Eight years since Yes Lawd!, the left-field collaborative opus that affixed the kaleidoscopic structure and boom-bap ethos of MF DOOM and Madlib’s Madvillainy to gritty R&B, NxWorries, the duo of California singer Anderson .Paak and Philadelphia producer Knxwledge, returns with Why Lawd? Where the first album celebrated new love and good humor — “I want you, so I’ll give up my side piece” — the long-awaited follow-up catalogues the fallout from a divorce in a stream of distressed reflections about dating around again while missing someone. Navigating the darkest catacombs of the heart, .Paak and Knxwledge rifle through several beloved song archetypes: “Daydreaming” pipes in gated reverb and guitar solos like ’80s Prince and Janet Jackson tracks, but “Battlefield” evokes D’Angelo’s collaborations with hip-hop artists as .Paak balances limber rhymes and tight vocal harmonies. In a landscape replete with the plasticine simulacra of old rap, funk, and soul, Why Lawd?’s rendering feels genuine and lived in.
Having spent the last few albums locating a workable balance between slick, mannered pop songwriting and cutting-edge dance music, hyper-pop luminary Charli XCX mixes the peanut butter with the chocolate on brat, her revelatory sixth album. Collaborating with a killer lineup of brilliant electronic music auteurs — A. G. Cook (Hannah Diamond, Caroline Polachek), El Guincho (Rosalía, FKA Twigs), Gesaffelstein (the Weeknd, Ye), Cirkut (Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus) — Charli sings about overcoming anxiety, embracing thorny emotions, and most important, tearing the club up. Brat balances private soul-searching and public airing of grievances, offsetting the sonic and thematic coarseness of “Sympathy is a knife,” “Girl, so confusing,” and “Mean girls” with the aching tenderness of “So I” and “I might say something stupid” but making sure to slip in breezy party starters like “360” and “Club classics.” It manages a feat once thought impossible: successfully feeding the crusaders for 2017’s forward-thinking if abrasive Pop 2, 2020’s suitably insular How I’m Feeling Now, and 2022’s more mainstream Crash within the same brisk song cycle.
➽Read Jason Frank’s scene report from Charli XCX’s Boiler Room set.
Three albums into the edifying revival of his venerable Pacific Northwest indie-rock outfit Pedro the Lion, front man David Bazan continues to poke around his own past with the same pained earnestness seen in jarring old story songs like 2000’s “Eye on the Finish Line.” This year’s Santa Cruz follows 2022’s Havasu and 2019’s Phoenix in surveying the artist’s upbringing via concept albums named after cities he grew up in. Bazan sings wistfully of experiencing loss, grappling with the uprooted and peregrine feeling of moving repeatedly as a teen, and being pulled in different directions by faith, sexual desire, and a love of secular music. Santa Cruz’s tiny agonies manage a delicate balance between stately, shimmering guitar lines and plaintive synthesizer accompaniment while Bazan sings with a gusto that bests his finest performances.
After diving into atmospheric electronics on 2022’s graphic-novel soundtrack Kosmik Musik and exploring orchestral accompaniment on 2018’s >>>, British experimental rock act Beak> retreats to the original idea on >>>>, its fourth album. The trio, built around Portishead’s Geoff Barrow on drums and vocals, thunders through snaking, unpredictable compositions without overdubs, drifting through crunchy, sinister prog riffs; hypnotic odes to ’70s German instrumental rock gods; snappy post-punk tunes; and creeping psych-rock odysseys with aplomb. >>>> resembles a fruitful trip to the record store that yielded crisp vinyl copies of Can’s Ege Bamyasi, Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets, and Uriah Heep’s Very ’Eavy… Very ’Umble.
A restless rhyme stylist, a talented actor, and a deadpanning humorist, Vince Staples keeps the listener guessing from one album to the next by pairing introspective verses with whatever glorious racket he may be into that year, whether it’s crystalline synth noise, meat-and-potatoes boom bap, or classic West Coast G-funk. Dark Times, Staples’s sixth studio album, maintains his streak of curt but impactful releases and blends the sleek, economic sound of 2021’s self-titled with the coarser storytelling of 2022’s Ramona Park Broke My Heart. Serving aching couplets over the aqueous sonics of “Étouffée” — “Finding beauty in the darkness like Rembrandt / Everybody ‘gang, gang, gang’ till it get bad” — and “Freeman,” Staples ponders his history, motivations, and place in the continuum of hip-hop greats.
➽ Read Craig Jenkins’s interview with Vince Staples.
Mach-Hommy is an intergenerational tristate-area rap mystic-eccentric: His abstract raps, Haitian Kreyòl linguistics, and plaintive melodicism may remind old heads of the Fugees and Yasiin Bey, but their kids are more likely to see a kinship with modern-day New York rap minimalists. #RICHAXXHAITIAN, his latest full-length, flexes cultural versatility and erudition to match its musical chops. No one else would tap indie rap and soul legend Georgia Anne Muldrow, Cali rapper 03 Greedo, and famously deported hip-hop promoter Haitian Jack for uneasy conversations about war crimes, diasporic pain, and the pitfalls of capitalism. The effortless melodies in “Holy ____” and the title track, and the hair-raising internal-rhyme wizardry in “Copy Cold,” “Sonje,” and “Lon Lon,” all make #RICHAXXHAITIAN a pointed expression of craft and politics.
