio in Los Angeles. For the first time, a live string ensemble was used. Strings were arranged by David Campbell. The writing and recording of Once Twice Melody began in 2018 and was completed in July of 2021. Most of the songs were created during this time, though a few date back over the previous 10 years. Most of the recording was done at Apple Orchard Studio in Baltimore. Once Twice Melody was mixed largely by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann.
*“You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. You’ve been in the dark for way too long. It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms. Scared? Don’t worry. We’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through this painless transition. But what’s the rush? Just relax and enjoy another hour of commercial ‘free yourself’ music on 103.5 Dawn FM. Tune in.”* The Weeknd\'s previous album *After Hours* was released right as the world was falling into the throes of the pandemic; after scrapping material that he felt was wallowing in the depression he was feeling at the time, *Dawn FM* arrives as a by-product of—and answer to—that turmoil. Here, he replaces woeful introspection with a bit of upbeat fantasy—the result of creatively searching for a way out of the claustrophobic reality of the previous two years. With the experience of hosting and curating music for his very own MEMENTO MORI radio show on Apple Music as his guiding light, *Dawn FM* is crafted in a similar fashion, complete with a DJ to set the tone for the segments within. “It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms,” the host, voiced by Jim Carrey, declares on the opening track. “Scared? Don\'t worry.” Indeed, there is nothing to fear. The Weeknd packs the first half with euphoric bursts that include the Swedish House Mafia-assisted “How Do I Make You Love Me?” and “Sacrifice.” On the back half, he moves into the more serene waters of “Is There Someone Else?” and “Starry Eyes.” Despite the somewhat morose album cover, which reflects what many feel like as they wade through the seemingly endless purgatory of a life dictated by a virus, he’s aiming for something akin to hope in all of this gloom.
Pop in your earpiece, close your eyes and embrace the wonders (and horrors) of augmented reality and prepare to travel 500 years into the future as Richard Dawson returns with…The Ruby Cord. These seven tracks plunge us into an unreal, fantastical and at times sinister future where social mores have mutated, ethical and physical boundaries have evaporated; a place where you no longer need to engage with anyone but yourself and your own imagination. It’s a leap into a future that is well within reach, in some cases already here.
Black Thought may be best-known as part of The Roots, performing night after late night for Jimmy Fallon’s TV audience, yet the Philadelphia native concurrently boasts a staggering reputation as a stand-alone rapper. Though he’s earned GOAT nods from listeners for earth-shaking features alongside Big Pun, Eminem, and Rapsody, his solo catalog long remained relatively modest in size. Meanwhile, Danger Mouse had a short yet monumental run in the 2000s that made him one of that decade’s most beloved and respected producers. His discography from that period contains no shortage of microphone dynamos, most notably MF DOOM (as DANGERDOOM) and Goodie Mob’s CeeLo Green (as Gnarls Barkley). Uniting these low-key hip-hop powerhouses is the stuff of hip-hop dreams, the kind of fantasy-league-style draft you’d encounter on rap message boards. Yet *Cheat Codes* is real—perhaps realer than real. Danger Mouse’s penchant for quirkily cinematic, subtly soulful soundscapes remains from the old days, but the growth from his 2010s work with the likes of composer Daniele Luppi gives “Aquamarine” and “Sometimes” undeniable big-screen energy. Black Thought luxuriates over these luxurious beats, his lyrical lexicon put to excellent use over the feverish funk of “No Gold Teeth” and the rollicking blues of “Close to Famous.” As if their team-up wasn’t enough, an intergenerational cabal of rapper guests bless the proceedings. From living legend Raekwon to A$AP Rocky to Conway the Machine, New York artists play a pivotal role here. A lost DOOM verse, apparently from *The Mouse and the Mask* sessions, makes its way onto the sauntering and sunny “Belize,” another gift for the fans.