Photo: ag-cook-britpop
Hyperpop pioneer A.G. Cook thunders into a new chapter with Britpop, his third album. It’s the inaugural release on New Alias, which succeeds his half-venerated and half-reviled PC Music label, a home for the work of wise dance-music innovators like the late great SOPHIE. But it’s reinvention in name only: Fans of the producer’s epochal Hannah Diamond and Charli XCX gems will find miles of bubbly, inventive synth sounds amid the triple album’s odd soundscapes, particularly in “Lucifer” and the title track, on which Charli provides expectedly insouciant vocals. In a sedate second volume populated by folk ballads like “Greatly” and rockers like the fuzzy, flanging “Bewitched,” Britpop stages a further exploration into the heady textures and melodies explored noisily on Cook’s sprawling 2020 quintuple album, 7G.
➽ Read Justin Curto’s interview with A.G. Cook.
In the 2010s, Chicago drill-rap pioneer Chief Keef made headlines as a budding hitmaker whose criminal record presented hip-hop elders with a bogeyman to shoulder classic worries about song lyrics inspiring real-world violence. In the ’20s, we better understand Keef as a 28-year-old street-rap vet whose output dances between brutality, pain, and absurdity. Almighty So 2, the long-awaited sequel for a mixtape from simpler times, documents the chest-beating of a man who has seen too much. The wounded, triumphant “Treat Myself” brims with spite for anyone who didn’t believe in Keef, and in the abrasive “Jesus,” he’s playing the villain they all thought he was: “Don’t look up to Chief Sosa; look up to Jesus Christ / All these two-liters, I need an endorsement with Sprite.” Anchoring these diabolical lyrical flights is a collection of enticingly busy sound sculptures: trap drums, soul samples, ominous keys, and other melodic embellishments sparkling in the mix like the gilded garments gracing an irate monarch. Sour even in its most lavish productions, Keef will never let us forget he “come from a damn cubicle,” as the intermittently reflective and soulful “Drifting Away” reminds.
Drifting through the psychedelic badlands adjoining Midwest emo and early post rock, sentiment — the latest full-length album from prolific singer-songwriter and found-sound composer Claire Rousay — surveys the numbness of depression with a mapmaker’s exhaustiveness. “Head” observes a relationship in disrepair, grappling wearily with a tendency to placate a lover’s mercurial moods while flowing almost imperceptibly from a creeping slowcore riff to a shimmering coda. Rousay calls this blend of crestfallen sentimentality and economic instrumentation “emo ambient,” and there’s a self-deprecating humor in the distinction, but the glum, glacial “asking for it” and “please 5 more minutes” wear their contrasts and anachronisms well.
The British bandleader Shabaka Hutchings, formerly of Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming, sets his signature saxophone aside on Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, his elegant solo album. Like Andre 3000’s New Blue Sun, Perceive honors the expressiveness of the flute and its many siblings while assembling a cast of characters that speaks to Hutchings’s prolificacy as front and side man: Andre, poet and musician Saul Williams, Armand Hammer rapper Elucid, experimental-music veteran Laraaji, and British singer-songwriter Lianne La Havas each make appearances.
Ten Total, the electric debut album by Tulsa’s 1010Benja, wars with tradition in two ways: The 34-year-old rapper, singer, and producer juxtaposes motormouth sex raps and romantic Timberlake-isms early on as the coarse “Peacekeeper” and the warm “H2HAVEYOU” lay out a knack for playing into and against classic R&B conventions. Elsewhere, in the windswept, upbeat “I Can,” you hear the preacher’s son bucking against the family worldview and carving his own spiritual path, finding use not in the organ reveries of gospel so much as the earnest emotionalism of church performance. The sensibility recalls another midwestern artist’s introduction: Chance the Rapper’s 10 Day.
The list of ingredients appears to spell chaos: shimmering guitars, grungy drum machines, a 70-year-old white woman. Luckily, the artist in residence is restless rock-and-roll lifer Kim Gordon, formerly of Sonic Youth and more recently of Glitterbust and Body/Head. The Collective, Gordon’s second solo album billed as such, revels in abrasive guitar noise and pummeling, programmed percussion. The sinister, suffocating “Shelf Warmer” and “The Candy House” gesture to southern rap, but the album is otherwise a reminder of the closeness of hip-hop and alt rock in the era where Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill collaborated. It’s also a wry meta-discussion about the machinery of cool. “So what if I like the big truck,” Gordon preens in “I’m a Man.” The lurid “Psychedelic Orgasm” deals in disaffected people watching: “Driving down, sunset / Zombie meditation / Getting caffeinated.” The Collective doesn’t speak out in judgment of what it surveys but makes sure to relay a faint sense of the hollowness of our routines and the smallness of our dreams.
It itches to categorize Scope Neglect, Australian composer Ben Frost’s sixth studio album, as extreme metal, though the parts are present in abundance. “The River of Light and Radiation” is, on paper, a djent tune that takes after the time-signature workouts from Swedish technical geniuses. But it’s not spiriting you across heady peaks to a rewarding resolution, drawing attention to a compositional resourcefulness, as is the tendency in that genre. Opener “Lamb Shift” picks over the parts of a riff that might do someone like Meshuggah justice if it would just quit falling apart long enough to loop; “Turning the Prism” seems more interested in the ominously braying noise interrupting its main riff than offering the release the brain is trained to seek after the ear comes into contact with a heavily distorted guitar and a quick, threatening kick drum. Scope Neglect is exploring metal as scenery, as tonal palate. It’s saying plodding, icy stasis can be hellish, too.
A genre-hopping mind-meld uniting a pair of storied indie-rap figureheads, YHWH Is Love, the second album from Madlib and Karriem Riggins’s Jahari Massamba Unit, is brimming with playful, mournful, wily, and beguiling compositions that play to the duo’s wide-ranging talents as beat-makers and collaborators for everyone from Doom and Dilla to Denzel Curry and Diana Krall. Love is rangy without being showy: The de facto theme song “JMU’s Voyage” is all bustling, muscular jazz-funk; the simmering, sedate “ALL THINGS …” opts for a more silent way.
ScHoolboy Q plugs the gap Kendrick Lamar left in TDE’s A-list rap roster with Blue Lips, his sixth album. Five years after dividing the fandom with the adroitly mainstream (if underrated) CrasH Talk, Q turns in a more dynamic performance. He can be the devil on your shoulder instigating unrest in “Pop” or the determined son and father in “Germany 86’” or the hornball in “Love Birds” or the grieving friend in “Blueslides.” “I done lost out on so much shit tryna live to your standards,” he says in the latter, resolving to prioritize his well-being and follow his own compass. The choice works wonders for the craft.
➽ Read Craig Jenkins’s full review of ScHoolboy Q’s Blue Lips.
A rock and soul historian whose guitar and vocal chops are as cold as her constellation of influences is vast, Brittany Howard serves another musicology lesson with What Now, a tour de force from the echoing, narcotic “Earth Sign” to the stately “Every Color in Blue.” Howard’s music dances deftly across decades: The motivational “Another Day” has New Power Generation airs; the wistful “To Be Still” and “Red Flags” serve hazy soul jazz. What Now documents straining relations — “I followed you and didn’t look back / I didn’t know love could feel like that / I ran right through them red flags” — but colorful compositions and arrangements undercut the sadness in tracks like “The Power to Undo,” where the protagonist is begging a partner not to demolish everything they’ve built accompanied by impossibly clattering drums and layer upon layer of gnarly fuzz. Brittany Howard is singing herself, and us, through it.
Two Star & the Dream Police, the debut studio album from 26-year-old New Jersey singer-songwriter and guitar prodigy Mk.gee, marries evocative lyricism — “What’s keeping you fenced off? / And who’s got the power in your mind?” — and expressive playing, which communicates a firm grasp on rock canon but also the urge to subvert it. Highlights like the yearning “Candy” feel like conversations with the classics as much as adoring odes to their love interests. The production screams “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” but the vocals owe less to Sting than the plaintive earnestness of Frank Ocean; an unexpectedly skronky solo recalls Prince’s assault on the ideological partitions separating R&B and rock in the ’80s. Moments later, “I Want” drafts a rewrite of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” with a solo that can’t easily be identified as a guitar. You might start to suspect he’s using snazzy effects pedals, but he isn’t.
A curt batch of bubbly dance-pop bangers touching on entertaining (and/or rebuffing) a lover’s advances, London DJ and singer Shygirl’s Club Shy goes where earlier releases like 2020’s Alias and 2022’s Nymph somewhat resisted, serving full-throated club-diva anthems reaching for the blissful, carefree sensuality of Eurodance hits like La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” and Crystal Waters’s “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)”; the gorgeous, cutting SG Lewis collab “Mr. Useless,” the pulsating Boys Noize team-up “Tell Me,” and the instantly quotable “Mute” — “We putting them boys on mute, mute, mute, mute” — get dangerously close.
Having gelled during their extensive touring, Radiohead’s splinter cell the Smile — comprising of OK Computer architects Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and London jazz drummer Tom Skinner — barrels into sophomore album Wall of Eyes touting denser, plusher compositions and a more wounded and introverted outlook. There are no searing indictments of political injustice this time from the erstwhile leftist-rock vanguard of the aughts. There is a subtle sensation of sliding into the too-hot bathwater of a trying time that could be a breakup or a death or a “dragnet” or whatever the listener needs to have a quick shudder about.