When Ari Lennox dropped her debut album *Shea Butter Baby* in 2019, the D.C. native was a young woman exploring love and heartbreak while trying to understand her self-worth beyond sex. Now, with her sophomore outing, Lennox ditches the romantic uncertainty and frustrations about not receiving the love she deserves for a sultrier, sexier, more self-assured collection of songs. “I just was being my regular hopeless romantic self and crushing on just completely terrible individuals that for whatever reason in that state I completely romanticized, and I’m recognizing I love the idea of love,” Lennox tells Apple Music radio’s Nadeska. “Sometimes it can feel like something that’s really unavoidable or unhealthy or avoidant. So it’s just really me just trying to maneuver through this dating life, which can be so exhausting.” Described by Lennox as a “transitional space before my current ‘eat, pray, love’ journey,” *age/sex/location* is a play on online dating and AOL chat rooms, where Lennox’s adventures in dating began. The opening track, “POF,” named after the dating site Plenty of Fish, introduces Lennox’s frustrations with the lack of good men in her life. However, despite experiencing not-so-good outcomes with these lackluster relationships, she still desires companionship. Over a bluesy bassline and gentle percussion, Lennox yearns for love but asserts her power in understanding what she doesn’t want. “Young Black woman approachin’ 30 with no lover in my bed/Cannot settle, I got standards,” she sings. Not every song on the 12-track project is about setting boundaries and lovelorn texts; the best moments are when Lennox pivots into the salacious details of her sensual pleasures. On the seductive and hypnotic “Hoodie,” Lennox lustfully crushes on a potential lover while trying to get underneath his clothes. She continues to express her passion and desires on tracks like “Pressure,” “Stop By,” and the Chlöe Bailey-assisted “Leak It.” Other guests on the album include Summer Walker, who lends her buttery vocals on the Erykah Badu-esque closer “Queen Space,” and Lucky Daye, who does his best to woo Lennox on the flirtatious duet-skit “Boy Bye.” The song plays like a game of cat and mouse with Daye’s slick talk and player-like lines, and Lennox, who’s dismissive but secretly is kind of into him too, offers up her cheeky one-liners in response, singing, “Those lines belong in 1995/Just like them funky Nikes.” “I love people who play,” Lennox says of the song. “Or not play with my feelings, but we’re playing around. We’re goofing around as long as your actions or your energy can show that you’re a secure, nice person. Me and Lucky, it was just really innate and natural. And we’re just lovers of soul. I feel like lovers of love.” *age/sex/location* showcases Lennox’s storytelling as the album starts with her search for authenticity in her suitors and ends with removing negative influences (“Blocking You”) and setting boundaries while emphasizing her self-worth (“Queen Space”). The evolution is evident in comparison to her *Shea Butter Baby* debut: Where she was hoping for reciprocation from her lover, now she demands it with a promise of cutting the relationship off without it.
For two decades, multi-instrumentalist Daniel Rossen has been known for his inventive, genre-meddling psychedelic folk and chamber pop as a key member in the era-defining Brooklyn indie-rock band Grizzly Bear as well as the duo Department of Eagles. Recorded at his new home in Santa Fe, his debut full-length album under his own name—following 2018’s Record Store Day-exclusive single “Deerslayer” and the EP *Silent Hour / Golden Mile* in 2012—is a majestic and masterful collection of songs that no doubt highlight his specific strengths: mournful fingerpicking, textural production, stacked horns and harmonies that play out like memories and an uncertain future, simultaneously. His specificity is clearest in an orchestral track like “Unpeopled Space,” where technical instrumentation distracts from Rossen’s vibrating tenor, his soft lyrics about nothingness.
HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING will conclude a trilogy of albums by Backxwash which began 3 years ago. The series is primarily auto-biographical, with fragments of stories from her periphery. With every record, Backxwash travels farther back in time, reliving and experiencing the anger and despair that she had not granted herself at that time. God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It (2020) began as a candid processing of her experiences in her adult life in realtime, while her sequential record I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES (2021) was a reflection on her adolescent and early adulthood years. Whereas God Has Nothing was a study in mercy, in I LIE HERE BURIED Backxwash finds solace in being consumed by her malevolent behaviours. HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING (2022) delves into environmental influences during her youth and times pre-dating her existence, concluding this therapeutic practice with a return to the here and now with a stronger sense of self than when she began this therapeutic and cathartic trilogy.
The award for “strangest boy band of the pandemic era” goes to Drain Gang, the collective of Swedish misfits who’ve attained cult status for their transcendent mix of cloud rap and hyperpop. To record *Crest*, vocalists Bladee and Ecco2k and producer Whitearmor holed up in a remote Swedish beach cabin, near where Ingmar Bergman filmed his 1957 classic *The Seventh Seal*; 60-some years later, the Gang poses similar questions about life, death, and the existence of God, with choruses that feel like prayers and lyrics like “We think we exist, that’s we why suffer, do we not?/Give it to me raw, death is beautiful” (on the nine-minute epic “5 Star Crest \[4 Vattenrum\]”). Slather these existential koans in Auto-Tune, add the ecstatic sounds of a Y2K rave, and you’ve almost got the Drain Gang recipe. But there’s something else there, too: a sweet, sincere yearning for something bigger than themselves.
by devi and rook cover photo by molly from medicine hat, edit by rook rares on patreon www.patreon.com/blackdresses
